My advice is to just get a tech job where you can coast, work from home, and knock out a couple tickets a day. Have lots of flexibility to see your kid and take vacations while they're young. Some places offer 4 day weeks and you still take home 6 figures.
Sales Engineering or Customer Success would be an interesting pivot but you usually make less money and have less flexibility than SWEs
Consider finding a role or opportunity to write software for people doing something you find meaningful - you can provide an enormous amount of value, and a good technical person is basically a wizard to people who aren't steeped in this kind of thing. The parts of my current role where I've gotten to work directly with scientists to help them solve complex problems have been by far the most interesting and rewarding things I've done in my career.
But I dropped a day of work and took a salary sacrifice.
Really bad burnout made me hate work, stopped me from enjoying coding, made me lose my confidence in tech, and made me feel like a slave to working without an external life.
Dropping just 1 day has been the largest mental health benefit I have ever had, and I don’t think I will ever work a second over 32 hours a week. Nor will I ever work 5 days a week.
But I made major life changes at the same time.
I deleted my last remaining bastion of social media - Reddit, due to extreme political new, and toxicity. I switched to hackernews as my only form on “social” media.
I also blocked global and local news sites on all my devices. That has been incredibly relieving.
I moved out of my expensive house.
I got back into gaming, realising that giving it up removed a powerful way for me to relieve stress.
Now I’m passionately working on side projects again on weekends, and the extra day is awesome. And I’m generally happy. My phone screen time has dropped from an average 5-6hours on average over the last year, to under 2 hours a day average the past month.
Also one other thing about the elephant in the room - “AI”, I’ve changed my views on it quite some. It truly is overhyped, I’ve stopped using GitHub CoPilot completely, and mostly just use LLMs as a shallow surface search engine. Try not to worry about your job, I don’t think it’s going to take it anytime soon, and it’s also not going to make anyone a 10X Engineer.
Maybe clever people will become 1.5X developers, and people the rely on LLMs too much will become 0.5X developers, so it balances out
I started a sabbatical two years ago, and in the beginning I was convinced that I didn’t want to ever work in tech again. In retrospect, that was at least partially the burnout talking.
It took me over a year before I started warming to the idea again, and I’m now fairly certain I’ll go back to a tech role, but with a very different perspective both on life and on whatever roles I take going forward.
There’s something incredibly valuable about fully replacing your routines and truly taking a break.
I sold some stock to make it happen, and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.
Do you like what you do and not who you have to work with?
Perhaps you want a job in your field that's "good enough" where you take a pay cut for better quality of life (defense, govt contracting, big banking, life sciences, non tech companies that still have hard software problems).
Do you like building but you want to call the shots on something you want to build for a decade?
Perhaps entrepreneurship is for you. But, it's tough -- having made the transition, you trade off one set of people problems (and lack of agency) for another. Net-net it's more stressful and while the highs are higher, the lows are much lower.
Do you want a completely different field entirely?
I've seen folks purchase blue collar flavored "lifestyle businesses" (self-storage, landscaping, etc) and scratch the entrepreneurship itch "in the small". I've seen folks shift to building physical things (taking up welding or woodworking), but you run into the physical constraints of your body which can present challenges. But, this is probably the hardest path for me to answer or advise towards, in part because it requires you abandoning or at least closing the chapter you've build your career experience inside of.
Best of luck. I'd start with the first question; it sounds like you've worked at companies with "ambitious" technologists and found a common thread of misdirected ambition. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't find a happy home inside technology. Technology is a big world.
I'm just burnt out in different ways... and feel like I have too many things to keep up with now. So my advice if you do take a sabbatical have a concrete plan to keep yourself busy, relaxed and motivated, something I didn't do. I just puttered around with random shit, coding projects I found interesting, renovations, small orchard, investing... etc, and I don't feel further ahead although externally I maybe look successful. But that said the company I was at and frustrations probably would have led to me driving off a cliff.
White collar jobs used to be rewarding and highly paid but overtime it became a glorified day care for adults with Animal Farm dynamics. It's especially bad in Asian countries with strict social hierarchy.
It's no wonder more and more young men are ditching white collar jobs for blue collar workers.
