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Ask HN: Anybody who left IT?

• sethx 10y ago
  Reminds me a lot about another thread on HN, where people in IT decided that the product of their IT work is so immaterial that they decide to pick up tangible hobbies to have something to show for their crafts. I remember reading quite a few people talking about woodworking or carpentry. Personally I'm still in IT, but i have the strong feeling that if i were to leave this field I'd get into farming, as it is a line of work where scientific method and accurate measurements and methods yield to better results.
• hn-VZ4N8hcYCjKw 10y ago
  I took a sabbatical after my dotcom imploded in 2000. Huge, huge mistake. When I tried "returning" I was either too corporate for startups and too startup-y for large organizations. I was both too young for roles I had already filled and too old for technical roles I was interested in. I bounced through a series of startups, averaging less than a year before leaving. I tried consulting but could never command the rates that would make it worthwhile. I tried my hand at my own startup and failed miserably. I did not have the business sense, could not find a partner, and failed to convince a single investor to invest. I suck at business and organizational politics. I fell into the role I had in the 1990s which gave me some brief status and minor wealth, but was too busy firefighting then to learn how to leverage that into a better role. While I believe I excel at managing stuff: people, projects, technology, it is hard to convey that in an interview. Eventually I said fuck it. I stopped applying for the CTO and I/T management roles I was interested in. I told recruiters I am retired, but this had adverse side-effects I did not expect. I now reply that I am not interested in whatever role they are offering this week. I used the knowledge and experience I have to switch to investing full time, now about a 50-50 mix of publicly traded stocks and startups in various stages of success/failure. I mentor students in local bootcamps and try to help them find jobs after graduation. I am still deeply technical, I throw together mock services and run them on different platforms to see what works, what fails and use that to guide my investments. I play with things like containers and IoT crap at home to keep current. I hang out here to learn what the new hotness is (both what HN thinks it is, and what is coming in from the edges). I learn a lot from the great writers here like patio11 and tptacek and others. What startups have up and coming personnel to track? Which startups have people to avoid? I definitely check out founders and lead technical staff of the startups I invest in. If someone is a jerk here, they are unlikely to be someone I want to invest in. I do not know if any of this counts as "leaving I/T" or not.
  • employee8000 10y ago
    Why did you bounce through a series of startups?
    • hn-VZ4N8hcYCjKw 10y ago
      Various reasons, most common was that I would be recruited for one role, and within a short amount of time after starting the role would radically shift to become a role I was either unsuited for, or excruciatingly overqualified for. Don't recruit senior staff to run through change lists. Don't hire someone for one role and then radically change the role after they start working for you. One time I was hired to build a group fulfilling a function, simultaneously the budget for the department was zeroed out and all headcount dispersed to other departments.
  • mailshanx 10y ago
    Would love to hear more about your experiences, both at various startups as well as job hunting. What are some of the more memorable startup experiences you have had? What kind of roles did you try applying for, and how did recruiters / hiring managers react?
    • hn-VZ4N8hcYCjKw 10y ago
      Roles: mostly management or CTO. Usually, but not always, recruited by the management team, but bounced in the early stages of the process. Most memorable was being told I was unqualified for a role because I did not clearly whiteboard how to use some aspect of the Spring Framework. Memorable because: the company did not use Java. At all. Was a RoR shop. Another time I was recruited to step in as an "emergency" CTO, like, could I start Monday (this was the preceding Wednesday) because the technology team was melting down under the current CTO. One catch: they wanted the current CTO to interview me to get his opinion. You can guess how well that went. I did not pitch myself as a hardcore techie and did not apply for roles which appeared to be hardcore technical roles. The CTO roles I interviewed for were really CIO roles, management, process, that sort of thing, with some technical awareness. But what I find is companies want to hire hard core technical people for these roles, and then have a mutual miserable experience as they learn that knowing everything there is to know about the latest whizbang framework does not necessarily guarantee that person will be great at hiring, managing people and process and projects or negotiating the growth of the organization. Sure, there are hardcore technical CTO roles, but I mostly avoided those. And not so much because I didn't know the technical aspects, but it's not where my strengths are. I find companies avoid hiring managers as managers, in either startups or large organizations. They seem to prefer promoting their senior most technical people into management, even at the expense of that person's technical skills atrophying while they stumble through learning how to manage people or projects or products or whatever. And you know, peace. This is how people think technology organizations should operate. Not my job to fix technology recruiting or personnel management.
• cybice 10y ago
  I left IT 10 years ago, because of health problems and I was really tired of programming. After 3 years of working as non IT specialist (negotiator in investment company) I helped our analysts to develop a small script to parse some data, then again and again, and I got that I still love to develop. So now I'm in IT world again ;-) BTW that non IT years were one of the best in my life as life is not a job. Ivan Starkov github.com/istarkov
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • nilram 10y ago
    How did you become a negotiator in an investment company? It sounds interesting.
• wheelerwj 10y ago
  these answers are really going to be skewed.
