Some days I think that I just want to basically check out of technology on a day to day basis and either develop a skill I have or learn a new one and work maybe part or full-time doing something totally different. Something totally unrelated to sitting in front of a computer.
Thanks to tech I have a lot of savings. Not enough to retire on early, though maybe starting to be fairly close, so I feel like I could do something like this in the next few years fairly safely, and I wouldn't feel as much the loss of income if I didn't have the savings.
Has anyone here done this and have a story to share, either positive or negative? What did you switch to? How did it work out?
For various reasons, mathematics didn't work out, and I was forced to interview again. Fortunately, I did manage to find a job as a compiler engineer again, and will be moving to London soon.
Now, the price of my adventure was quite steep. I uprooted my life when I moved from the US to Paris (especially because I didn't know French at the time), and the upcoming move to London will once again be difficult. I nearly halved my savings, by studying mathematics at my own expense, and will be back to earning the equivalent of my starting salary in the US.
However, I'm an adventurous person, and view my experience in positive light. I'd been wanting to study Jacob Lurie's books for the longest time, and I finally did it. I worked on a mathematical manuscript, which is now up on arXiv [1], and on a type theory project which has been submitted to LICS '23 [2]. I've had a good life in Paris, and my French is decent.
There's the larger philosophical question of "What is a life well-lived?", and for me, the answer is to pursue those things that you're truly passionate about, even if it doesn't work out.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09652
[2]: https://artagnon.com/logic/νType.pdf
... and third, they give me a kick in the backside when I feel whiny and complacent. "Oh, so you're pissed because your bonus was 2k instead of 2.5k? Well, if you were still washing dishes like back then, there would be no bonus at all..."
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To me, the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places, the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.
I know there are those who would totally disagree and say, ‘If I could just be a millionaire, that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work every day. If I could be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world.’
They don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it."
-- Richard Nixon
Money buys the ability to do whatever you want. It buys you the ability to take what would normally be big risks. It also buys you the ability to live a sad but otherwise comfortable life on a beach.
Money bought the person you responded to the ability to travel the world and study math, instead of worrying about getting food on the table or taking care of family.
Denying this is one of the most ignorant things people with money can do. It's the core of many problems in society, as it's directly related to the inability for many in power to empathize with people who are less fortunate.
Having kids. Not that you have to do this with kids, but it is a reason
Me, an interviewer: "so you know compilers, great start on monday"
Also me: "so you know compilers and have studied math on top, sorry son thats a no from me"
If you take more than a few months off interviews become insanely hard.
But then again, I might be comparing oranges to apples here.
Depends alot on the supply and demand of compiler engineers though.
Could be interviewer: finally a competent compiler engineer! Handcuff him to that gold bar!
Why?
Ive always thought that those jobs are like: every company does it a little bit different (tools, processes, architecture) but theory, parsing and LLVM stay the same.
So what changes in e.g year or two? new CPU instructions? Architectures?
How does your job look like? You are doing more frontend or backend work?
I will mainly be working on the middle-end and back-end for RISC-V.
Probably worth noting that I did have an PhD offer earlier, to work with Coq. However, since it was in a small village in Germany, I had to turn it down.
On a more general note, I don't know if formal methods is that promising today: proof assistants are very immature, and proving even little things involves a lot of trial-and-error and is very time-consuming.
Yes, I recall interacting with you!
To me that is a truly a life well lived.
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
> Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964
How am I doing now? Still good, still grateful to be married to somebody who gets good health insurance through their job. Still need to update my website a bit (is that work ever really done?). Still working on the mix of building stuff and rustling up new business. Please feel free to reach out if you have a furniture need or a furniture windmill to tilt at (email in profile). I do sculptural light pieces too.
I doubt that I am alone in that.
If you don't mind, can you share a little about what the pay really is like? And how do you go about finding gigs? What are typical gigs like? i.e. do you build stuff and then try to find buyers, or do you find the buyer first and do heavy customizations? Do you use your own plans/designs or do you use others? How high was your skill level when you went full time? What would you recommend for someone who is largely self-taught and therefore has blind spots with some things?
(I'm working my way through the Anarchist Design book and thinking about getting started on the stick chairs).
