Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?
I'm really tired of the BS, AI, corporate environment and what not.
Looking for alternatives.
In case you're in the same boat:
What do you plan to work with?
Looking for alternatives.
In case you're in the same boat:
What do you plan to work with?
32 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 52.1 ms ] threadI do not tire of it.
I’m going to live a simpler life where I work on making video games as a creative endeavor. I’ll try to find a part time job to earn some money, but mainly just adjust my expectations to be happier with what I have as opposed to what I could have.
I’ve wedged myself into the correct shape to fit into what companies classified as a productive tech worker for 10+ years mainly out of fear of being poor, so now I must repay that debt to myself by doing things just for the sake of enjoyment or fulfillment and not to build a skill that makes me better at making more money.
i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.
If I do switch, it would be sales. If the cost to build things really goes to near zero, sales would be a lot easier. People love to buy things that are better.
I would say pick/find something you're passionate about or interested in where you think you could make money, find a market and go for it.
But turn on "showdead" and read nivcmo's top-level reply. Or if you won't, here's what for me was the most important line:
> Smaller teams, clearer missions, direct customer relationships. That's the antidote.
Maybe, after a few months off, I'll be open to that, if I can find it.
Congratulations, it's once in a lifetime :)
Oh wait, they keep calling me out of retirement too ;)
>direct customer relationships.
That's the main thing I would put full-time effort into now.
It's nice to be off the treadmill until you are good and ready, once I get going again I don't plan to stop for a long time, if ever again, so retirement has been a good break.
My plan is to go back to working in logistics, still have friends there, it's a rough time in that field right now: but I can't imagine myself enjoying the next few years reviewing slop, babysitting Claude, and surviving the next layoff.
Having run a business for almost a decade, I’ve accumulated a lot of accounting and tax knowledge that I think would be cool to properly certify. Also it would be to re-live a childhood dream.
That can be a feeling all its own :)
And also.. i have been asking myself alternative question..
Who do you plan to work with?
s/plan/imagine/ but still where do u find those..
That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day.
I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job.
It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a software internship. I remember thinking wow they must have a totally different idea of what a good/bad job is.
I can't think of a better value job that working in tech in terms of amount of effort and schooling required.
I worked in a bakery / dessert place for 4+ years making barely above minimum wage. 8-12 hours a day on my feet, making dough, talking to customers, etc.
I didn’t absolutely love the job at the time, but I miss the realness of it constantly. Making a real piece of food, talking to real people. The tech industry increasingly seems obsessed with making everything as fake as possible, and I can relate to OP on multiple levels.
I could completely forget about my job when I got home, didn't have to somewhat keep a framework of some giant corporate spaghetti code soup in my head to a certain extent for months or years on end, and interacted with people way, way more than I do now, and made deeper friendships with my coworkers.
Also there was no risk of me working on something for six months and it get cancelled or shelved before it gets used by anyone. At least in fast food and retail jobs you're helping multiple people (sometimes hundreds of people) every day. In my corporate career I've often ended up working on software that only has a handful of high paying clients, or only used internally and not client facing.
If I could justify the insane pay cut and could manage it physically I'd probably do something like be a barista nowadays. Or be a teacher, maybe.
Several people I know who went to a good university and landed big tech/quant jobs early became millionaires (liquid 1,000,000) after 5 to 7 years. Some got lucky and reached this milestone way earlier.
Medicine takes 12+ years of education before bearing any fruit and finance has very little freedom.
I've worked in a number of other fields, some pretty crappy. Nothing has kept me engaged like tech.
So I went into consulting, and also management. The throwaway experience I had of my deep knowledge going obsolete in interviews has created a built in aversion to learning every new thing that comes out - something I loved in my 20s.
That's my issue with the field. I think developers are in a better spot - you're either a strong developer or you're not. Systems or ahem, "DevOps" suffers from this commodification of resume buzzwords over and against analytical, learning and adjacent mastery of skills.
You have to realize corporate software exists within a bell curve, which means don’t be awesome. Be compatible, at least at work. In your own software be as awesome as possible according to features and numeric measures.
You also have to also understand you will likely be surrounded by people who think they are awesome when they actually suck really bad. You can look for some place that does not have shitty people or learn to let them make all the noise so that you can just chill and use company time for your own personal desires. To avoid shitty people look for jobs with the highest barrier to entry.
If you want to be in management learn to do 6 things at once all day, really care about people, and develop vastly superior communication skills, and finally learn when to STFU.
I should make myself a clock saying "X days until college". Once it clicks I'll go straight to a local university to register some courses, rent some cabins, and enjoy life.
When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has slowly drifted from "engineer solving problems" to "employee managing process." You spend your morning in standups, your afternoon fighting with CI pipelines someone else configured, and your evening wondering what you actually built.
The people in this thread who say "just get perspective, you could be loading trucks" aren't wrong exactly, but they're answering a different question. Nobody here is saying the pay is bad or the chairs are uncomfortable. They're saying the work feels hollow. Those are different problems, and "be grateful" has never been a lasting fix for the second one.
What I've noticed — both in myself and in people around me — is that the ones who stay engaged tend to have found a way to shrink their world back down. Fewer layers between them and the user. Fewer abstractions between them and the machine. Whether that means a tiny company, freelancing, or just a side project you actually care about, the pattern is the same: make the feedback loop short and real again.