• moralrobots 10y ago
  I belonged to the first generation of kids who had programming as a hobby. Started programming BASIC from a book that I found in the library when I was 12 or so (on paper, no cheap computers then), then got a ZX81 at the beginning of the 80s, and then went on to an Amstrad CPC, and finally an IBM PC. I also got to play with a PDP 11 on the way. Later studied philosophy, but kept the hobby, then worked professionally as a programmer for 20 years, until I got a chance to work as a philosopher. I dropped a safe, lifelong IT job that was going nowhere in the long run, for an extremely insecure philosophy lecturer job in China. The call of adventure, I guess. In my heart, though, I'm still a programmer. I enjoy hacker humour, not philosopher humour. In my free time, I read programming books, not philosophy books. When you started programming at 12, it stays with you for life. I'm now a programmer working as a philosopher, and if I do something else I'll still be a programmer doing something else. There's no regret, just a feeling of belonging to a particular culture, and this will not change, no matter what I do. That's why I read HN, and still play around with some of the new tools, frameworks, languages etc. But the philosophy job was too good to miss.
  • rmchugh 10y ago
    What does a professional philosopher do? Philosopher working as programmer asking...
    • gkya 10y ago
      As he said, lectures at a uni.
    • moralrobots 10y ago
      Sorry for the delayed answer. We're on China time here :) For me, it's mostly teaching, but even "extreme" amounts of teaching as a lecturer amounts to about 15 hours of classes per week. Compared with my 60 weekly working hours as a developer, this is almost perpetual holiday. Of course, there are exams to grade, lecture notes to write, and such. Also, you need to publish stuff in academic journals, and this is quite hard sometimes, because there are only limited amounts of journals in which everyone has to publish, so the competition can be fierce. Contracts are fixed-term for the lower ranks, so if you are unlucky, you can easily find yourself out of work every two years or so. So it has advantages (less stress, nicer work, more freedom), and disadvantages (unsafe job, cut-throat competition, generally less money) compared to IT.
• willholloway 10y ago
  I took a break from coding/ops for other people for money a couple years ago to pursue a startup idea I had. It was a cool project but I decided it wasn't a great business idea due to regulatory issues with the field. After that I had a choice to go back or do something else. I saw an opportunity to do a real estate development deal and I went for that. I liked doing the first real estate project so much, I put together a group of investors and am pursuing a larger deal right now. I do more interesting programming now than when I was working for others and keep my skills fresh. I really like real estate development for a number of reasons. 1) Much better tax treatment of income. Rents are not subject to self-employment taxes, a 15.3% discount. 2) Real estate benefits from access to the fountain of all money, the federal reserve. It's national policy to support RE prices. 3) The ability to do a project, put in a lot of work, and at the end own something valuable in perpetuity. After a year of a very large ops contracting project the checks just stopped. I really didn't like that. 4) Real estate is a market that is very local, with a lot of opportunities for advantage through information asymmetry. It is also something that resists reaching global scale and the race to the bottom competition that induces, and resists automation. 5) I really like the physical quality of the work. I physically feel better due to all the running around and not sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day. All of my software and hardware experience benefits me. I see all kinds of possibilities to save time/money with these projects with software. One day I will probably create a startup in the RE space. Most importantly there is a zen like nature to the work I do now, and I do a lot of the work on these houses myself, as the going rate for skilled craftsmen is not far off from a remote dev contractor in a lot of cases, and its easy to do many more hours than many employers would be willing to pay for. Very importantly, the value created is put into the property which is only realized through higher rents (taxed as passive income) and/or a capital gain if the property is sold. This probably means that in the long run I take home more money rehabbing a house than I would coding for cash, due to appreciation and better tax treatment. My only regret in all of this is that I didn't do it sooner. In America real estate investing is a pretty reliable path to wealth for the right kind of person with the right kind of eye.
  • cfitz 10y ago
    I am in a similar place but - very gratefully - at an earlier point in my life. For a young person looking to funnel "tech profits" into real estate, what educational resources do you recommend (if any) for mastering this field? The tangibility of real estate and the ability to get your hands dirty with property improvements engages me in a way that software cannot.
• excalibur 10y ago
  I would love to get out of IT altogether. But I don't see any path away that won't involve a huge pay cut, at least initially.
  • tspike 10y ago
    That's pretty much a given- can you reduce your lifestyle and start hoarding cash?
• VLM 10y ago
  I worked in IT at a financial services provider as a WAN technician in the 90s. That was my last IT job. Then I worked mostly in operations at a couple telecom companies. I mostly automated and integrated a lot of stuff, at that time Perl was contemporary and not looked down upon by the cool kids like today. Programming is different when done in a revenue generating department rather than an expense only department so times were better. Somehow I eventually ended up in engineering writing tool integration and automation stuff mostly for telecom company end users (like telecom techs not end users at home). This is somewhat weird in that engineering is usually not revenue generating but it kind of is here so its kind of in between. Where I work now IT is infrastructural and replace mice and image PCs and pull cable and fix printers and so forth. There are a tiny handful of interesting sysadmin and router operator jobs but mostly going back to IT would mean imaging PCs. The fun programming is done in engineering by engineering on the production (and test and dev) networks. Under those conditions I have little interest in going back to IT and being paid solely on bean counting metrics like trouble tickets cleared per day and PC hardware replacement average outage time and so forth.
  • vgy7ujm 10y ago
    Perl is still cool. Lots of new improvements happening. Perl 5 has yearly releases in case you did not know. Sounds like you could do well in devops if you still have your Perl and automation skills.
    • vgy7ujm 10y ago
      Hey, downvoter: Perl is cooler than you.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • gtirloni 10y ago
        I didn't downvote you but I see zero people using Perl in DevOps and no job posting I've seen lately asks for it. I've worked with Perl in the past and it's as capable as any programming language out there, but the ecosystem isn't there anymore. At least not for DevOps.