This is a solved problem. SawStop will reduce the injury from amputation to somewhere between laceration and a pinch.
Interestingly, as I recall, nearly as many people are injured each year from power tools as are injured in vehicular collisions (in the US) and way more people drive than use power tools.
There is a solution, yes, but the problem is not solved.
It's amazing the difference it makes in my daily well being - as you say, interacting with new people and working with your hands is very much more satisfying at the end of the day.
Getting a delayed passenger to their destination is a much more tangible problem, then coding for some ill-defined business need.
Still doing tech, but I have a much better outlook and productivity now.
The notion that someone would leave the tech world for a job in the service industry because it comes with more respect is absolutely wild to me. That's so far away from my personal experience I honestly can't fit it into my mental model of the world.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe your experience is actually super different from mine. Either way I'd be very interested in an elaboration.
Perhaps OP meant as a trend over time? That has truth to it if you compare going back to the early 90s (my frame of reference).
In the 90s programming was not that well-paid, but was a very respected role in the companies I and my circle of programmer friends inhabited. A programmer/sysadmin was a wizard and treated as such. It was a vastly more fun industry to be in even if salaries were just regular white-collar professional level.
Slowly in the 00s after the dot com crash that seems to have vanished even as salaries started to climb. An in the 2010s programming became a low-level job where all the decision making power was removed from programmers and handed over to PMs. Now programmers are seens as replaceable worker units to be micromanaged to death via agile and daily status reports. In other words, not respected professionals anymore. The insane salaries kind of make up for the loss of respect, but not fully.
For the first couple decades of my career I always felt this was the best field of work ever, and it was. These days though, as I look at my high school peers who went into medicine, law, accounting I have to wonder. They all get ever more respected in their fields as they gain more experience, very much not the case in software anymore.
But seriously, it is a hard job. You learn quickly that just because you understand something doesn’t mean you can explain it to someone.
As a complete side note, I think it would have been easier to learn programming if I had started with some lower-level CS, not high-level programming. Some concepts behind even high-level programming don't make a lot of sense to a newbie unless they understand what the limitations of a machine are, and why they inherently exist.
Depending on the district you end up in, it's not for the feint of heart.
The pay will likely be much higher than teaching elsewhere (though I still took a 30k cut). Some bootcamps are more legit than others, so just do your research first
What subject are you teaching? Mine will be physics, if all goes well.
I was the only of my mother's children to attend her employer's appreciation event after she died [family did not have a funeral]. It meant so much to see how her community appreciated and respected and missed her. My siblings, her fellow children, did not want to witness this for some reason ["a waste of time"] but it's among the most beautiful things I've witnessed.
To those gathered hundred+ friends of my mother, I loudly thanked them for attending and sharing the spirit of her beautiful life; I told them calmly and proudly that "this is a celebration of 'how you should live your life,' to have left such an impact upon so many wonderful people."
Top 5 life moments/memories. RIP.
I know a few teachers who quit or went private (for less money) because of problems in the system. The bureaucracy can be oppressive and conflict with your morals. Safety and mistreatment can also be a real concern in some areas. The good news here is that most of the kids you'd be dealing with would be taking programming as an elective, so they should actually give a damn.
This is why I love mentoring new hires and interns.
An error message from a server while in the car going on a small vacation triggered the change. I had enough. So on the spot I thought of my options and decided on becoming a trucker.
My first aim was to do long haul but I never went that way. I got hired to do local LTL deliveries/pick ups and I loved it. For me it's hard to beat driving a truck when it's nice outside. Winter can be a bitch but you learn manage.
Constantly going in and out of the truck got me and keeps me in shape. I lost 100lbs and feel much better than the fat slob I used to be, tied to the keyboard. It also help that I bike to work (not in winter though).
Took a real pay cut but I would never go back. I don't think I can anyway. I started programming again a couple of years ago on personal projects and I love it. I realize that my skills are greatly diminished but it's still fun to find solutions to problems, fix the damn bugs lol, and be proud of the final product.
It is amazing how much of a difference physical movement on a daily basis will do.
Finding a job as a newbie was not easy at the time (because of the insurance they were saying) so I went the agency route and they found me work right away. Worked there for 2 years then found a job closer to home. Been doing that for about 15 years already.
