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Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

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Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#151

Post by bityard »

InitialLastName wrote: post #150
bityard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the roles I seriously considered and actively explored to some degree or another. 1. Electrician. It's not something you can just jump into, even if you're the type who can grok 100% of the theory, equipment, and electrical code overnight. Even after you're all trained up, you have to rank up through various levels, most of which require working under someone else for X number of years. It takes a decade or…

> Aircraft mechanic. I have family in this field; not only is the pay not great (for the skill level) but there is a layer of stress (and liability) that gets added to jobs where one mistake can mean death for someone else. I wouldn't jump into it without being sure that stress wouldn't affect me.

I guess I forgot to mention that I actually _was_ an aircraft mechanic, although that was in the military which I suspect has next to nothing in common civilian aircraft maintenance. The work itself was fine, if pretty tedious most of the time. I left the service to chase a career in tech which was probably the right call. Although there are days where I wonder what it would have been like to retire with a government pension 5 years ago...

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#152

Post by InitialLastName »

bityard wrote: post #151
InitialLastName wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aircraft mechanic. I have family in this field; not only is the pay not great (for the skill level) but there is a layer of stress (and liability) that gets added to jobs where one mistake can mean death for someone else. I wouldn't jump into it without being sure that stress wouldn't affect me.

I guess I forgot to mention that I actually _was_ an aircraft mechanic, although that was in the military which I suspect has next to nothing in common civilian aircraft maintenance. The work itself was fine, if pretty tedious most of the time. I left the service to chase a career in tech which was probably the right call. Although there are days where I wonder what it would have been like to retire with a government…

Yeah, I'd hazard a guess that the life/death tradeoff, the error-management process, and individual liability work very differently for military vs civilian roles.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#153

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #15
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that does sound like something someone who switched from music to tech would say, but it’s also a little true.

I made a career out of it and made it to regional status. If you want to pay your bills, you need to hit national level or teach music. It's a fucking grind and you naturally age out.

Hey good job man.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#154

Post by mxuribe »

redbell wrote: post #63
dottjt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ideas on actual roles? I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.

IMHO, Farming is the ideal switch for a techie. Technically, you are switching from the likes of Matrix to speaking to animals. Another activity that I believe would bring more joy than 99% of jobs, if not all , is charity .

@redbell If you do go into a profession having to do with "charity" - what is more often referred to as non-profit (or not-for-profit) - please go in with open eyes. I don't want to dissuade you from looking into such careers; simply research things as one might be expected to do whenever looking at a new job/career. I spent 1 year at a well-known non-profit (similar tech leader job to what i've had in corporate world), and it was quite annoying from the perspective that it was the same (or worse!) bureacracy as compared to the corporate world, but with less pay. On the other hand, there were 2 medium-sized projects that i participated (and some portions led) in which have been the absolute best, most fulfilling thing i have ever done professionally in my almost 30 year career. While most of the co-workers were nice and had genuine desire to help their fellow humans, everything else about non-profit work (except for those 2 amazing projects!) was the same crap as corporate work (but again, less pay)! Again, i'm not saying you should not pursue a career in non-profit; simply do your due diligence in research. Goodness knows, we need non-profits to be more effective! Cheers!

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#155

Post by AlecSchueler »

greenie_beans wrote: post #61
AlecSchueler wrote: post #45

I did this some years ago myself and I want to say the only thing I miss is...agile working! Throw your tomatoes now. It's fantastic to work in this field and very fulfilling but I consistently find the quality of teamwork and coordination to be much lacking compared to my engineering past. I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upc…

i've never met a great instrument player who needed jira for solo practice. tomato ** 100000, with a chorus of violins.

Practice isn't the issue, everyone loves to do that. It's more the mundane things like writing bios for social media, contacting venues, finalising lyrics etc.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#156

Post by kodt »

harimau777 wrote: post #127
kodt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't most physical labor jobs and trades fulfill number 2?

Those generally aren't good jobs. In particular they tend to pay poorly and destroy your body.

Many pay well with good benefits if you have a good union. Yes physical labor is hard on your body, but in your 20s and 30s you can probably handle it just fine. You just need to move into a foreman/management position before you get too old.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#157

Post by kodt »

ertgbnm wrote: post #143
kodt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't most physical labor jobs and trades fulfill number 2?

Not necessarily. A lot of contractors are on call at a moments notice, work crazy hours, and take home all sorts of health related problems.

I was thinking a good union shop job. Yeah independent guys working for themselves is a different story.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#158

Post by renewiltord »

_heimdall wrote: post #134
renewiltord wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The view from Disunited Nations seems likely. There need be no successor peace. There could just be a broken ocean. Europe, in particular, has long failed to contribute to the peace it prospers in. The US periodically has to go and pacify the place since they are practically barbarians who will start killing each other in massive genocides given a few moments alone. When the US withdraws, weakened and bruised, no dou…

There's a very real question hidden in there though, is it even the US's role to "pacify" the "barbarians"? There's a lot rolled up in such a small idea. What makes another population barbarians, and how is it so different from the US? Assuming there are groups of adversarial barbarians around the world, why should the US step in to "fix" it and how can they even define what the fix is?

I guess that's fair. Americans see it as their role to prevent other people from their recurrent Holocausts. You leave Europe alone for a century and a genocide will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a decade and a war will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a year and violence will ensue. I suppose one could let that happen. But it's hard to say that the extinction of some racial group is a generally acceptable thing.

Irrespective of the origins of America, that is a categorical difference in the scale of death and destruction. To Americans, that is barbarism, but it's possible that Europeans do not see it as such and perhaps see civilization as inherently violent.

They are foreign to us here and speak different languages so perhaps their true minds are forever opaque to us, but we can see their actions: and that is repetitive quarrels with their neighbours with frequent attempts at ethnic extinction. From that, some conclusions can be drawn.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#159

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Dalewyn wrote: post #51
cmgriffing wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one interesting thought while reading that section. It seems that a lot of effort has been put into tooling for translating to and from English. It's probably much more effort invested than for other languages, so by using English he actually is increasing his TAM because the translation tools are better adapted to many other languages from English.

Or to put it another way: Spanish can understand English. English can't understand Spanish. Speaking English you can communicate with English and Spanish without also speaking Spanish, kill two birds with one stone. The virtues of a lingua franca.

> Spanish can understand English.

> English can't understand Spanish.

Many Spanish-speaking people are bad at English.

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