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Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#41

Post by rojobuffalo »

I quit in Summer 2015 after working 5 years as a front-end engineer. I did a ton of camping and reading first. Then I worked on some farms in the Pacific Northwest for a few months. After that I moved into my family's second-home in Utah and started a part-time job as a cook at a farm-to-table restaurant.

I started a company with the mission of improving food systems. So I'm working on my second prototype app for this area. It's definitely a struggle to not have a salary and not be around a company of talented people every day, but I'm still enjoying it. I don't love writing software, but I just feel like what I'm working on needs to exist--so that's what I do now.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#42

Post by rifung »

cerrelio wrote: post #11

I took two breaks from tech. One was for grad school, which I dropped out of after 3 semesters. Like some others in the thread I found academia to be pretty bad. You're paid shit and treated like a peon. The work was actually interesting, but I knew I could just go back to private industry and make 5-10x as much doing the same type of work. I took a break from "everything" at one point and became a nightlife photogra…

> The work was actually interesting, but I knew I could just go back to private industry and make 5-10x as much doing the same type of work.

Don't you have much more freedom in academia on what you want to pursue though since it doesn't have to make money or am I mistaken? I'm considering going into academia because I'd like to do research more on the theory side for which there don't seem to be (m)any industry positions.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#43

Post by voidz »

cylinder wrote: post #29
voidz wrote: post #16

I became a full time father and results have been stellar. My boy is now one year old and turns out to be very clever... And very strong. He could crawl at seven months and started to learn how to walk at 11 months. His first word was 'hunger' (in Dutch, it sounds virtually the same) at two months, maybe it was imaginative but he was happy to eat after we we heard him say it, haha. Now he can also say 'mama' and 'pap…

May I ask, would you consider your pre-fatherhood period as ambitious? If so how do you deal with deferring that ambition to be a full-time father? I sometimes feel like this might be the path I take, but I worry about regretting it later down the line.

You know, actually I was very ambitious. But during one of the conversations I had with my girlfriend shortly after we became a couple, I started to realise that my ambitions were motivated by all of the wrong reasons.

See, even though I love doing the things I'm skilled at (Linux/BSD system and network engineering) I felt ambitious due to the extreme pressure I felt society had on me; like "if you don't have a job, stable income, lots of friends, and great social profiles, your life does not count and you are a useless eater." Almost everything I did was to not let this be so.

When my gf who was then still at med school said that she had no problems with the idea of her being the one to provide for us while I'd take care of our personal lives (and kid(s) later on), and that she loved me for who I was and not for what I'd do, it was like this huge weight was lift from my shoulders and stomach. With tears from being relieved I asked if she really meant it because I almost couldn't believe it. And indeed she did. She wasn't against the thought of me having a career. it just wasn't important for our relationship. All she wanted/wants is for me to be happy.

When all of this sunk in, it was like my whole future outlook recalibrated. For the first time I felt safe, and like my MO turned from 'surviving' into 'living'. When she became pregnant I immediately knew that I'd made the right choice.

It's nice to think about all of this. Thank you for asking.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#44

Post by grecy »

I quit my Software Engineering job and am now spending two years driving my Jeep around Africa.

I'm working while on the road, writing for magazines, selling photos and filming a YouTube series.

I am having the time of my life, and am extremely happy I made the decision I did. IMHO, sitting at a desk is just not worth it. Life is too short. I'm meeting a ton of people who agree, and are living the kind of life people spend their lives dreaming about.

If you're interested in my trip:

Facebook: https://facebook.com/theroadchoseme

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theroadchoseme

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dangrec

YouTube http://youtube.com/c/theroadchoseme

And my website: http://theroadchoseme.com

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#45

Post by ttoinou »

cerrelio wrote: post #11

I took two breaks from tech. One was for grad school, which I dropped out of after 3 semesters. Like some others in the thread I found academia to be pretty bad. You're paid shit and treated like a peon. The work was actually interesting, but I knew I could just go back to private industry and make 5-10x as much doing the same type of work. I took a break from "everything" at one point and became a nightlife photogra…

How did you became a nightlife photographer ?

I did photograph for one night and it was pretty hard to prevent people from spilling theirs drinks on my camera :S how did you handle that ?