• netsql45 10y ago
  Tonight on 60 minutes: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-h-1b-visas-being-hijacked-to-lower-labor-costs/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-h-1b-visas-being-hijacked-to... A few people left
• gkya 10y ago
  I spent two years of my life doing nothing but self teaching myself programming. I was 19 when I started, and 21 when I found my first job as a programmer: a junior in a Django e-commerce shop. I quickly found that what enthused me about programming was not present at all in the real industry, that apart from the paycheck, the job would be, probably for my life, identical to that of a Fordist production-line worker: insert necessary letters and punctuation here, repose, repeat. In a room in some building, sitting all along, dabbling with deadlines, weird demands. This was boring, and not what enthused me for programming at all, that was the explorative aspect, the tool-making. So I quickly decided that I'd never ever be a professional IT person. In the two years I had perfected my English, to the level that I'd say that my English level was near-native. This proved very useful to me, allowing me to qualify for an Italian philology course, from which I'll graduate with a GPA of 3.80/4.00 in a year and a half, and which for me has been a part of a literary/humanist adventure which started about the end of my teens. For a living... I don't really know. I have two main paths: academia as a phylologist, or sth. else. I really want to run a cafe, but I don't have any capital at all to start such a business. My overall plan for the future is pursuing my curiosities on one side and moderate, mentally-light and sociable work on the other, because, for me at least, the life is way too ephemeral and short to do otherwise. As for HN, well, I've not lost my interest in tech and programming. I use, for example, Emacs for any kind of documents, email, RSS/Atom feeds, etc., there are some bits of Elisp that I've published. I'm slowly studying Common Lisp as a programming language. Writing programmes is pleasurable and useful still to me, and following HN helps me keep in touch with it. Also, HN is the only ONLY _o_n_l_y_ place where I can share the same platform with people like Alan Kay, many other CS celebs, creators of software that revolutionised computing and is maybe used by billions of people, and the sheer fact that I'm typing into the same textbox that these smartest people are typing and that one day our paths may cross on this forum on an interesting topic is, God, oh God, exciting. So, here is some more than what you bargained for, I think :)) A really nice and relevant Ask HN that helped me get these out, so thank you so much! edit: add the missing `identical'.
• opopie 10y ago
  I got my start as a kid, I was lucky to have a father who's an EE and interested in computers. By the end of high school I was working full-time in a start-up. This grew exponentially in 4 years and we sold just before the bust in 2001. During much of this period I was also in school full-time for SW-Eng. Studying and working in the field 50+ hours a week was very taxing but rewarding. I received a stock pay-out big-enough to afford to small downpayment on a house and to take flying lessons. I had a brief stint as a well paid consultant before being offered full time work with the government. I enjoy the people but felt I was always solving the same problem. Collect data, insert it into a db and built tools to work with it. Wash - rinse - repeat. To keep me sane I had learned to fly small airplanes and found myself teaching and craving for more challenges. Since childhood the dream had always been for me to fly helicopters. In 2006 I took a 12-month LOA from my permanent gov job and went to college to learn to fly helicopters. I can't tell you how much fun it was/is!!!! Being outside, seeing the world from above everyday, and knowing that each flight would present new challenges. After I got my license I was extremely fortunate to get a job flying aircraft (airplanes and helicopters) with special sensors on board at very low level 200-400' above ground collecting geophysical science data (i.e. magnetic field, pull of gravity, background radiation, induced electromagnetic response). The work was literally on every continent and I spent the next 7 years flying in some amazing places, including (favs): Papua New Guinea, Greenland, North West Territories and BC (Canada) and several countries in central/south America and the west/east coasts of Africa. I realised after a while that being away so much while a blessing was also a curse. My friends were getting married, having kids, getting divorced and generally moving up the life ladder, I was living in hotels for 2 months at a time in random places (often 2nd and 3rd world countries) and then spending a couple weeks at home before going off to do it again. In 2013 I was offered a job flying a larger multi-engine helicopter for a provincial air ambulance service in a major city. This offers the best of both worlds - I get to fly 14 days in a 28 day schedule and I am almost always home after my shift. Even better the way the schedule falls I have 10 weeks off a year and 14 days off in a 28 day schedule. With this extra time I've actually returned to a developer/prototyper type role for my employer and get to work on projects that I propose that have the potential to make my flying job better and easier. It was a serious kick in the butt to go from making nearly 100K in 2006 to 32K in 2008, but after a few years I've worked my way back up and am feeling better balanced for it. There are only a few things I'd do differently (mostly I would have prioritise relationships more and stopped travelling a couple of years earlier than I did). If your dream is to fly, it's a very personally rewarding choice, but career wise, especially in the U.S. the money is poor. Also I wouldn't be surprised to see drone tech starting to replace pilots 15 years from now or even earlier.
• avenoir 10y ago
  I'm contemplating to get certified for mountain guiding and rescue. The problem is of course going from making 6 figures to somewhere around 40k and likely much lower at the start. On the upside I would be in the nature and mountains almost every day and this is what I love.
  • gtirloni 10y ago
    You should definitely go for the training and start slow. I have seen mountain guides that were passionate even after decades while others couldn't stand the jungle any longer. I'd approach it as any other career change and get my feet wet first. Even if you end up not liking it, that training is still very useful.