That way you can ease into it, the other option is to go for one of those "we pay to train" places, but that involves more upfront commitment.
I did not have the savings to do it, but I eventually quit and became a bicycle mechanic. I actually enjoy what I do now, and the work environment doesn't have me constantly jumping back and forth between panic, undirected rage, and extreme listlessness like tech always did. That being said, I'm now broke and probably going to lose my house, so there is that.
That a great summary of working in big tech.
You bought it while you had tech money and the bicycle mechanic money can't pay for it now?
Have you considered doing some consulting or something on the side? So sorry to hear this.
I've tried to do some consulting work, but never could figure out how to get any clients. Apparently this is a thing people do somehow, but everyone I asked just knew somebody to get their first ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134322
The coffeeshop fallacy (2011)
It‘s easy to get blinded by how incredibly privileged the tech bubble is and have had a better experience so far just trying to find a great non-toxic spot in there. YMMV, good luck!
Whilst I wouldn’t be seen dead working in a place like that, y’all really don’t know how good you’ve got it.
> "To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up. Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business."
("Locust coffee drinkers" is analogy not insult).
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
I’m sure many a barista fantasy has been crushed the first time having to deal with an unruly or argumentative customer, clean diarrhea off the bathroom walls, etc. Yeah, you have less to worry about once your shift is over, but your shift might really suck.
In our culture it sounds cringe/like bragging to make these kinds of comparisons punching down (to which I retort that the “back to blue collar” fantasy started it) but at this point in my life I don’t think I’ll ever have to put up with crap like that for money in the future, and I don’t plan to. Why would I do that?? We get paid several multiples just to tell computers to send little packets of data formatted just so from here to there.
All you need to do to be happy is what you’d be doing at your barista job anyway - stop giving a crap about your job after regular working hours, and stop trying to find an existential purpose in repetitive, draining tasks. Once you can do that, you reap all the benefits of higher pay with less bullshit
I went to college and tried a year of grad school, and then ran off to become an electrician. This is a profitable career but is extremely tough on body; any position within the industry, it is still physical labor. Now, after fifteen years of sacrificing myself "for the big bucks," I am left wondering whether I will be able to fit into a work environment that isn't construction [knowing that I must make this transition].
It is paralyzing fear, and removing this debilitation is hard when people are literally throwing bonkers money at anybody even claiming to be a skilled tradesman, right now — my body is done! The money is good! Whatdo?!
I'm currently "taking time off" and re-exploring a childhood love of computers... learning python, bought a new computer for first time in over a decade... trying to love this all!
And now with all the AI coding and copywriting... UGHHHHH. The timeline, it's just brilliant and perhaps I'll just retire and enjoy a new AI existence =P
No great surprise at all that people checkout and burnout, cause people are not machines.
So I'm attempting to reconcile the reality of modern, corporate software development with the way I derive satisfaction/meaning from my career. Boiled down, my naivete about our relationship with work, which is undoubtedly encouraged and exploited by society, has started to wane, and now I'm trying to uncouple how I get meaning/satisfaction from how I get money.
New years resolutions aren't for me but this year I tried to start loosely viewing things in my life like investments, specifically in terms of ROI. It's more of a reminder of how to think than a spreadsheet. I imagine myself as having an 'energy' budget. Sometimes I spend some energy and I get some back; other times I get nothing in return. As far as my career goes, I need to spend X to get my pay check, which eventually converts to energy. Sometimes I spend X+Y, hoping I get something more, like recognition/education/satisfaction. Sometimes that Y is engaging in a debate in peer review. Sometimes it's trying to anticipate one's manager or "showing initiative". The important thing is to track Y and if there's no return, mark that as a bad investment to be avoided in future. I burned out a couple of years ago because I was spending Y like mad with zero regard for the ROI, or at least with the vague expectation there would be some ROI one day.
Obviously this is not novel, or even a good analogy ("all models wrong; some useful"), but this framing is a (potentially) temporary way to adjust my thinking and behaviour from the brainwashed, single-minded, career-focused, please-notice-me-ceo-daddy track I started out in after school/uni.