But for some growing # of females (and even smaller number of men), it seems like they are opting to sell images/videos of themselves engaging sexually arousing or sexually explicit content while also engaging in legitimate white collar work. Again in Asia, this trend is even more rampant especially Japan, 40 years ago you couldn't dream of seeing 18 year olds standing on the streets of Tokyo but now they seem to everywhere.
I'm frightened by the whole thing. If young graduates are heading to workshop instead of office, it means they aren't going to be consuming like they used to. There is no need because there is no need to be seen with the stuff people covet here vs in office/startup environments where the rich/poor gap is not only in your face but for everybody else to judge.
I was born, raised and studied in South Africa. Living costs and salaries are cheaper. I worked in California. Instead of living a lavish lifestyle, I saved. In hindsight, I should have saved even more. The important thing I did was opting for cheaper housing. I worked hard, which opened doors. I landed up at a startup that's now doing really well.
I retired after just six years. Six more years later, I'm doing what I want. I've been cycling around Europe and Africa. Next week I'm flying to Canada to explore North America for the next two years. It's a pretty cheap lifestyle, but I get to experience life around the world in a way few people ever do. I'm working on building a presence on YouTube. I've met others who sustain their travels via YouTube. Even if I don't, I can keep going for quite some time living off of savings. I wouldn't be able to do this so easily if it weren't for stock.
I'm not advocating a travel lifestyle. Instead, I'm advocating for saving up while you're earning decent cash. Don't blow it all. Then hopefully you can leave for what you really want to do, and not be tied down due to finances.
Find a manager that you can learn from that might not have technical skills but is a genius in another domain like sales. You will learn so much and the difference in culture is mind blowing. In my experience the smartest people tend to be nice and confident. There's been this assumption that being abrasive and being smart go hand in hand, especially in the tech industry. This is for the most part not the case.
You can provide enormous value to an org with your skills.
1. Taking a significant sabbatical (6-12 months) if you have runway for it
2. Meeting with people you trust (e.g. past colleagues) and discuss your situation openly
3. Switching role. People & strategy could lead to product management (but PM roles comes with their own suite of frustrations)
4. Finding a mentor or a coach and find what drives you. It's there, hidden somewhere in the pile of work that you left behind.
It's true. I feel the same.
1. Huge cognitive load to deal with when you started taking responsibility for others code . Even worse if you still need to code.
2. No person skills growth. Managing engineers is not real world management to me. It's way too simple and just chores.
3. No business sense growth. You just implement. You don't face the customers/users. You eventually lose connection to the real world. "asymmetrical amount of value" comes from tackling real world problem instead of "arguing about the structure of software".
Maybe it's just me and OP.
Founding a company isn’t great work/life balance no matter the field, but it is significantly more rewarding in deep tech imho.
But if you don't love teaching, there are easier ways to make less money. :)
- Open an independent bookstore in a medium-sized midwestern city's downtown
- Get into the jewelry business (not sure if there was family business experience there);
- Open a coffee shop, this person had someone else manage it (must be nice);
- One past tech PM switched careers to become a traveling nurse and was loving it still ~5 years in;
- Wive's friend moved to montana and opened a dog grooming franchise
Note that virtually all require some money to either invest in opening a new business or re-train yourself in some new profession (college/grad school prob just means loans). Doesn't mean it's true for every option, but worth noting how often that's the case.
https://amit894.medium.com/ikigai-simplifying-the-intersecti...
The problem with contracting is people often end up locked into a perpetual support role, as IT market saturation drives down earnings.
Could look at a union job, and set yourself up for a soft landing into retirement. There is also the CS dream job of Plumbing... =3
Ditching it for building comes with a bunch of pros and cons. Pros, works interesting, massive demand, jobs last 20+ weeks instead of a few hours/days making it way less effort to chase a dollar. I've got a six pack again after being sedentary for 5 years, my health is the best its ever been and i dont spend a dollar on a gym.
Cons, wage dropped by about 50% until I get licensed. The whole industry in Aus is plagued with bad actors and shit businesses. It's rife with sexism, racism, bullying and just generally horrible people and companies. There are basically bugger all companies offering apprenticeships. The unnecessary hazing onsite is a pita too. Old fellas get grumpy watching IT workers pump jobs it took them 20 years to learn in less than a week. Turns out youtube builders will teach you more tricks than the grumpy old dogs have learnt in their lifetime. Age and experience do not always correlate in a positive fashion.