• no_wizard 10y ago
  This is anecdotal, I would like to tell you the story of a friend who did just that, as I myself actually work in Site Reliability which really seems to be the new IT 2.0 (certainly not helpdesk, though I've done that too and I used to manage it as part of a team until recently) It goes a little something like this: My friend had over 10 years of experience in IT, and for what it's worth never even intended to get into the field, it's simply a job he could have that adjusted well enough with his school hours. He wanted to be a Math Teacher. Anyways, after getting through school he realizes that any job he takes will likely pay less than his IT job. He had gotten his hands on certificates in networking, red hat and others during his career and managed to have a lucrative post as a IT senior manager at a large Bank. Stable if underwhelming and not much room for advancement. Then he realized one day, he told me he realized it in a meeting he was in having to do with I want to say doing an overhaul of some of their networking: Therr was more money in being the outside firm they contract to handle these things and train staff then there was in staying on and helping consulting/services firms in his current role. You see, his insight was that he could get away with making more lucrative amounts of money in contracts with large institutions or companies which often, for various reasons, depend on IT services firms to handle their deployments. He also noted that a lot of these companies don't specialize in high quality mission critical deployments. Accenture is a big IT firm that mostly highest in his opinion cheaply and doesn't attract top talent and a lot of these guys don't have an ongoing training arm. So he founded a company that focuses squarely on filling a niche: he mostly contracts services with non-Technical firms like Banks, Hospitals, Governemnt institutions and agencies etc. and he does 3 things: By focusing only on highly critical or inftrastiricre that needs massive changes to rollout or other such opportunities, he doesn't go for low rent contracts. Instead he focuses on delivering high margin services for niches like rolling out tech solutions for high speed trading for hedge funds or critical infrastructure deployments for banks hospitals etc. He secondly trains existing or ramping up IT staff in the things his company actually sets up, it's part of the services contract. This training arm even does just training now and does well. Big companies often contradict out their training for new technologies and his love of teaching really shines. The third thing he does I find most remarkable: he sets it up often where his company can exit doing business. His goal isn't to milk services contracts but to empower organizations to do it themselves over time. You would think this would be a losing strategy but it isn't. It allows him to keep the company small and garners a lot of respect from people who make these decisions. A lot of the big IT firms want to keep you on as long as possible because the contracts are more lucrative that way. He inverts this and it has garnered some respect. Which in turn creates a lot of referral and repeat business. Now granted he left his jo with a list of good solid contacts to get up and moving and had a clear vision. Did he leave IT per say? No. He did become his own boss and successfully does well for himself and his small company does well over all. The one thing he told me which me or may not be still true is he wishes he would have become the IT firm to VC firms and startups. A lot of startups have massive challenges to scaling infrastructure properly and could do a lot through just good training and having a guide. I don't know if this is still an area of opportunity but I remember having an at length conversation in regards to trying to become the go to devices firms that VCs and or startups could call in to help themselves or in the case of VCs the businesses they provide support to a leg up on this *For privacy reasons I'm not going to reveal names.
• bane 10y ago
  I started my career as a regular old software dev but realized that at most companies that aren't specifically tech companies, IT is simply treated as highly skilled janitorial staff. At the time there wasn't as robust of a tech industry where I wanted to live a there is now, so I left to become an industry analyst, then moved into management roles. It turns out lots of fields benefit from having tech people join them. For example, a surprising number of technical research/analyst jobs are filled by absolute non-tech people (those fields seem to grab liberal arts majors at incredibly high rates), but they need people who can understand technology at very deep levels. So I made a name for myself by applying technical knowledge in those domains (not by doing tech work, but by knowing how tech worked). In management and business roles it's very much the same. Most managers tend to enter management by either growing vertically into more and more senior positions within their domain, then suddenly need to learn all the other skills needed to manage effectively or they go to some kind of management school or business school then head directly into management without learning how any of the workforce actually operates. Very few are cross disciplinarians who understand tech and soft skills and management at any kind of functional level. I find that tech is a part of the portfolio of what I manage, but I've made a name for myself by being an effective bridge between corporate operations and technology and the technologists appreciate (I think) not being treated like maintenance staff and being able to have a reasonable conversation with somebody about what they do. I think startups are very interesting in the sense that they really combine all the skills in one area and I bounce back and forth to startups as my career path today. I sometimes regret not staying in pure IT, but I also don't regret avoiding many of the very negative (to me at least) aspects of that life.
  • intopieces 10y ago
    Your description sounds like who I might be later in my career and I am pleased to have read about your path. I have also positioned myself inside a research role as someone who can communicate across disciplines. I am frequently the only manager who avoids abstracting significant dev work into magic and that seems to be appreciated by our developers.
  • pjbster 10y ago
    To avoid having to explain themselves, some IT execs simply outsource their imaginations and adopt ITIL. It's not hard to find a variety of diagrams purporting to illustrate how the myriad management functions in ITIL fit together. You'll see lots of silos with names beginning with "Service..." this and that (because, in a massive injection of double-speak, IT likes to describe itself as a service rather than what it really is: a racket). Here's a typical example: http://www.itsm.hr/brosure/ITSM_CHART_V2.0.pdf http://www.itsm.hr/brosure/ITSM_CHART_V2.0.pdf I dare you to find an appropriate place in this diagram to place your dev team. Pity the poor CIO: not only does he/she have to decide whether to buy or build but the build option comes with strings such as also having to invent a management process to go with it! So, again, most "Service Design" managers don't bother: they just hire the nearest TOGAF-certified architect team and hand over all development to them. It's hardly surprising that corporate dev team managers often find themselves in the role of "supplier", on the outside looking in. No-one with ambitions in the organisation wants the job and anyone who ends up in there has probably done something wrong or emerged as a natural also-ran in previous political games. What this means to devs (particularly) and some testers (depending on which box they live in) is this: They Are (so) Fscked. I saw my role become disenfranchised over the course of 6 years as a result of a regime change which imposed ITIL upon us. I avoided suicide by jumping into the contractor market and, through nothing more than sheer luck, have found myself working for a small autonomous team looking after an important business function (worldwide royalty payments). My boss has a rebellious streak which I strongly identify with and she also has sufficient career capital to keep her team identity intact. I'd like to leave IT and do something which delivers more personal self-worth (pimp or drug dealer at a minimum; international arms dealer if I just can't do without the Bond lifestyle) but I need to clear some capital debts first so it's contracting for the next 5 years or so. Beyond that? I'm just hoping there's still a world left to walk out into.
