Ask HN: How did you move from IT/software to something unrelated?

I'm sort of doing this now. I'm a full-time software engineer, and I have a passion for tea as well. I've been reading a TON about small business, entrepreneurship, etc. My wife and I are in the processes of launching a side-hustle online tea company, and documenting the whole process on our YouTube channel. It may not be a full-time gig, but we want to grow it as far as we can. So, in short, we're sticking with the safe jobs we know and leveraging our free time to build something we love.

I think the ESL/teaching English abroad thing is always an option.

Being relatively young is def a good thing, imo. Olds are not so attractive to employers, career-switching or not.

i had the chance to do project management after a long time being a dev/whatever, and it was actually really cool. also did some product mgmt and that was cool too. there are often companies looking for 'junior' folks with that stuff -- the main skills needed are tech + 'interested' + young (can also be read as: not jaded yet)/cheap.

my advice to all my friends and people i care about is...get out now. that is, get out of tech, get out of wage slavery, get out of anything that allows you to be owned or is about to be automated (everything) -- get into rent-seeking and other horrible stuff b/c that's the way to survive and thrive, unfortunately.

or, move to a less insane country, like somewhere in Scandinavia maybe.

good luck!

I doubt that more technology is the solution. What worked for me was to build up strength in my wrists, hands, and forearms again, with free weights. (I'd actually recommend dumbbells rather than barbells. If I were advising myself 22 years ago, I would tell myself to start really light, and don't work too hard to begin with.) It took a lot of work, but I didn't cause the RSI to flare up again, and within a few months I was able to type at full speed for indefinite periods.

Something else I learned was to not overdo it.

So, that was almost a cure for me, but whether it'll work for you or not is an entirely different thing, depending on what the root of the problem is. You would probably also need to address posture and muscle tension issues, like I do, and you just plain should not attempt any kind of serious rehab without a good physiotherapist helping you.

You write as if you are trapped in IT. You say you are burnt out. Perhaps the feeling you are trapped is coming from inside you rather than the world?

Burn out comes from using willpower to force yourself to do work that you have no hope will succeed.

The feeling of being trapped comes with that. The Fight Flight Freeze response.

The feeling is inside you. You can fly to another industry but the feeling will go with you and you will remain unsettled.

Because burn out is a physiological phenomenon, one that you feel in your your body, focus on physical recovery. Sleep, go outside, reconnect in your relationships, exercise. Get the adrenaline and blood pressure down.

Then it is worth doing other things to build back the feeling of hope. But use that as the guide. Do I believe this will be fun? That I will succeed at this? You need to retrain your sense of hope in your own efforts.

It takes time. A few months to 2 years perhaps. Forgive yourself daily. You aren't the first or the last person to feel this way and there is nothing wrong with how you feel. It was a way to stop you from continuing doing something self-destructive. The primary lesson is to do things that are self-constructive from now on. Things you want to do. Things you wake up to do. Don't stop yourself from those things any more.