41–50 of 265 posts
The general advice is to sit down with your partner and plan out the outside-work five-year and ten-year plan. Does it involve kids? Moving? Founding a startup? Having a proper weekend hobby or starting already on checking off bucket lists?
The only way out of a rut is change. The longer you leave it, the worse the choices will be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than 2 years. My previous gig was 2.5 years. Before that was 2.5 years. It's obvious I never last long anywhere! If I could switch companies easily I would. But you need to be insanely good at math/statistics to pass the interviews, which I'm not, and you need to show enthusiasm for the role, which is difficult.
I think you give yourself too little credit. You graduated with a PhD in CS, you must be well above average.
(I don't know OP personally and I'm not commenting on them specifically, they could be amazing)
A thought: instead of focusing on what the job is, find a job where you care about what the job accomplishes. You're in quant finance. Does that excite you? I'll bet not, or else you wouldn't be where you are right now.
Everyone needs software these days. Charities, non-profits, lots of companies that are doing good for the world. They all need software people, technical people, and what they accomplish might be of more interest to you than the specifics of how you accomplish it.
Quant finance is notorious for being extremely unmotivating and depressing to work on. You say: I'm interested in computers and programming in general, but doing it for a living ruins the joy. Well... maybe. But maybe it's just the soulless nature of quant finance that ruins the joy. You need to quit your job, because you hate your job, and try something else. Anything else! Don't conclude that you hate programming f…
> I could probably grind leetcode for a couple of months to try to get into Google, but I would find working at Google utterly meaningless as well. How are you so convinced you'll hate Google as well? The big plus of working at FAANG is that they have lots of projects and you can switch to something you are interested in. You don't to working on ML in Ads, you can always switch to compilers (dart?), databases (spanne…
for every developer working on Go there are 1000 working on the most banal corporate crap you can imagine.
I'm not saying its a bad tradeoff - plenty of money. but if you care about what you do with your time, it might not be for you.
Maybe you are expecting too much from your job in terms of fulfillment/meaning? Or too little?
Community and people make our lives richer than money. Maybe find a job just as meaningless but with people you really enjoy working with?
Keep taking time for yourself and dig into this. What do you need the money for? Why? Why do you think retirement will be meaningful? What is meaningful to you? How can you optimize for that?
I quit my FAANG job with no backup in place during the pandemic and so far have done a bit of traveling. No one blames me. It's 2021, the year of the burnout. For me the breaking point was watching the movie Whiplash where everything is given for the career and thinking it all seemed reasonable. The movie wasn't intended to be perfectly reasonable at all.
I've lined up another job already but will still be a little while before i start that. I was never that bothered by unemployment at any point except that i may have had to move back to my home country if i didn't line up the next job within the visa grace period. But that's not as much of problem as a mental break. One of the nice things about having some savings is that you can prioritize your mental health now even if it cuts into your early retirement plans.
Maybe you don't get another job for a while but if you are on track for early retirement being unemployed in 2021 isn't going to break you.
You're burnt out in 2021 after the chaos of a pandemic. Completely understandable. Do what you have to do.
> Given that anything else would involve a massive pay cut
That's one solution right there: talk to your partner obviously, but it looks like you could quit the job that you hate, and could still maintain your lifestyle using your partner's income. Then find something to do that you actually enjoy. I hope your partner would be happier when you're happier.
That said -- where you are now feels hopeless, and the first thing to really do is try to figure out what you want. I mean that in an almost tactical way -- clearly you have some competing priorities, and it would help to know what you would want in an ideal world, and then make the compromises that are required.
It sounds like money isn't as much of a driver for you as you had initially hoped. So -- what would you want to do if money weren't an object? Does your partner want to stay or just not in as much of a hurry as you to leave?
There are options/possibilities. You might be able to work remotely from somewhere with a lower living cost but with a London-esque salary. There are also places besides London and your hometown.
I say this having been in a similar spot, as mentioned earlier. Burnt out completely at my job -- the one that I had wanted since I was 12. I've been working on a startup now for a little while -- and its by no means a success at all -- but I at least have something to work towards. There's a fantasy. There's something I can imagine working where I can be happy. And with that, there are real conversations I can have with my partner and myself about what we should do. It's not easy, but I have a vague idea now of what I would find rewarding, and at least a path to get there.