• k__ 10y ago
  I know a few people who left IT and went into social. They did mainly admin stuff. Now they are happier, even with lower pay.
  • isuckatcoding 10y ago
    What do you mean by "social" here?
    • k__ 10y ago
      Uh, social work? For example, one helps students at university with their study planning. Another one helps kids that have shown problematic behavior.
      • isuckatcoding 10y ago
        Cool. Good important work.
• antoncohen 10y ago
  It should be noted that IT has different colloquial meanings in British and American English. Based on the time this was posted, and the context, I'm guessing this is about the British meaning of IT. But we are getting answers for both. British: Closer to the literal meaning of IT, it refers to pretty much any tech job, including software developer. American: Exclusively refers to jobs in corporate IT departments. Most software development jobs would not be considered IT. A sysadmin would be IT if working on the internal company systems, but would not be IT if working on production web infrastructure.
  • user5994461 10y ago
    There are the two meanings of IT, either designating kinda any jobs in technology OR only the low income jobs in technology (e.g. support monkey). However, it's not about British vs American English at all. It's only a very few people who make that nuance, most of which are devs because they are the only one to actually understand it :D Truth is, you really don't want to be assimilated to IT anywhere in the world. Most people will think of you as the guy called when the computer breaks.
    • CM30 10y ago
      > Truth is, you really don't want to be assimilated to IT anywhere in the world. Most people will think of you as the guy called when the computer breaks. I think people do this already. A lot of people I know seem to assume 'web developer' = 'expert in configuring/fixing Microsoft Windows'.
  • sidlls 10y ago
    This isn't strictly true. A large number of employers (in America) of software developers do so under the umbrella of their "IT Department". This is especially true of businesses which don't think of themselves as technology companies but have a need for home-grown software developers (for internal or external facing applications).
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > American: Exclusively refers to jobs in corporate IT departments I've frequently heard Americans with no particular reason for unusual degree of foriegn influence use it in what you claim is the British way; I've even heard some distinguish between the broader general sense of IT and internal IT. > A sysadmin would be IT if working on the internal company systems, but would not be IT if working on production web infrastructure. Outside of companies that view technology as the product rather than a tool to deliver it, yes, sysadmins working on production web architecture are often, in America considered part of IT and located in IT organizations, as are developers, testers, etc., working on the web (and other) apps.
• iamgopal 10y ago
  I wrote my first program when I was 15. I did masters in mechanical engineering and own and work at centrifuge manufacturing company. I'm now at 35. Not a single week has been passed without me doing some programming. Sometime making internal web apps for problems that can be solved with excel. So not exactly the case OP is looking for, but primarily I didn't made career in software just because there was no demand for it when I started. ( in retrospect there was a demand, but sometime being good at something means you can not correctly guesstimate how much people are willing to pay for something you can make in couple of week. )
• dejv 10y ago
  I spent more than 15 years working in technology. During my career I did various jobs as a developer, product manager and pre-sales engineer as an employee, contractor and freelancer. I am fulltime farmer now: growing wine grapes and making wine, building my own independent winery. It is tough and you have to invest tons and tons of money into it, which I don't really have. There is reason, why are wineries started by rich people. I still have to work few hours a week as a developer to supply my income. I am in my fifth year and I am happy this way. Working outside is awesome. Work can be very hard, your body hurts sometimes, your income is determined by weather and compile time is one (or more) years. There is something calming in the rhythm of this work: your work is changing by season and you have to wear tons of hats (which doen't mean that you are doing BE, FE and then maybe devops). Not that I am caring about it, but I find interesting that being broke winemaker seems to give you much higher social status than being developer.
  • QuadraticFizz 10y ago
    Interesting perspective. Do you find yourself using Algorithms​ to make your harvest/process more efficient?
    • dejv 10y ago
      Of course I build whole software for managing winery: everything from time tracking to profitability calculation. I am trying to sell it to other wineries, but not luck yet. I am also building prediction model for my NIR spectrometer, using ML to predict various analytes in the wine spectra. This is ongoing research project, which might be commercialised someday.
      • Kaizyn 10y ago
        Maybe online software as a service? Lufthansa does something similar with their backend airline systems to defray the development and operating costs (and turn a profit). Maybe more uptake of the product from California wineries.
        • 10y ago
• DoodleBuggy 10y ago
  I know a few who left IT for various reasons, usually burnout or being unfulfilled, sometimes money. They went into sales, management, investing, consulting, medicine, teaching, the most satisfied became public school teachers or are directly involved with patients.
