I spent about a decade as a PM in early-stage enterprise software companies (Box and Talkdesk, among others) and left in 2019 to open a dog boarding business!
I found real estate, had plans drawn up, got permits, found a contractor and ways a few days away from closing my SBA loan. Then the bank called and said they were putting a hold on new underwriting because of this COVID thing... this was March of 2020.
Had to shut that down before I ever opened my doors, but then I started a dog treat business, and that's going well!
Here's an AP article that covers it... that's me at the top with my dogs: https://apnews.com/article/business-coronavirus-pandemic-8ea...
I'm doing small projects for fun. My favourite is helping people get unstuck in 15 minutes with 3 questions. A few coaches have expressed interest in offering a similar service so it's accidentally turning into a micro-coaching business where people who don't normally have access to executive coaches and get help with something specific in a defined period of time.
My advice to people in tech who want to stay in tech, build stuff for yourself. If you're not sure how or don't have ideas, there are people who can teach you myself included
A friend of mine recommended I do 100DaysOfNoCode. That was a great suggestion. It's free. They send you an email every day with a 30 minute activity. The activities introduce you to a ton of tools. I learned about 20 new tools and built over 15 websites and apps.
Because you're starting with the technology you're almost forced to come up with business ideas.
I talk about it more in this loom video and also have 2 other ideas for generating ideas https://www.loom.com/share/22be41636f3a4c119f7e3d6497a03de4
I'm new to Hacker News so my apologies if video links aren't allowed
What I do myself and what I recommend is if you have a spark of inspiration for any idea, do something to action it (send an email, tell someone, build a landing page, etc). Follow your curiosity without expectations of any outcome. If you get early traction, keep advancing to the next step. Let go of things that don't interest you.
It's never too early to build something yourself. There are an insane amount of tools and opportunities. Imagine if you built 1 thing a month and had 3 things a year that you enjoy and generates a steady stream of revenue. Now image doing that for 10 years.
Retirement merely means I tell me what to do.
It's simple. At home, the things that annoy me about the job don't exist.
If it's broken and I don't feel like fixing it, it stays broken. No due dates, no planned outages, no SLAs. If I like an app it stays, if not it disappears. No processes or approvals. No people problems. No BS.
They're really not the same thing at all, and I'd imagine many careers that are also hobbies work the same way for many. Playing with cars on the weekend isn't the same as being a full time mechanic.
Startups can easily lead to burnout. Tech itself doesn’t necessarily. I think I’d be quite happy spending my twilight working years at some kind of bigcorp saving up for retirement.
I am retired from tech but I might want to build a family of happy chickens and freeze dry their eggs. No idea if I would do it as a business or just stockpile freeze dried eggs and share with the neighbors.
This idea was prompted by the recent supply chain issues, egg shortages, panic buying, weird world issues and finding that freeze dried foods are expensive. I can see why. Freeze dryers are expensive, time consuming and a little noisy. Either way I will be building a quonset style barn with as much solar as I can put on and next to it. I carved away a little bit of land from the horses so that I have more room for solar and chickens.
Right now, I'm just a cog in the machine, iterating on the same boring products for consoomers and to maximise shareholder value and increase executive salaries and bonuses whilst earning just enough money to keep me motivated for another day.
When I think about my work and life it's incredibly depressing, but I have no idea how to create monetary value doing something meaningful and productive.
Don't the consumers enjoy the products? You're giving them that enjoyment.
I am not a fan of programming or software anymore, and while the moneys nice I don’t want to spend many more decades sitting on my ass, working on stuff o could care less about. Money is nice, but it’s certainly not keeping my content.
When I took a few months off, however, my perspective changed. After the 2nd month of doing nothing, I started to really miss the intellectual stimulation of hanging out with other engineers, working on shared goals, etc., so I decided to go back to work at a new company.
I'm now happily employed full-time, working with a larger team, and still building things in my free time. Life is busy, but I enjoy it.
I still think this may be my eventual destiny, but for now I'm happily working with other people and just trying to enjoy life as much as possible.
Yes, there is lots of burn out as well. I suspect much of the burn out is due to lack of having a reason to do what they do.
For the last 40 years, tech has been a tool of creation. It's becoming a utility. Part of the fabric of everything we do.
Almost every company has tech, just like every company has accounting.
I believe burn out is often a result of a lack of purpose. If you are on a mission, you are less likely to burn out. This also assumes you are taking good care of yourself, taking breaks, being well rounded, etc.
These two sentences seem contradictory.
Oh, and I'm going to travel much more than I've done for the last 30 years.
I am now, apparently, a retired person. It came as a surprise, and relief. (The fine line between retired and homeless cuts through every human heart)
I intend to write a lot of code, make a lot of 3d printed stuff, and enjoy my time with my friends and family.
For the next month or two, I can't do much due to eye surgery.
I've picked up (with a lot of help from HN) a Forth variant from the 1970s previously known as STOIC, to work on. It's written in C, which I've avoided since the 1980s. (I hate case sensitivity, and the shenanigans that happen with Macros, and the insanity that is \x00 terminated strings)
If possible, I intend to write a C library that does Reference Counted, Count Prefixed Strings, to route around the standard *char grief.
I'm also working on a set of tools to deconstruct HTML and recast it as an Actual Markup language that you can apply to HyperText, in a sane manner. (Throwing all the layers together with a blender in "HTML" was a tragedy)
Oh... and I forgot earlier... I want to at some point use an OS as a daily driver that implements the principle of least privilege. WASM might be a work around for this.
The cheese_goddess has spoken, there are no longer any alternatives. We know what to do ~
Presented in order of honesty
