This is the most important comment I've read in a while. It has become really easy to feel trapped in software as a trade even though I love working on software as much or more than ever in the details of the work. I'm fortunate that my current gig doesn't involve doing anything that I find directly objectionable in a Hippocratic Oath sense (though some might, its trading stuff which I long ago decided is about a 1.01 out of Meta on a scale of 1 to OpenAI).

The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies:

- Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)

- Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer

- Computer People Know What's Best

Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle).

I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up.

What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.

Glad this was the top comment. It is extremely easy to "leave tech" (or, as you point out, leave "big tech") - you just have to accept that you will most likely make substantially less money and that your "standard of living" will have to adjust accordingly.

I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay.

But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.

It blows my mind people feeling mistreated at X FAANG company just to go to Y FAANG company and expect any better treatment. They are all the same at this point. At least the unhinged career ladder climbers on Blind aren’t kidding themselves.

> every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package.

Well, a lot of them. Not every. There are jobs at big tech companies where you work on good things benefiting society, like improving security in open-source, or developing a lot of the OSS tools out there. (Think Project Zero, or many of your favorite major OSS project, which are developed by engineers at big tech.) They are not nearly as common as other roles obviously, but they do exist, and it's worth at least attempting to get them.

How “high paying” a job do you need though? My last three companies, I’ve worked on products that don’t involve marketing or data mining of any sort that I’d consider unethical. While they have certainly involved automating away jobs (car sales/bank loan people, pathologists, and now accountants, respectively), they were all software designed to benefit humanity.

And they all paid $180k+, the last two $200k+, in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. I only work over 40 hours if I’m working on something I’m passionate about. I realize FAANGs can go into the $400k+ range, but… do you really need that? Is it worth it? For the stress, the rat race, the pressure and all that?

Granted, they’ve been remote roles, and I live in North Carolina, not one of the HCOL metros (I don’t see how anyone can justify living in NYC, SF, or LA, honestly).

But like… this just seems untrue. There are plenty of good-paying, ethical roles to be had. Moreover, I’d say if you spend some time actively seeking out ethical, fairly (not excessively) compensated roles… they’ll find you, without you having to search for them.

A corollary to this is that “tech” is simply the method of accomplishing a business’ goals/objectives. At this point, all companies employ lots of hardware and software in their operations. No one working in a modern company can “leave tech,” but OP’s comment about “big tech” stands.

one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity.

In general (with a few exceptions like finance that are generally up front about what they are), the chillest, sanest jobs with the most accomodating environments tended to pay the best and vice versa.

I also have too many friends who tried sacrificing pay for better working conditions and more meaningful work and ended up bitter because they were sold a hollow dream.

Working in smaller tech companies with worse pay is worse than working these tech jobs.

Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors.

> Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue.

That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner.

The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.

Wow! Tech people have a really difficult time figuring out normal people's diction!

What kind of business? Most of the dream ones people envision are capital-intensive and failure-prone (speaking as someone who started a capital intensive business that failed)

This is pretty far out of reach for most people, unfathomable if you have debt and/or living paycheck to paycheck.

Please keep us up-to-date on how that goes. It sounds like you are having progress.

Most of the smart and talented people I know that dropped out to create companies abandoned them and ended in someone else’s company later. The two exceptions were salesmen who ended up becoming rich after selling their companies.

What you're describing is essentially the whole FIRE movement (financial independence, retire early). While I find adherents to that movement can be "culty"/extreme around the edges, the general advice of living below your means so that you can then have at least some number of years where you can engage in a more meaningful use of your time (doesn't have to be "retire") is good advice.

This is such a developed world comment :)

Because for the rest of the world rural (or a village) means literally rural or a village. What the people from the developed world may never understand is the wide gigantic chasm between urban and rural here, in every aspect of(un)imaginable.

How to life well as an independently wealthy computer person is an important question to address and I encourage you to continue addressing it because it sounds like you'd give better advice than most.

You might find the messaging more effective if it was declared in more direct terms though, its a pretty different problem than still needing to make a living when computers are your stock in trade.

Cool, congrats and wishing you good luck and success!

> monthly "who wants to be fired" thread Reminds me of Mad Fientist blog.

love this!

If you already have enough investments to not work, why would anyone even work in tech?

Leaving the grind when you already kind or rich is easy mode. Leaving it when your net worth is negative is another story.

When I left big tech for doing tech at a nonprofit, I had to keep reminding myself that even though I took a 66% pay cut I was still making ~double the median wage. By all accounts the job I had with a pay cut was still seen as a “good, high-paying job” in the community

Well a lot of those folks got themselves trapped in a mortgage possibly with a family. I see it all the time here in the Bay. People think they’re on top of the world, buy a house, then start to have second thoughts. Then they’re trapped and will lose out by selling and downsizing. They don’t want to do that, so complain and stick with their job fearing layoffs and hating life.

that's the hard part for me, I'd have to change every aspect of my life because any other job would probably start me at 25% of what I make now

sell my house, put my kids in a different school district, be terrified about health insurance

if I fail I'd have to go back into tech and would have uprooted everything in a way that's probably irreversible

How did you find out about the non-profit company and got into it?

these are usually worse, especially if IT is treated as a cost center and the SME is run by people with autocratic tendencies.

half of the questions on /r/cscareerquestions are about how to deal with working in this type of company ("why does the boss always defer to his nephew who cant code his way out of a paper bag?") or how to get out ("where are all the jobs paying over $100k?").

Correct, it's about leaving the private sector corporate / startup grind

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I know of two cases where people quit tech to become physiotherapists. I think if you own your own practice it might pay fairly well.

lol

Public workers are more positively impactful to the operation of society than many engineers working in digital widget factories. Bureaucracy limits potential, for good reason, but doing something is still more than nothing.

I worked the majority of my career at an optical equipment manufacturer. It was technical, but in a very old-fashioned sense (sometimes, too "old-fashioned").

One of the reasons that I stayed there, was because I was satisfied that most applications of our products were for artistic, creative, or scientific purposes. I felt decent about working there.

Also, the culture was very focused on delivering the very best to our end-users. Unlike almost every tech company in existence, these days, the company was not interested in selling itself.

Yep, there are so many options one couldn't list them all. I spent the first 10 years of my career in defense contracting and got out because I didn't want to contribute at all to that. Since then I've worked for companies whose products are tangible and needed by everyone. The downside is, not being tech companies per se, you're not working on anything that will change the world. The upside is, your work generally helps the company provide needed products more efficiently.

Agreed, personally I work for a university now (not in the US) - I’m still a software dev, but it’s the best job I’ve ever had because the people/work/purpose is all good.

I think the title implies "tech industry", as in companies producing digital technology for profit. Working for an union as a developer is not working "in tech" imho.

What age did you start med school? Probably not feasible for those of us who didn’t have stellar academic records. (Regardless of professional accomplishment)

(Un)fortunately, changing lifestyle is a painful and necessary prerequisite for leaving the bubble.

If by "keep a similar quality of living" you mean "keep FAANG-sized paychecks", there probably isn't an alternative. If you mean "keep upper-middle-class paychecks", well, there's more to "tech" than just web programming.

For instance, embedded systems is pretty good. Yeah, they don't pay FAANG levels, and they never will. They typically aren't a "toxic faang-esque HIB factory", though.

This is like asking how you can keep drinking the blood of babies without the guilt of killing babies. The quality of living attributed to tech workers is on the condition that they participate in the system that extracts value from people and society. If you don't want to participate in that system of exploitation, you don't get the privileges that come with being an exploiter.

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Emigration? It is really easy for Americans to move to Europe. If you are Russian, Pakistani or Kenian, that's another story.