Kind of sick of these "I quit tech to do X" articles when the author clearly made more than enough to retire. Same vibe as Tim Ferris showing you his daily routine of working out, reading books, and answering 3 e-mails.

> In the few months before I resigned, I was working maybe two hours a day. Yet, those two hours were terrible. I was forcing myself to accept them because they were enabling a lot of good things for myself and for the people around me.

Imagine saying that to anyone born a generation prior and expecting sympathy.

>It was the same period in which I started to become politically active:

I often hear this from people who are struggling with their work environment or have some mental health issue. My suspicion is that it probably isn't very helpful for them. It seems harder to get anything done in politics than the typical enterprise. If you are having difficulty with your work the last thing you need is another brick wall to bang your head against.

> My first client was one of the biggest banks in the country: a hellish circus of inefficiency, coked-out managers, feudal power dynamics, and pre-GDPR surveillance marketing. My job was to cross real-time credit card transaction data with bank data, score some machine learning models, and send ads for predatory loans to families about to have a baby, couples about to get married, and so on and so forth. People who are poor enough to need a loan to live their life, but stable enough to pay it back with a lot of sacrifices. An SMS or a bank app notification should have been delivered after a few seconds of doing an expensive transaction, in the moment of their, supposed, psychological vulnerability.

I can predict the tech-libertarian defense of that right now, built on the fallacy of homo economicus and treating the market as its own evaluation metric.

> The problem is that I was part of a profession that was benefiting from an anomalous amount of privilege, built over decades by the expansion of the market, and this privilege was built on solid grounds. Now such privilege is crumbling, and it’s always going to get worse, at least until the unionization of the tech sector reaches good levels and it will take a while.

In the face of that, I wonder how long software-engineer libertarians will keep LARPing being billionaire capitalists, because they've got a comfortable job and a little money in a 401k.

It's sad. Because they've been propagandized, they're squandering their real economic power when they have it, instead of taking action to be prepared for the day when that power won't be there to protect them.

That said, unions (tech unions in particular) need to be hyper-focused on the broad interests of all workers in their remit, so as not to be defeated by decide-and-conquer tactics over polarizing political issues.

I was waiting for the punch line where the author gives all that sweet money back to the terrible system they despise, and finally washes their hands clean of it.

Unfortunately, such a line never came. I guess the money was just too good.

Give it 2-3 weeks we’ll see another article like this. Might be FAANG, might be not. But it seems like nobody is willing to truly sin against the capitalist god with proper repentance. Take a wheelbarrow, put the money in, hand it back and say “no thank you.” Until a person does this, their words are meaningless.

TL;DR European with a masters's degree, free healthcare and no children has the freedom to jump around in their career and even take extended breaks to indulge in hobby projects.