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#46

Post by cerrelio »

rifung wrote: post #42
cerrelio wrote: post #11

I took two breaks from tech. One was for grad school, which I dropped out of after 3 semesters. Like some others in the thread I found academia to be pretty bad. You're paid shit and treated like a peon. The work was actually interesting, but I knew I could just go back to private industry and make 5-10x as much doing the same type of work. I took a break from "everything" at one point and became a nightlife photogra…

> The work was actually interesting, but I knew I could just go back to private industry and make 5-10x as much doing the same type of work. Don't you have much more freedom in academia on what you want to pursue though since it doesn't have to make money or am I mistaken? I'm considering going into academia because I'd like to do research more on the theory side for which there don't seem to be (m)any industry posit…

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Yes, if you can find a PI/project that's solving the exact problem you want to solve.

The work doesn't have to make money, but it has to make papers. And if your publications aren't landing in high profile journals, your funding (and career) will dry up.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#47

Post by cerrelio »

ttoinou wrote: post #45
cerrelio wrote: post #11

I took two breaks from tech. One was for grad school, which I dropped out of after 3 semesters. Like some others in the thread I found academia to be pretty bad. You're paid shit and treated like a peon. The work was actually interesting, but I knew I could just go back to private industry and make 5-10x as much doing the same type of work. I took a break from "everything" at one point and became a nightlife photogra…

How did you became a nightlife photographer ? I did photograph for one night and it was pretty hard to prevent people from spilling theirs drinks on my camera :S how did you handle that ?

Cocaine makes you very vigilant.

I became a photographer because I had some friends who were socialites and had VIP access to clubs. Their various club owner friends liked my photography, so I just started showing up with my camera all the time and I'd get in free and drink all night.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#48

Post by vram22 »

vkat wrote: post #18
globalgoat wrote: post #3

I'm back in the industry at the moment, but I did quit my job a few years back. I hired an allotment, grew a lot of vegetables, taught myself to bake bread and did a few other projects. How was it? It was just great and it taught me about living on much smaller amounts of money, which is very helpful now that I have children and I work for a charity. So maybe that's slightly off topic, and more of a career break than…

How does one go about renting a small piece of land for hobby farming?

I'm not sure where the parent poster lives, but I've read about this system (called allotments) in kids' fiction; it was apparently common in the UK (and may still be). Some of the characters in the stories used to be growing vegetables in their allotments :) It's something like small plots of land in or near the edges of towns, so easy for the renters (town-dwellers) to reach after/before work or on weekends.

I've done a good amount of gardening myself, and it is great fun (apart from being a good way to get fresh vegetables etc.)

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#49

Post by lotyrin »

eplanit wrote: post #33
late2part wrote: post #20

Point of order - most of us don't work in IT. We work in "tech." I love my IT brethren but not all of us do desktop installs and tech support for a living.

Hear, hear! I left "Enterprise IT" and went into embedded systems. The first 2-3 years were exciting and exhausting because it felt like I needed to recall everything I ever learned from my Comp. Sci. education and from my early career -- I had to became a real software engineer again. Rather than some application on a framework on a virtual instance....it's now board bringup, bootloaders, and kernels. I now love my…

I spent some time in embedded space after high school and really miss it in these days of drawing pretty pictures on whiteboards to attempt to explain exactly why management can't have what they want when they want it, political negotiations with people that hold the keys to the kingdom (e.g. salesforce admins) to try to be allowed to do my job, etc.

Do you have any recommendations for someone trying to get into tech engineering and out of Enterprise IT in regards to credentials they should seek out, groups in their city they should look into?

Re: Ask HN: What did you do after quitting the IT industry and how have things been?

#50

Post by nicholas73 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6
callinyouin wrote: post #5

I feel the same way you feel. Growing up I was absolutely fascinated with computers and knew I wanted to be a computer scientist since the age of 12 or 13. Now that I'm in the industry (and not in academia like I initially thought I wanted) the magic is gone and I want to get out, hopefully within the next 5 years or so. It's not that I dislike programming, in fact I still love it, but now that I'm solving other peop…

I'm buying a sailboat with my wife and daughter and sailing the world in 18 months (waiting for the last of my options to vest). Think about it! It's ~$60-100k to get the boat, and you can live on ~$24-30k/year doing it. There's a huge community out there of cruisers who do it full time.

I hope your daughter doesn't suffer from boredom after the initial novelty.
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