Looking for alternatives.
In case you're in the same boat:
What do you plan to work with?
i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.
All that, plus the skeleton crew due to my company's offshoring is making me jaded.
When I was still a teenager I just had to have it be the complete opposite way.
Years later I could see it coming first hand, back in the early '80's after PCs came out and the industry grew so fast it sucked the vast majority of technical minds away from natural science like never before.
I already knew as a student, that I would need for everything I do to build on everything I had done before, as an advantage not everybody would have.
The mainstream was always for lots of people to get their degree, stop learning, and they'll be fine.
With plenty more who never stop learning, although traditionally concentrated in academic environments.
For me to do mostly the latter outside a formal academic effort, it was even more important for as much of my work as possible to build for my entire life.
With the personal computer boom you could see the rug-pulls that the growing digital workforce was enduring, where they often could't even use the same computer language for very long before migrating toward another fad. Which wouldn't happen if the growth was not out-of-control chasing as much dream as reality. They could afford it though, the tech debt was swept under the rug, two steps forward with one step back is still progress, and it mainly affected employees below the executive level, which has always made things more subject to fads.
Medicine is always in demand. I did a brief stint in EMT but felt mostly like a glorified bus driver doing lots of interfacility transport work. In addition to regular nursing, you could look into nurse practitioner as well if you wanted a bit more autonomy.
There'll be another overhyped buzzword in a few years and we will all be expected to get excited about it and I just can't anymore. Realistically the actual business value of software has barely changed in about 20 years except for niche things in finance and R&D engineering (and I know because i've worked in R&D engineering with embedded guys).
I am just not interested in learning to deploy largely pointless AI chatbots or learn yet another web framework to make largely the same ERP or PLM etc related stuff I've done before in the 'framework d'hier'
That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day.
I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job.
It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a software internship. I remember thinking wow they must have a totally different idea of what a good/bad job is.
I can't think of a better value job that working in tech in terms of amount of effort and schooling required.
I could completely forget about my job when I got home, didn't have to somewhat keep a framework of some giant corporate spaghetti code soup in my head to a certain extent for months or years on end, and interacted with people way, way more than I do now, and made deeper friendships with my coworkers.
Also there was no risk of me working on something for six months and it get cancelled or shelved before it gets used by anyone. At least in fast food and retail jobs you're helping multiple people (sometimes hundreds of people) every day. In my corporate career I've often ended up working on software that only has a handful of high paying clients, or only used internally and not client facing.
If I could justify the insane pay cut and could manage it physically I'd probably do something like be a barista nowadays. Or be a teacher, maybe.
I worked in a bakery / dessert place for 4+ years making barely above minimum wage. 8-12 hours a day on my feet, making dough, talking to customers, etc.
I didn’t absolutely love the job at the time, but I miss the realness of it constantly. Making a real piece of food, talking to real people. The tech industry increasingly seems obsessed with making everything as fake as possible, and I can relate to OP on multiple levels.
But no one wants to admit that because it’s nice to fantasize about the greener grass, that there is some perfect ideal job out there.
Several people I know who went to a good university and landed big tech/quant jobs early became millionaires (liquid 1,000,000) after 5 to 7 years. Some got lucky and reached this milestone way earlier.
Medicine takes 12+ years of education before bearing any fruit and finance has very little freedom.
I’m going to live a simpler life where I work on making video games as a creative endeavor. I’ll try to find a part time job to earn some money, but mainly just adjust my expectations to be happier with what I have as opposed to what I could have.
I’ve wedged myself into the correct shape to fit into what companies classified as a productive tech worker for 10+ years mainly out of fear of being poor, so now I must repay that debt to myself by doing things just for the sake of enjoyment or fulfillment and not to build a skill that makes me better at making more money.
When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has slowly drifted from "engineer solving problems" to "employee managing process." You spend your morning in standups, your afternoon fighting with CI pipelines someone else configured, and your evening wondering what you actually built.
The people in this thread who say "just get perspective, you could be loading trucks" aren't wrong exactly, but they're answering a different question. Nobody here is saying the pay is bad or the chairs are uncomfortable. They're saying the work feels hollow. Those are different problems, and "be grateful" has never been a lasting fix for the second one.
