A former boss of mine shut down her web development company, sold her house in the city, moved to the country and started over as a stone mason. Last I heard it was going pretty well.
Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
301–310 of 463 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#302Not exactly. I'm still in tech but I sold everything and bought a sailboat to sail the world after I got sick and tired of sitting at a desk. I have starlink now which makes it possible (before it was hunting for 4G/5G signals like I was the crocodile hunter) and sailboats can be pretty affordable if you want to sharpen your trade skills. I've "re-kindled" my love for woodworking, fiberglass, diesel engines, electric…
This is my dream. I love to sail / fish. But do you have a family? wife? I fear that this kind of thing will be impossible if I settle down, have kids etc.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's me! It also generated a rather large discussion here and if you want to read how things were going up to that point, I posted a lengthy comment there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964 How am I doing now? Still good, still grateful to be married to somebody who gets good health insurance through their job. Still need to update my website a bit (is that work ever really done?). Still working on the…
Out of curiosity did you go into woodworking with the intent of making a living from it? Or were you in the position where you had enough savings/passive income/whatever to keep the lights on if woodworking didn't provide a steady income?
I do it for money and am not financially independent. My partner is the primary income earner in our household, and I would expect that she will retain that position for the foreseeable future.
Our goal is definitely that my contribution to our household economy grows to a more equal role, but she works an professional job and has been at it for a while and moved up over time.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds good, doesn't actually mean much. It's just an extended version of "money doesn't buy happiness". Money buys the ability to do whatever you want. It buys you the ability to take what would normally be big risks. It also buys you the ability to live a sad but otherwise comfortable life on a beach. Money bought the person you responded to the ability to travel the world and study math, instead of worrying about…
Agreed. Money buys choices, simple as. What you do with those choices, and how much meaning they bring to your life, is entirely up to you.
Or, to put it another way, everyone has choices, but the choices of the poor are all bad.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#305I used to work as a compiler engineer in the US for several years, before deciding to try starting over at the age of 30, in pure mathematics. I moved from the US to Paris in pursuit of an affordable mathematics education, and spent two years in a Masters program. I did have a considerable amount of savings, but it was very risky nevertheless: if it didn't work out, I'd be out-of-touch with compilers, and it would be…
It's a beautiful paper, even if the significance of sections is lost on me. Very clear and concise and beautiful illustrations. I learned a few things from it (I like how you describe planar trees as trees that can't be reflected about the y-axis).
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had always thought you were just switching to a focus on formal methods! Otoh we had only interacted a teeny bit / little to none while you were in nyc I think
I initially kept that option open, yes. However, there are surprisingly few available positions in formal methods outside of academia, and Coq is very very hard: my ability to prove things with Coq is quite modest. Probably worth noting that I did have an PhD offer earlier, to work with Coq. However, since it was in a small village in Germany, I had to turn it down. On a more general note, I don't know if formal meth…
I would have gone with the small village in Germany! But yes, formal methods will likely be eclipsed by machine learning applications due to the investment in skills required and time consuming nature of the activities.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's me! It also generated a rather large discussion here and if you want to read how things were going up to that point, I posted a lengthy comment there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964 How am I doing now? Still good, still grateful to be married to somebody who gets good health insurance through their job. Still need to update my website a bit (is that work ever really done?). Still working on the…
I need you to understand that I think about this comment all of the time . Every time someone asks for something ridiculous, I think "I could be making furniture out of wood". I doubt that I am alone in that.
I am continually surprised by how much that comment resonates with other programmers. I'm glad it brings you some joy and provides the idea of a different path should you decide to make a career change.
Since HN has a lot of Bay Area folks, I feel that I should mention that The Krenov School[0] is but a short drive up the coast from you lot. I haven't been, but the student work I see from there on Instagram is a source of inspiration to me.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#308Very early in my career, I briefly took a non tech job to get out of one I hated. I say briefly because I quickly found myself in a job that surrounded by 100 problems easily solvable with simple tech solutions, and started to do them- either because it saved me time or it was painful to watch other people do something painful slow when simple tools would do it— things like stitching together data files (basically a…
Working software in a place that isn't mainly software is actually really great. I write the internal systems and occasionally work on the customer-facing websites and applications at a small local manufacturing company. Definitely better than my first job in RPA where I was constantly on a call with an uptight customer that gave vague descriptions of what they wanted, that then got upset when they had to call us 4 more times to fix what we built to their bad description. And it was nonstop crunch. No slowdown time in between customers and implementations. Just immediately on to the next one. Definitely painful.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a teacher for ten years before taking a position at a small tech consultancy. I also encourage you to jump into the substitute pool; however, please understand that as a regular classroom teacher you will have many more tools to manage a high functioning classroom (not least, a regular classroom teacher has established relationships with their students). Substitute teaching is teaching, but there's a reason exp…
Definitely but it's good for anyone thinking about a career change to get a taste for the rougher aspects of teaching to ensure that they don't have unrealistic expectations about the career
Absolutely true.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
#310Has anyone tried freelancing part time as a developer while starting their new career? I am considering freelancing so I can focus on making and selling shoes. I don't need to go all in on making shoes right off the bat, but having an extra 4 hours a day to do the non-tech thing I enjoy doing would be great. I would still be making enough money to cover the bills while I work on the new career.
I worked just like that for a while, and eventually decided tech work was more reliable for me than my equivalent to your shoes concept.
As part of that experience, I did a bunch of personality theory research that tipped me off to this reliability factor (in myself! Not saying shoes won't work for you), and then it made sense. I switched my hold on the non-tech side to a more flexible improvisatory one. I do that whenever it strikes me as fun.
If I could go back in time though, I would have called myself a business owner sooner and dropped the freelancer label. For one, there's very little practical difference from a maintenance POV.
For another, the freelancer label is like broadcasting that you're probably not in it for long, and this limits your access to clients who are looking to show their boss they've hired a reliable resource.
With regard to hours, you can make tech and business ownership whatever it needs to be for you. I definitely didn't understand this principle in practice: Develop a working schedule spec for yourself and work to spec.
The spec isn't based on wishes or ideas. It's based on looking at your average work hours and effort last week, month, long before you got worn out. It's based on your realistic comfort level.
You will always have to push back gently when people invite you to out-do yourself (features, timelines, whatever), and if you give in, that state of things can definitely make you hate tech. It does take some refinement over time.
IMO everybody who does this for work should deploy a stable, specification-focused version of themselves at work, and a dev version at home.
You should get to work each day knowing you have awesome boundaries in place to protect your stress levels and also help you make your clients more successful. And you should have tech stuff to look forward to that's just for you.
Good luck with the shoe business by the way, that's really cool.