Ask HN: Tired of being a software engineer, what next?

Idk, I've had a great career for 4yrs - getting laid off in January has been a death sentence. I've found some startup consulting work but the industry is either pretty shot or my resume is a death knell.

You will not find meaning in executing other people's dreams

Work on your marriage.

Stop pining for being 20something again; stop believing company PR.

You won a golden ticket; don't burn it.

> where I can flex my engineering skills without BS

Not to be snarky, but it depends on how good you are and where you are (and have a track record of being). I don't know you but when most people complain about "BS" they're complaining about the fact that they have to justify their priorities, projects, and timelines or interact with other departments.

This is exactly what high paid SWE work is these days. You can have less collaboration by moving to infra, but it'll still be the norm.

Usually the only way you're allowed to go live in your coding hole is by being way better than the median engineer and having an eye for changes that produce massive amounts of value. Some examples:

1. Guy who works at a node shop who mostly ships optimizations and improvements to V8. Generates >2 mil ARR in savings every year.

2. Engineer who goes around the codebase quietly removing scaling bottlenecks for different teams.

3. Engineer who sits around solves all the hard distributed systems bugs that come in. Something wrong with the paxos implementation you rely on? he can patch it.

If you can't be this person for a company it's much harder to step away from how the company actually gets run.

> work with good, competent people who care as much as I do

There are some mid-size startups that fit this description, but at larger companies your only hope is to find this at the department level. Remember that 27,000 SWEs work at Google. It'd be weird if every single department was mostly full of good, competent people who care.

If you want this in your work you generally need to be targeting engineering organizations at the size of 50-200 people.

Who needs meaning when you can have fun?