What I've noticed — both in myself and in people around me — is that the ones who stay engaged tend to have found a way to shrink their world back down. Fewer layers between them and the user. Fewer abstractions between them and the machine. Whether that means a tiny company, freelancing, or just a side project you actually care about, the pattern is the same: make the feedback loop short and real again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships.
As much as people say AI is killing jobs, even before that, interesting jobs were mostly being killed anyway by agile, sprints, and product managers anyway, to the extent that replacing those kind of jobs with AI is no great loss.
Loading trucks, and manual labor, can potentially be quite satisfying, especially if it's your truck, or your business, or your product being loaded.
Over the years, power slowly returned back to management and the industry figured out how to slice the creative role into small cogs: QAs, FEs, BEs, SREß, OPSs, POs, PMs. It's ten people now instead of three crafsmen. They can now follow a very strict process to produce average software with a lot of overhead. Customers don't care because one half is forced to use it and the other don't have a taste of what good software is. Partially, because they use abysmal MS products. Apple briefly showed to an average Joe what is possible when people care, but they're slowly losing it.
Now it's node/js everywhere and fierce competition being a ticket taker. People with no passion who are here just for the money and who don't care about the code. People who are here to play promotion politic games. Coding is a regular job now which pays decent and has low barrier to entry. You can fake it very far now with AI assistance.
While we used to use Excel and now use Jira, in my experience even 25 years ago never spoke to users. Spoke to their proxies in house. If lucky those proxies are from the industry and were end users once.
But turn on "showdead" and read nivcmo's top-level reply. Or if you won't, here's what for me was the most important line:
> Smaller teams, clearer missions, direct customer relationships. That's the antidote.
Maybe, after a few months off, I'll be open to that, if I can find it.
Congratulations, it's once in a lifetime :)
Oh wait, they keep calling me out of retirement too ;)
>direct customer relationships.
That's the main thing I would put full-time effort into now.
It's nice to be off the treadmill until you are good and ready, once I get going again I don't plan to stop for a long time, if ever again, so retirement has been a good break.
I would say pick/find something you're passionate about or interested in where you think you could make money, find a market and go for it.
Having run a business for almost a decade, I’ve accumulated a lot of accounting and tax knowledge that I think would be cool to properly certify. Also it would be to re-live a childhood dream.
That can be a feeling all its own :)
Which is why I’m now in the position to choose whether to study to be a CPA or go back to work.[0]
So I went into consulting, and also management. The throwaway experience I had of my deep knowledge going obsolete in interviews has created a built in aversion to learning every new thing that comes out - something I loved in my 20s.
That's my issue with the field. I think developers are in a better spot - you're either a strong developer or you're not. Systems or ahem, "DevOps" suffers from this commodification of resume buzzwords over and against analytical, learning and adjacent mastery of skills.
If I do switch, it would be sales. If the cost to build things really goes to near zero, sales would be a lot easier. People love to buy things that are better.
I've worked in a number of other fields, some pretty crappy. Nothing has kept me engaged like tech.
And also.. i have been asking myself alternative question..
Who do you plan to work with?
s/plan/imagine/ but still where do u find those..
I do not tire of it.
My plan is to go back to working in logistics, still have friends there, it's a rough time in that field right now: but I can't imagine myself enjoying the next few years reviewing slop, babysitting Claude, and surviving the next layoff.
But I have no idea what to do next, because being a dev is already my 2nd profession, but my enthusiasm is going down hill these days.
You have to realize corporate software exists within a bell curve, which means don’t be awesome. Be compatible, at least at work. In your own software be as awesome as possible according to features and numeric measures.
You also have to also understand you will likely be surrounded by people who think they are awesome when they actually suck really bad. You can look for some place that does not have shitty people or learn to let them make all the noise so that you can just chill and use company time for your own personal desires. To avoid shitty people look for jobs with the highest barrier to entry.
If you want to be in management learn to do 6 things at once all day, really care about people, and develop vastly superior communication skills, and finally learn when to STFU.
I should make myself a clock saying "X days until college". Once it clicks I'll go straight to a local university to register some courses, rent some cabins, and enjoy life.
