Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 496 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#71

Post by chewz »

abyssin wrote: post #42
chewz wrote: post #32

Meetings took forever, goals and budgets limited my creativity, have been getting fat on business lunches and life is simply too short to spend it in the office. Couldn't breathe with recycled air. I got cancer and when I got better I have never wanted to go back to the office. I have spent last 10 years travelling the world, reading, learning to live on very little. Never looked back. Life is not a bliss but I am ha…

Thanks for sharing your story. What is very little, and how do you make this very little? How do you learn new skills, and what keeps you motivated?

Well I am learning the old way - take a laptop and try something new, starting with small and then the project grows. Always enjoyed bottom up learning and discovery. I mostly do that in winter as in summer I prefer outdoors.

Edit: I have been blessed that despite two engineering degrees (financial math and electronic engineering) I have never worked as a programmer for living.

Since I have learned by trial and error 6502 assembler to hack strategy games on C-64 programming have always been unspoiled free time, pure fun activity for me. And 19 programming languages later it is still so.

I live in small summerhouse, eat simple food, cook, own old, small car that I use only when necessary. I prefer biking whenever possible. Buy most clothes and stuff used or heavily discounted. Buying used stuff is also good for the planet. Learnt a lot of DIY which is both cool and satifying.

I despise urban enviroment but have to visit the city cause I take care of older parents. So the summerhouse and living in the forrest is both a choice and a way to spend less on rent..

In a way I always wanted this but given the opportunity I had been chasing money, opportunities, new experiences, following the rat race etc. Now as this is over I feel less conflicted which makes me happier.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#72

Post by PsylentKnight »

chewz wrote: post #32

Meetings took forever, goals and budgets limited my creativity, have been getting fat on business lunches and life is simply too short to spend it in the office. Couldn't breathe with recycled air. I got cancer and when I got better I have never wanted to go back to the office. I have spent last 10 years travelling the world, reading, learning to live on very little. Never looked back. Life is not a bliss but I am ha…

How much did you have saved when you set out? Have you worked at all in the last ten years?

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#73

Post by gorgoiler »

My personality changed around my early 30s in a way that meant I found it very hard to align myself with anything less than the highest quality leaders in the company.

Which is a euphemism for “I turned into an obnoxious punk” but I’m fine with that too :)

It feels like as the years pass and ones sense of autonomy as a human being overflows the brim, it gets harder to tolerate not being your own boss.

I took five years off work and was complete master of my destiny, which finally wore off, and I now work at a private boarding school that is recognized globally as being a center of excellence for teaching and learning.

The summary is it’s completely different and challenging to switch careers like this. It’s also been fantastic because (1) I am naturally a very gifted teacher (2) but I am completely unqualified, very raw, and full of newbie naivety which is all very humbling (3) and yet very liberating as once again the expectations on me are low and I have room to learn and grow, and (4) I am surrounded by people who actually know what they are doing and are committed to helping me get better.

The best part is that I can approach the day to day of the new role and the skills it requires with the mindset of someone who has been through one career already. I may turn into a punk again but for now I’m enjoying being a level headed journeyman surrounded by masters.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#75

Post by TheCapn »

encom wrote: post #23

I left it before I really got started, and looking back at it now, I don't regret it. In my mid-twenties I decided I'd rather be an electrician. I don't sit on my ass all day. I get to meet new people, and see new places all the time. Some places that few ever get to see. Power plants, clock towers, police stations, homeless shelters, church attics. All sorts of stuff. Not all of it equally exciting, but a lot of it…

Find your way into Industrial Electrical work if you can. You get a strong mix of tech and electrical, moreso than Residential, can't really say the comparison to Commercial work though...

My company (Automation & controls) is partnered with electricians for all the jobs we bid on. Having electricians that know wiring for specialized bus networks, how to do basic troubleshooting on control circuits and all that is amazing to have.