• satysin 10y ago
  > Why did you do so? Started a family, I became a stay at home dad :) > What do you do for a living now? My wife works. I plan to return to work once my son goes to school in September this year. Probably not in IT though, I love IT but more as a hobby now. > Do you regret it? Not for a second. I love my life now! > And why do you still read HN? Because tech is who I am.
• 88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
  I went back to school for a biochemistry PhD after a few years as a web developer - no regrets, though I do miss not being broke. Computers are still vitally important to my career though and HN serves as a convenient aggregator of programming techniques and new technology that I occasionally find useful. Also it's nice to be able to respond with a smidgen of insight to the odd biology article that finds its way here.
• Azeralthefallen 10y ago
  I worked in IT for around, 10 years as a sysadmin/devops/backend developer. Around 2010 i realized i was simply not happy at all with what i was doing. I hated it, and felt like i was constantly borderline burning out. I had grown fat and lazy. Nothing about my job brought me happiness regardless of where i worked. So i decided to drop everything and go back to school to become an electrician. I loved it and i loved working with my hands, and compared to working in IT i loved it so much more. I loved the people i was working with, and we worked well. Mainly installing surveillance for SMB's. However about a week before my apprenticeship ended i was installing a ceiling camera, and a perfectly fine ladder ended up collapsing and giving out. I landed in the worst possible way and severely damaged my spine and lower back. End result even after a ton of physical therapy i couldn't do what was required of me as an electrician. So i ended up going back to IT to do devops. I am extremely fortunate that i had a second skillset to rely on or i am not sure how i would make ends meet. However i still find working in IT, soul crushing and draining. I hope eventually i can go back into the trades and do something i want to do.
  • rootsudo 10y ago
    I am sorry to hear this. :(
  • chiaki 10y ago
    Sorry to hear this..
  • lowlevel 10y ago
    Sorry about your luck bud... I'm feeling about the same... coming up on 20 years of borderline abuse/burn out.
  • sreenadh 10y ago
    I am really sorry to hear about your accident. I too started doing some DIY project around the home and I am working on a small indoor garden now. I can relate to your feeling. I too gave gained a lot of weight, now I am reducing it. I am getting sick of sitting for long. Plus, I am want to touch and feel the things i work on. Since you are trained as an electrician, I have a suggestion which you might enjoy. Why don't you try microsoldering? I show a nice [article](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/watch-the-master-microfixer-jessa-jones-at-work https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/watch-the-master-...), there is also a video related to it. That is a job you can do sitting down. The lady doing it was biologist by training. Don't give up.
• mindcrash 10y ago
  I didn't leave IT. I left the hotshot tech companies. After a few years in which I became really, really unhappy to the point of depression due to certain events at the company I used to work I went to a small organisation which is currently starting to get into technology to support their consultancy business. It's a much friendlier place to work, with people who honestly care about each other. If I knew this was possible I would have done it ages ago. A small thing I would also like to add: people claim the problem in technology is men. This is not the case. The problem in technology is assholes. And they exist at both sides of the gender divide.
  • amorphid 10y ago
    Upvoted for reminder to strive for "no assholes".
  • notjack 10y ago
    Those are two different problems.
  • isxek 10y ago
    Hear, hear.
  • bythckr 10y ago
    I read somewhere that students who were earlier planning to go to wall street are now heading to IT. That explains the assholes in big shot companies. I got into IT for the sheer love of programming. I am someone who is detail oriented. I have observed "detail oriented" as the key issue I have with the assholes is that they don't care about the details. Their approach is to throw 10 things and see what sticks. They are very impulsive and very impatient.
• madphrodite 10y ago
  Worked in the industry for the last 20+ years as a network engineer, sysadmin, test engineer, systems programmer and security analyst. As I've gotten older (almost 50) and IT employment has become more structured (with new approaches devised to make business and processes more profitable and controlled (agile, devops)) my interest in the field has waned. I still like the creative aspect of the work where it pertains but if I was in corporate IT (instead of small scale hybrid cloud, HPC and scientific computing) would rather do something else.
  • jv22222 10y ago
    You say agile and devops is the reason your interest waned. What did you not like about them? :)
    • madphrodite 10y ago
      Chuckling at this ingenuous question. Agile + scrum were transparently about providing leadership/managers with a reason to be involved at higher rates of compensation. Streamlining customer/developer communications or promoting the creation of well designed solutions were not part of our agility. We didn't need paid moderators to chuckle at our jokes, enjoy our insights, and make bad decisions on our behalf. Devops and the whole automation phenomena I ignored till the realization creeped in that companies were hiring HR folks who thought that automation and the anti-pattern of SA OPs were silver bullets 'everywhere'. The tools that are in use that have become part of the devops 'stack' like ansible and chef or jenkins and atlassian and all this...cruft. If I want to deploy and CM for *nix please don't tell me I have to work with Ansible specialists doing deploys and orchestration + CI and builds behind some Atlassian sales masterpiece. You may not be able to hire someone who can understand our shell scripts and deploy|test automation for cheaper than us but you actually have people who can write a shell script and diagnose a systems problem without handing off to a developer to decipher '312:yaml malformed button hook, dict value unbuttoned.' I'm just a veteran of some psychic wars and probably don't know what is good for me though. :)
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• jrs235 10y ago
  I'm about to leave IT. Resignation letter was submitted last week. I'm looking to do something around leadership and business consulting focused on improving communities. I'm not sure if I'll regret it. I obviously very well might if things don't work out. I think I'll always read HN. I still find this forum and the discussions that take place hear valuable in business contexts.