I still do IT on the side, it helps me fulfill some inner wants and needs (I really like helping folks get the best our of tech).
I would love to try get into building IT infra like datacenters. Mix the two job realms together.
Don't be afraid to make big changes, you got one life, might aswell "send it".
I teach Python and Data Science (Pandas, Polars, XGBoost, Sklearn, etc.) to large companies (and some smaller ones), and I've written several books on those topics as well. There are certainly pro's and con's to what I'm doing, but it provides good flexibility for me and my family.
> My strengths revolve around people and strategy
These don't seem to jive. EM or Staff is about as much people and strategy you get.
I came from tech recruiting which I would not recommend but I do know a few engineers who have transitioned into that. I think sales engineering is similar without a lot of the recruiting bullshit and likely a lot higher upside unless you want to run a company of sales people.
Why is Engineering Manager the most miserable position?
For me, leaving the private sector SaaS world and working for a non-profit was a good decision, because it put me far enough away from some of the cultural bullshit I despised the most. Timelines aren't insane, growth hacking is a term nobody has even heard of, and I no longer feel like the harder I work, the worse the world is for everyone except the investors.
I'm just implying there may be ways to continue to be a SWE and change your situation.
Can't recommend it for the pay but it's nice being around extroverts :) or maybe that's just Americans in general.
Have you thought about contracting? I used to be a mercenary and switching every 6 months kept it somewhat fresh. It was a bit more exciting than a permanent position.
TL;DR: If you are eager to learn and do, you can eventually switch to anything close to your current profession - in other words, this option is to not think about a big jump, imo, and rather small steps.
My goal in the next year is to go back to SWE but as an entrepreneur - as an indie of some form. I have a niche in mind that might pay the bills.
You're right about the industry being broken, senior managers infantilising and patronising teams, and the constant arguing about bullshit with people who just want to be right all the time, even when they're clearly wrong.
Asymmetrical value is where it is at. Keep going with that angle, hustle, get out, and don't worry about scaling: lifestyle businesses are the new unicorns.
Couldn't agree more.
In any case you might want to consider starting a family first and only then switching careers.
I'm trying to avoid platitudes here, but children really do put some things into sharp focus and more often than not that affects your priorities.
Also you discover where your limits are and that they're actually much further than you anticipated.
I see that as a better starting point to do anything challenging really, as you're already managing the hardest challenge.
When I left my last SWE job (after 10 years in the industry), I had money saved and was coming off of very challenging changes in my personal life. So for the first year, I gave myself a lot time to rest, take care of health challenges I had been procrastinating on, and getting back into video games and anime for the first time since college. Through video games and VR chat I got into 3D modeling as a hobby, which I would continue to learn doing while also exploring some other things (volunteering for a political campaign, and interpersonal mental health coaching). Eventually I got excited to move to LA to take classes at Gnomon, which was quite expensive but also extremely enjoyable. I honestly never expected to actually work in this field since I did not dedicate myself fully to it, and it's a tough industry. But one of my classmates referred me to a job at a major tech company that wasn't that glamorous, but paid well and suited my very limited skill set. So here I am.
All in all, there was about 5 years between my last SWE job and my first 3D modeling job (with some coaching work in between but it was very low paying). Certainly that time gap could be shortened, as I was not fully dedicating myself to it, but it would have also been a much less enjoyable process and transition if there was pressure to support a family behind it.
If I'm going to give you any tips, is if you're trying to start a family I highly recommend finding a boring easy tech job that doesn't require your full capacity so that you 1) make enough money to not be stressed about it, and 2) have plenty of time to focus on non-work related things. There are tons of boring roles that are.. well, boring, but not stressful or soul draining. I'm kind of surprised you want to be a parent but you're also entertaining a sales role that would be pushing you to work more instead of less. My two cents.
> I just don't enjoy arguing about the structure of software anymore
Why were these arguments happening in the first place? Were you starting them? Did you dislike the arguments or did you dislike losing them?
>I'm tired of the personalities
There will be personalities no matter what you do for a living (or even in retirement!). Some will suck, some will be cool, most will be both at different times. But if you are tired of ALL the personalities, maybe your own personality is the problem.
> tired of the infantilization of the industry
What is "the industry"? How was it infantilized? I feel you are leaving some important detail out of this particular frustration.
