61–70 of 105 posts
Take a break for a few months to recalibrate what you want from life. Tech will still be here when you’re ready again. Go travel, use your physical body to walk and hike and lift, have a couple of flings, go to a bar at noon, work a few temp jobs, apply minimalism in your life, learn about something you like, etc.
I left technology about a decade ago to join the Military. It was an adjustment, but honestly was the greatest job I've ever had. Compared to tech where everything seemed high stress and had terrible work life balance, my military career was like playing on easy mode. Failure was impossible, no one wanted to stay a minute longer than they had to and everything was already on fire so putting it out was never really th…
If it was the greatest job you ever had, what is the much better job you're aiming to get/got now?
How about pottery?
If I was in that position with high NW, I'd quit and invest for a living (trend trade, not day trade)
If you want to learn faster, use leverage.
Being an investor is a dream for many. I would advise against it if you're hunting status (visible wealth, being a VC or angel). Motivations are deceiving - use good friends to help you discover why you want to do something. Status chasing is often a hidden reason, even from ourselves. There's much more efficient ways to chase status. Most people are very poor at optimizing their choices to get status!
I thought I would like to be an investor but it turns out to be boring antisocial work.
Some friends I know who have become investors appear to like gambling - they're not people doing careful risk analysis. They're renting while betting a house worths of money - which seems to be working for them! Investing while having a mortgage is risky debt leveraged investment in New Zealand (but perhaps sensible in the US). One friend lied to investors and is in jail for it: learn the value of time & freedom.
here my answer on similar question from ~year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42500960 "(like, which month is now?).. outside-hamster-wheel."
i am at opposite problem of yours - i still love programming - and "growing" programmers/persons - but seems noone wants that anymore. So.. may have to find something else out of my n-th neglected hobbies..
and yes, have fun. It's all nonsense without that
If you want to use your hands and collaborate with humans a lot in person, the trades seem to be quite exciting right now. Salaries are also good — A good plumber in our area makes nearly $800/hr, and that's not touching what the datacenter plumbing folks are making.
Did you really mean 800/hr? Or is that a typo for 80/hr?
My side gig pays around that, but there aren't many hours involved it in, and there isn't a good opportunity to find more hours, so it isn't all that much money at the end of the year. It is a tidy job for the effort required, but you wouldn't want to have to live off its income.
Your workday isn’t a monolith; it is a series of tiny tasks. Try deconstructing your job to identify intrinsic motivation.
Which micro-tasks do you look forward to? Which raise questions you think about and work on in your free time?
Which tasks do you avoid, put off, or find immediately draining?
If you can’t identify interesting tasks, you are likely looking at too high a level of abstraction. Break “working with clients” down until you find the specific unit of work (e.g., “debugging edge cases” vs. “proofreading emails”) that sparks interest.
After sorting tasks into intrinsically motivating or not, look for a role that involves about 20% more time on the interesting micro-tasks and 20% less on the boring ones. If you do this every few years, you drift toward a career you enjoy without needing a radical “reset.”
This approach led me down an unexpected path: law firm attorney -> government attorney -> regulatory consultant -> small-business operator. Now, I am looking at moving to a role that involves at least 20% more time on software development (intrinsically interesting to me) and 20% less time chasing unreliable people (particularly draining to me). I never set out to change my “identity,” but focusing on the micro-tasks I actually enjoy has allowed me to engineer a career I enjoy on a day-to-day basis.
This framing has been helpful for me: Your workday isn’t a monolith; it is a series of tiny tasks. Try deconstructing your job to identify intrinsic motivation. Which micro-tasks do you look forward to? Which raise questions you think about and work on in your free time? Which tasks do you avoid, put off, or find immediately draining? If you can’t identify interesting tasks, you are likely looking at too high a level…
I, for one, don't even know anymore. I used to quite enjoy the art of coding and "big picture thinking", for lack of a better description. But now LLMs do the former and everyone and their brother are clamouring to do the latter as they see it as the only way to remain relevant in the software industry, leaving it to be a competition that is not fun to participate in.
Collecting the paycheck, I guess?
If you want to use your hands and collaborate with humans a lot in person, the trades seem to be quite exciting right now. Salaries are also good — A good plumber in our area makes nearly $800/hr, and that's not touching what the datacenter plumbing folks are making.