• tccloud 10y ago
  I have not left IT, however, I left the tech and any for-profit company. A year or so ago I came to the realization that working in big tech, although provided a space to grow and challenge myself, the ultimate goal of what I did was meaningless to me. So I decided to switch over to the non-profit world (within IT). Although there are quirks for working at non-profit (limited resources for example) the workload was less stressful and the people you worked with was more reasonable in terms of timeline. The work that you do even though may not be directly contributing to the cause will have an indirect impact on the cause your organization is trying to improve.
• lazyjones 10y ago
  Started programming at the age of 10, studied CS, became lecturer/researcher, funded a (web) company, exited successfully after 15 years, now investing in/developing real estate (and some Angel investing in startups). I don't regret it, it had become rather tedious to follow every FotM and deal with crappy software and artificially obsoleted hardware etc. - and most interesting problems are now too big for small companies, the rest is mostly solved/engineering. Also, had some nasty surgery in my spine (spinal cord tumor) and can't type as fast as before. Still read HN because IT is still a hobby.
• dietrying 10y ago
  I had a job as a DevOps Engineer at a really good company, in which I left about 6 months ago to travel the world. Currently I'm still technically unemployed, so I'm just living off of savings. Though I've shifted most of my time towards learning the ins and outs of drop shipping. I'm not selling anything yet, though I feel I have enough research I will be very soon. I don't regret it. But I do miss it some. I still have a passion for creating in general, but anything technology related is even better. In particular software. So I think that answers the last questions. Though I want to make an extra point here. As I'm sure many will probably point out. At least most of my friends and family have. I know that I can find jobs as a remote employee. This is not my point. I chose to leave a good full time job, simply because I do not want this type of life anymore. Doing it remotely is not going to change the deadlines and working 40+ hours. The type of life I'm trying to set up is a life of more time to actually enjoy my life. Not spend it behind a computer or any other type of work. There are numerous other things I'm trying to do to make income. Blogs, Vlogs, affiliate marketing, etc. Those will all take time as well, yes. But when it is a result of capturing the content of my travels I am going to capture anyways. Why not make some money off of it. Also, you have to keep in mind, I have sold all of my belongings and have no debt (which I am very fortunate and thankful for) but my cost of living is significantly lower to where I do not have to make as much. Plus most other countries I'm visiting things are much cheaper than in the US. So in summary, need less income, lower my spending, find ways to make tiny fortunes off of results of things I am already doing. It is a process, and still takes time upfront. My hope is that I can find a happy work life balance. It can work, I have already met many people that are doing these exact things and it is working for them. And if it does not work out for me, the IT industry is not going anywhere. There will be a slight adjustment getting back into the swing of things. But it is not an impossible task.
• anexprogrammer 10y ago
  This has come up a few times!... I left because I was utterly sick of churn, NIH, and the endless succession of this week's magic (javascript framework etc) bullet. OK. It's different. It's almost never better. Also felt most of my efforts were NOT making the world a better place but tech was contributing HARD to the throwaway world we need to cease, not increase. I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate. Some of the things I do might outlast me, and it seems a worthwile contribution to the world. Some of the work done will count in a century or two all being well. Do I regret leaving? Hell no. Best decision I ever made. Still read HN because I am still interested in tech, but mostly not the 80% that the world seems to have settled on. I am extremely agin many of the uses, decisions and techs that give us the modern world. Exponentially increasing throwaway hardware on a finite planet? Surveillance? IoT? Security? Everything as a data slurping webapp? Disrupting perfectly sensible things that work nicely? Meh ^ 200. I'd be glad to get involved in a project that I could believe made a significant substantive difference. Like if a Mr Musk phoned (not terribly likely) about alternative energy, climate change or some such...
  • riffraff 10y ago
    > I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate how did you pick up the necessary skills to be able to do this? It looks like something that would take years of focused effort, rather than an easy jump.
    • anexprogrammer 10y ago
      Well the luck of finding a place that can deal with a middle-aged apprentice means I'll be collecting those skills for a while yet! I came across the opportunity whilst looking for options and directions for degrees to drive the career change. Well, that and deciding quite what other field I wanted to land in. Opportunity arose, I leapt. :) Sometimes I'm glorified handyman, sometimes more significant, almost alwats learning more about old methods and tech, or previous centuries' restorations. I'm still collecting pieces of paper, including for some required modern things like electrics, that usually feel like basic commmon sense, until you see the folks in the class who are barely grasping it. There's opportunities for specialising more as I go on. Europe is littered with old sites, some owned by the large conservation charities are pretty formal in recruitment and role. Some of the individual estates and smaller organisations are more flexible probably because some of the niche skills are needed only more rarely. So I'd probably have never got near the National Trust without a 5 year run up.
• sdfin 10y ago
  For the ones that left IT after getting tired or burned by it: Suppose you worked on IT but only half-time. Do you think things would have been much different?
• thom 10y ago
  Feeling incredibly burnt out after a few years of (mostly failing) startups, I didn't want to give up on the only skills I had, and I ended up dabbling in football analytics. I've found it very satisfying, and though there aren't a ton of paying jobs, I'm somehow managing to make a living out of it. I wrote about the experience recently: https://deepxg.com/2017/03/10/500-days-of-numbers/ https://deepxg.com/2017/03/10/500-days-of-numbers/
• interludic 10y ago
  It seems that most people are happier after leaving IT, can you rephrase the questions to who left and is not as happy?
