I quit the tech industry (2015)

I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative. Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).

The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.

The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.

After 20-some-odd years in the industry... oof.

Sometimes it feels like groundhog day. You might have thought about web application authorization. You may have implemented it a few times and figured out how it ought to be done. And you might think that after twenty years it would be a solved problem.

But you would be wrong.

You're going to encounter yet another web application with a bespoke authorization system. It's going to take a shotgun approach to validation and nobody will be able to tell you if it works the way it's supposed to or not. The tests pass (if there are any). It might have errors in it but we haven't had any reports yet. We hired a pentester last year and they didn't find anything. It's probably fine.

So you add a new feature and you need to extend this authorization system to handle it and you spend most of your time trying to make sure things continue working instead of focusing on what matters. The same thing over and over again. The same libraries, the same mistakes, the same solutions.

I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well.

Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom.

The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time commitment.

The best answer would have been to have rich parents with a large trust fund so I could go pursue my interests without worry. I don't have rich parents, but that doesn't change my requirements.

So instead, I'm going about acquiring the funds I need by whatever legal means I can, which in practice means job hopping at tech companies, looking for equity payouts, and buy/borrow/die with companies and funds that I anticipate to be around for 50+ years.

Of course, I don't get to have kids with this strategy, but ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism anyway. It happened to me and I'm not particularly keen on how it's going. At $10M+ I may reconsider, but I don't expect to get there in my lifetime.

> And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

By working my butt off for over 30 years, making a rather humble salary, but never living large, avoiding personal debt like the plague, driving old cars, or crappy company cars, living in apartments and a small house, saving 25-40% of my earnings, investing in conservative, yet still a bit aggressive, funds, and then, after leaving a job I stayed at for nearly 27 years (at a famous Japanese imaging corporation, that makes optical equipment), being rejected (sometimes, quite rudely) by every place I applied at, for being too old.

The first project I mentioned was done over a period of ten years, as a "side project," while I worked as an Engineering Manager (a job I hated). I did it because my life was, literally, saved, by an organization, and I wanted to Give Back.

There are many reasons to do things that don't involve avarice, ego, anger, or cynicism. I want to make the world a better place. My resources are limited, but I have some ideas on ways to multiply my impact.