Alternatively, for those reading this in the tech side, the job is super engaging. I get to work on programming machines the size of my bedroom. I get to travel and see equally interesting locations (Dam spillways, Agricultural facilities inland and at port, underground mines, etc.). The fact that I get to get out of my office a few days a month is a big reason I've stuck with my job for as long as I have (7+ years now)

EDIT TO INCLUDE SOME PICTURES (Both the Cool and the Ugly):

https://imgur.com/5uOWDGB https://imgur.com/oJozMBr https://imgur.com/95HSxlx https://imgur.com/yhrPUC3

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#76

Post by adrianN »

Nextgrid wrote: post #64

I wish I could leave. The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the cu…

You could always switch to a company that doesn't make its money with ads. For example I work for Snowflake and I don't feel like I'm building stuff to screw the end user at all. I just make our database better. I also worked for Siemens. There too I didn't try to screw any users, I just tried to make trains run cheaper, faster and more reliably.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#77

Post by tngranados »

pansa2 wrote: post #70

Never enjoyed it. I knew from the second day of my first tech job that it wasn't what I wanted to be doing, but I blamed the job itself rather than the industry. Moved on after a year and tried other tech jobs (different size companies, different types of software), but they were all essentially the same. I like building things for people to use, but as a programmer found myself very isolated from users (even at smal…

This is resonating with me. I'm still working in the tech industry but considering a change. To which industry did you switched?

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#78

Post by hackyhacky »

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues.

I tried to convince myself that these advantages made it worthwhile to sit alone in a dark room for >10 hours a day, but in the end I couldn't. I was spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files, pointless deadlines, egotistical colleagues, and almost zero time solving interesting problems on products that I care about. You might argue that I should have just found a better job, and I did, several times, but I found that no matter how much enthusiasm I had for a job at the beginning, eventually it got bogged down in software engineering detritus. I didn't much care for my colleagues: no offense to those present, but I just don't really like tech people, despite the fact that I obviously am one of them.

Through a series of coincidences, I found myself with an opportunity to teach programming at the university level. It was a lot of fun: I can talk about problems that interest with me with people who want to hear it. I operate with very little supervision. I still get to learn new technology, but fortunately I can ignore the rough edges and focus on the benefits. Meetings are minimal. The salary is adequate for my lifestyle. Best of all, I get to interact with real, live human beings. (Although at the moment, of course, we're doing everything via Zoom.) Fundamentally, the problems I'm solving are not technology problems, but human problems. At this stage in my life, this is more interesting.

I never imagined I'd end up a teacher, partly because I was a terrible student. Over the years, I had gone back and forth between industry and academia but now I think I'm in academia to stay: there's nothing I miss about slinging bits for a living.

Ironically, I'm helping my students enter a career that I left, but I let them make their own life decisions.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#79

Post by pansa2 »

ehnto wrote: post #62
notacoward wrote: post #28

I haven't left myself yet, but at almost-55 I know a fair number who have. Here's what I know of what their answers would be. The first simply had another passion - travel. Work was just a way to pay for that. Eventually went to work for an agency, been there a long time and AFAICT couldn't be happier (despite being less well off materially). I've known a couple of others who fit this pattern. One left the industry t…

> I'm tired. I'm tired of the artificial deadlines I think the ephemeral nature of software really plays poorly with the artificial deadlines, and the artificial importance of some projects in general. Eventually you recognize the pattern, and there's no logical way to justify it, so it's harder to motivate yourself. You know the deadline isn't real, and you know the software will be rewritten next year with some new…

> the ephemeral nature of software [...] it's harder to motivate yourself

It's been a few years since I left the industry, and I'd be surprised if any of the code I wrote professionally hasn't been superseded by now. Even worse, plenty of it was scrapped before it was even released.

Of course, I knew this would be the case when I was writing it - that does indeed affect one's motivation.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#80

Post by epmaybe »

I don't know if I really "left" if I never joined in the first place. I'm almost a doctor, now, but I studied computer science in college and became pre med in my third year of college.

I realized I didn't really want to be a cog in the wheel without human interaction, and I wanted the perspective one gets in medicine to be able to come up with solutions that help people. That evolved while in school to building software/hardware that increased access to medical care, and it's been a cool ride trying to figure out how to actually come up with studies that prove my ideas work (or don't). It's also extremely gratifying to treat patients and make them better, even if it's at the micro scale.

Post reply on HN