• interludic 10y ago
  It seems that most people are happier after leaving IT, can you rephrase the questions to who left and is not as happy?
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• digitalzombie 10y ago
  I left startup scene and more specifically web dev, I was full stack. I didn't like the 60-80 hrs week with no overtime really. I also didn't have any real life and wanted to spend my free time looking for a girl and concentrate on my health (exercise). 60-80 hrs really kill most of your plans... I left to go back to school to become a data science... so I guess it's not really leaving. But I'm not giving up my years of experiences to go to a totally different field. Just web dev isn't there any more with the recent bootcamps pumping out tons of, in my opinion, ok-ish web dev. Beside who am I to say when I can't do those google interviews anyway. I didn't have enough grit to compete or tell the "CTO" why they should hire me over two other web devs that graduated from some bootcamps for the same salary. I left two startups after they hire pretty bad people, they came calling me for freelance works though even though I left because I disagree with the CTO and the other because too much free overtime. So I said fuck it, and went to school and get another hard degree (other than my bs in comp sci, I'm doing master in stat). I doubt a bootcamp can do that and plus the data science field is very wide. Maybe who knows one day I end up in Google or some nice tech company in SolCal, a nice stable job and concentrate on other aspect of my life while enjoying my career instead of slaving away and hating my passion.
• hn-3b382489 10y ago
  I've often thought about leaving IT over the past 5 years but find the industry something of a vicious circle in earnings. Annual above inflationary increases in earning seems to cause something akin to "Short-term pain, long-term gain". I can't personally reconcile how I'd go from $500k+ to an entry-level role in another field on <$50k and every time something frustrates me about the industry, the cold reality is it still feels smarter to milk these "golden years" and to sock away a lot towards quality of life in retirement. No longer needing to work from 40-45 and having a house paid off with 20+ years to learn a new trade, do whatever is interesting, or travel, that remains compelling to me. How have those who've left the industry managed with the substantial drop in compensation? Do you have families, retirement plans, all that stuff, and just decided you'd rather be A++ happy with less wealth, instead of B- happy whilst earning a lot?
• discrim101 10y ago
  Here are some people left IT, 60 minutes: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-u-s-jobs-vulnerable-to-workers-with-h-1b-visas/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-u-s-jobs-vulnerable-to-worke...
• synicalx 10y ago
  I haven't left yet, but like a lot of people in here I've left the "high end" game in favour of something a little cushier. In fact I'm actually back at Uni part time studying something completely unrelated in the hopes of eventually getting out all together. So basically I left the Service Provider realm, and moved into local government doing predominantly SysAdmin work. It's pretty good, I get paid more than what I should, long contracts, lots of leave and entitlements, and they don't care if I duck down the street for an hour or two here and there to go to lecture or tutorial. I still read HN because there's useful info from time to time, and getting into fights in the comments is always fun and somewhat beneficial to what I'm studying. Reason for the change in my case is I've simply got no interest in technology. The only reason I wound up in IT in the first place was because I got a free TAFE course on it, which lead to a job. Without tooting my horn to much, I'd say I'm pretty good at what I do, but I just don't care at all about it.
• davewasthere 10y ago
  I haven't left yet (tried, but it didn't take). But the devs/IT bods I know who have left have gone to do the following/for the following reasons: * Farming * Sailing around the world * Musician * Retired abroad * Photographer * Illness And apart from the illness one, I think that change was definitely needed for all, and that, for the most part, they're happier in their new, non-IT, lives. If this was more about reading HN though, I don't think many of these were HN readers.
• suff 10y ago
  What do you mean by 'IT'? Geeks who plug in printers? Yeah, that's a bad business to be in. Software, on the other hand, R&D, product development; those are GREAT businesses to be in. I can't help but laugh when people 'escape' a 99% margin business :-)
• aleo 10y ago
  I left web development job to become a musician several years ago, and while learning music was a great experience, it doesn't pay nearly enough to make a living. I'm constantly broke and barely scraping by, currently i have $20 to last until weekend when my student will (hopefully) pay me ~$10 for a lesson. I regret leaving IT because i was making good money just coding python and html/css/javascript. And being broke is really, really stressful, especially now that I'm in my thirties. I'm probably going back to programming, but things have changed a lot since 2009 so I'll have to spend some time learning new things like react, es6, new deployment techniques etc.
  • number-sequence 10y ago
    I don't know your situation, but have you thought about part-time remote work? Or just part-time work in general? Every job post seems to be looking for people who can work with React. If you're looking for remote work, web dev is def the place to be.
• missizii 10y ago
  I started coding as a teenager, ended up with a Masters in CS. Had a great career as a software engineer mostly in start-ups and companies with a start-up-like culture, until I was 28, when we moved for my husband's job. Where we live now, almost all the jobs are in banking. I became pregnant with my first child a few months after the move, and now I am a housewife, homeschooling my Kindergartener, and expecting our fourth child. I do miss coding, and I have lots of ideas for open source educational software projects, but no time/energy to pursue it currently. I hope when my children are a bit older to get back into tech, mostly via open source projects and hackathons, since I hope we will be homeschooling long term. I miss being a software engineer, but my financial software stint taught me that corporate culture is hugely important to whether I enjoy my job and can do it well. I love being home with my children and teaching them, going to the park with them on a nice Tuesday at 10am has yet to lose its novelty and pleasure. I still read HN because I am still deeply interested in coding & tech culture. It's been a strong interest for over 20 years, I don't think it will go away.