This is a long post, but I think it is a relevant option to the apathy and disdain you're feeling from the daily grind you're in.
The ENTIRE JOB is working with a salesperson and leveraging people, strategy and your tech experience to get the technical win for (usually large) sales.
While a big part of doing the job is giving demos and (sometimes) showing slides, because you have to know a lot about the product, you can still flex your software chops without worrying about story points. IOW, if you're at a tech company that sells libraries for $x, you'll still need to write code using those libraries so that you can speak to $x, connect with the people you'll be "pitching" to and getting to that technical win.
This will scratch the itch of wanting to code without having to play a story to do it.
No prospecting, cold-calling, contract negotiating, or other sales-y activities required.
You'll make less than a FAANG SWE but more than a non-FAANG SWE. The average is $230k-ish, 70% salary, 30% commission. Unless you have a good commission year. Then you can make WAY MORE than a typical FAANG SWE. Some SEs earn $400k+ on a good year. Still less than a Staff/Sr. Staff+ FAANG SWE (which comes with many more responsibilities that you would consider bullshit).
(Something that doesn't get talked about very much here is how much software sales people can make. There are definitely sales folks pulling in multiple millions per year. That $10B JEDI contract that Microsoft won? There were salespeople and SEs assigned to that account...and $10B is a big number. That said, sales is a MEAT GRINDER.)
Almost all sales engineers I know have awesome work life balance as well. There are days when we're up to our eyes in work, but there are other days when we have absolutely nothing on our calendar. For days. You also (within reason) set your own schedule. At the last two places I've done SE work for, if I wanted time off, I put it on the calendar and invite my salesperson. Some places will ask you to put into your HR system, but it depends. If I need to take off during the middle of the day for something important, I pop that on the calendar, and we make it work. I could NEVER EVER do that before, and it's super cool.
Getting into the field with zero experience is, unfortunately, pretty hard. I'd try to move laterally into it at your current company first or network with SE managers, either IRL or on LinkedIn. However, if you're seriously considering leaving tech (please don't! The world outside of tech IS ROUGH AS SHIT), I'd give this a try.
Another avenue that you can pursue is consulting. It's post-sales, so you'll still be grinding, but you get to hop from client to client without getting too attached to how they do things. If you're more on the strategy side, you can, eventually, run accounts and mostly have conversations with stakeholders about where they want to go. It's harder than presales and usually has lots of travel attached, but it's an option.
Source: Am in presales now, did consulting for 5-ish years, was a SRE for years and years prior to that. I left FTE eng jobs because I wanted to travel more and traveling as an engineer always comes with huge strings attached. I sometimes imagine going back and going real deep into the stack like I used to but then think about the story points and changing directions and other general Tom-foolery that comes with engineering and stay put.
I would like to hear more about this.
What does this mean?
1) Taking what you know, and doing it at a smaller scale. Instead of building eCommerce sites for Fortune-50 companies, doing it for local Mom & Pop Shops... Outcome : Meh, I spent too much time looking for customers, and too few hours billing for work. The projects were just too small. It may work, if you can some how get enough small customers, but I found it really unfulfilling to have to "cut corners" to meet the really tiny budgets that small customers have. And working with things like some shitty junk template for Shopify or WordPress Commerce was just torture.
EDIT : I also lost about $85k on a $55k project trying to do something for a small business. It was embarrassing. I took on a project that was a bit too big for me to do all alone, so I contracted a team of devs that a friend raved about... and they didn't work for me. Anyway ended up having to pay them, and just lost 6-months of time, totally embarrassed myself to the customer (who I had gotten through a friend), and in the end I ended up doing like 5x more work than I had planned and hiring a (non-cheap) friend to come in and help save the day. I don't know the advice I learned here really... other than it just flat out sucks to have things go sour when doing a side-project that you're personally on the hook for delivering. In my case, it came down to me trusting the wrong people. Really is quite valuable to know the people you are working with.
