71–80 of 105 posts
I often dream about being a carpenter, a park ranger, or a truck driver. But it feels like it's too late, and my family would suffer from the lack of funds as I transition and learn.
If you want to use your hands and collaborate with humans a lot in person, the trades seem to be quite exciting right now. Salaries are also good — A good plumber in our area makes nearly $800/hr, and that's not touching what the datacenter plumbing folks are making.
Did you really mean 800/hr? Or is that a typo for 80/hr?
If you want to use your hands and collaborate with humans a lot in person, the trades seem to be quite exciting right now. Salaries are also good — A good plumber in our area makes nearly $800/hr, and that's not touching what the datacenter plumbing folks are making.
Did you really mean 800/hr? Or is that a typo for 80/hr?
Teaching is a very fulfilling profession. Organising knowledge and developing learning material on topics you care about is creative and intellectually stimulating, and connecting with your learners gives it a human component that is often missing in dev roles. Some teaching jobs are even relatively well-paid...
Take a break for a few months to recalibrate what you want from life. Tech will still be here when you’re ready again. Go travel, use your physical body to walk and hike and lift, have a couple of flings, go to a bar at noon, work a few temp jobs, apply minimalism in your life, learn about something you like, etc.
This is not advice to just follow for anyone. For some people this may be right, but for others it can be dangerous and a disaster. (At least if there's any chance "months" turns into "years".) If one is of verge of depression (or similar stuff) then removing routines in your life is in general not going to fix things, but make things worse. A long vacation or unpaid leave, sure. But quitting work without a concrete…
Personally, in between jobs a long time ago, I chose to walk the Henro Trail, an approximately 800-mile Buddhist pilgrimage trail in Shikoku, Japan. To make a long story short, it was the experience of a lifetime.
Why are you asking HN? Do you have anyone you know in your personal life you can talk to? Family or friends? Hopefully someone you know well can give you some honest feedback and help you figure out what would be a better fit for you. I don't see how a bunch of strangers on HN could possibly help seeing as they know nothing about you and totally lack context.
1) close colleagues you might not want to be vulnerable towards, or
2) people you are close to and feel vulnerable to you, but do not have similar career trajectories or experiences.
There is a reason why "communities of practice" have always existed, and HN kind-of-sort-of happens to be one.
I'm in a similar boat to you, and it's made me think a lot more about happiness and, I think this is something we may not think too much about, how our life affects our receptiveness to happiness. I'll try to explain what's helped me, and hopefully it can help you too. There's that old phrase that happiness is a journey, not a destination. It's a state of being, a fleeting emotion. We each have our own unique flavor…