2) Building stuff outside of tech. I built a few tables and benches and such for friends in my garage. I posted a few pics online and found a buyer for an item, and like I went in thinking I was charging a fair price. Outcome : I like woodworking, so the work was fun. The downside is that these sorts of customers are a pain in the ass. Guy commissioned an "indoor table" and then put it outside space... and 3 months later he was mad that the finish wasn't holding up. In the end I burned a lot of time, basically had to refund the entire sale price, lost money and time trying to remedy the situation (not to mention haul the item to and from my garage shop multiple times), and just got really frustrated with humanity. Like it's one thing to do some tech work and have people trash it... it's a whole other thing to have someone take a beautifully finished indoor table and then stick it out in the rain and cold for 3 months and then be upset that the wood warped and want you to burn hours fixing it... Plus this customer was just such a pain in the ass. And you have to "love your customers" to get started in this sort of space, and love engaging with Social Media.
3) "Coaching" / Project Governance. I found some people who would have hired me to do work, but instead had hired some (cheaper) shops. Then I found a role overseeing the work and coaching them on what to look for and what to expect. Outcome : Made good hourly money, but in the end it was way too similar to my day job... only with a lot more headache. Software teams that were in India, or other places that were just the most god awful teams you could imagine. Bad quality. Bad communication. Dishonest. Shitty shitty off-shore hours. But also clients just kinda sucked. Marketing folks who would sit and listen and give praise for advice, and then disregard it all and then come back with, "Oh thanks for your good advice last time, let's say I didn't listen to any of it and all the bad things you said would happen happened... now what do I do to save the project?" But, of the 3 options so far, this was what paid the best. I did this a handful of times and some were OK, but most were really frustrating.
4) Angel Investor. I found some small local businesses... one in tech, the others not so much... and just got involved. Helped with stupid things like marketing sites, or setting up POS systems... whatever I could help with. Gave them a bit of seed money -- either as a loan, or purchased 10% of their business. Outcome : Lost money and time on 3 businesses, but one of the companies did OK, and I could probably live off the returns for a while if I needed to (or sell my share). It's hard to predict which companies will do well, but being an Angel Investor was nice in that you get enough control (people don't just listen to you and ignore you), and you get some hands-on work, and the returns can be pretty solid. The company that did well was just something dumb... a neighbor's friend was building a few warehouses to rent to Amazon.
Tried investigating the hacking and stalking and was met with a serious coordinated threat of murder. Was blackmailed to stay silent about the murder threat.
Couldn’t work on code much more.
Went homeless.
Media blackout on the trial (would have been a salacious headline in Hawai’i), perhaps due to my reports of receiving the coordinated murder threat and the status of the social circle who issued it.
Took the NSA’s college level codebreaker challenge and did pretty well. Bad idea. They call them spooks for a reason.
Met a wealthy man here in Haleiwa who gave me side work and pushed various hard drugs on me, so I tried getting away from him. Endured criminal violence, harassment, discrediting and defamation, obstruction of justice from a judge, and more shenanigans.
Tried getting back into coding. Even got a donor laptop from a nice ex Amazon employee here on hn to try to rebuild.
Took another NSA codebreaker challenge while homeless and while dealing with the ongoing violence, harassment and discrediting campaign from the wealthy party with a lawyer. Couldn’t handle it. Laptop gone. Sorry to the ex Amazon guy who donated it. It was a tiny little i5/8GB, enough to participate in the NSA CTF.
Met a guy into data engineering at the coffee shop who gifted me a brand new M2 MBP 24GB. Tried getting back into programming while homeless. Hasn’t worked. Gave it back to him new in box. Was being targeted yet again at the time due to being exposed homeless on a bicycle in public. Couldn’t handle it and can’t deal with the constant lack of dignity due to experiencing long term homelessness and destitution.
Still homeless seven years later and in a far worse predicament. Not very optimistic about my future. Scrapping for food money. I live on a bicycle with two backpacks outdoors on public assistance for food, which helps a bit. Bicycle has irreparably broken down today; trying to find a donor replacement locally so I can make it to my gardening job for food money tomorrow.
It’s bad enough to be ruined with lies while others enjoy lack of accountability. Far worse is to be discredited and met with skepticism about reports of criminal behavior.
Software development has stopped completely for quite a while now. Fighting off the dread of the entrenched, persistent desire to end, mid life. Failed career, non existent, now with a ruined rep and trauma.
As a result, the Hacker News responses are often incredulity that anyone could ever leave the software industry (even if it's a miserable soul-draining place), or slight career shifts that aren't really career shifts, with a little bit of Financial Independence Retire Early thrown in.
Now, where to find the community of folks who have left Hacker News for something they genuinely enjoy, that would be great to know.