20 ms·

I quit the tech industry (2015)

165 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time: I quit the tech industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9691002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9691002 - June 2015 (548 comments)
raptorraver 4y ago
Would be interesting to know what has happened to the author after the blog post.
- angulardragon03 4y ago
  It looks like they are still not in full-time employment, and seem to be enjoying themselves.
- guessmyname 4y ago
  They posted an update a year later → https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/12/one-year-later/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/12/one-year-later/
wly_cdgr 4y ago
I totally get it and will of course do the same as soon as I can afford it. That's the holy grail, baby
hardlianotion 4y ago
Hope he’s doing well.
- guessmyname 4y ago
  > Hope he’s doing well. AFAIK @eevee [1] identifies as she/her [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee [2] https://twitter.com/eevee https://twitter.com/eevee
  - morelisp 4y ago
    - Elinvynia 4y ago
      - morelisp 4y ago
        lostcolony 4y ago
        Is it? I've never heard a person introduce themselves as "woman". I've heard people identify themselves with their pronouns plenty of times. In fact, given the links, literally all I see from eevee is their preferred pronouns, not "woman". I don't see anyone even calling out that she's trans (is she?), just correcting a misconception from the original comment that she uses he/him pronouns. Those particular pronouns may imply being a woman (I don't know enough to venture an opinion there; certainly I've seen people use combinations of pronouns such as "she/them" that don't make such an implication straightforward), but calling out the pronouns she uses to identify herself seems like a perfectly natural response to correct someone using the wrong pronouns, and not some sort of 'gotcha' to differentiate someone being trans (doubly when it's not at all apparent she's trans), especially when the person in question...identified themselves with those pronouns.
        morelisp 4y ago
        wollsmoth 4y ago
        >calling out the pronouns she uses to identify herself seems like a perfectly natural response to correct someone using the wrong pronouns I feel like this pronouns thing started up in just the past few years. To me it seems more natural to say someone is a man/woman. If someone doesn't fit into one of those boxes then I think it makes sense to clarify the preferred pronouns.
bitwize 4y ago
- noufalibrahim 4y ago
  I echo this sentiment. My "real life" has improved massively because of the fact that I work in technology. Money can't solve all your problems but there is a class of important problems that only money can solve effectively and tech. is a good way of making that money. I'm extremely grateful for this and wouldn't diss it. On a more general level, the stress of working on multiple projects, dealing with different kinds of people, managing a team etc. all take their toll on a person but what kind of job doesn't? There's some amount of sacrifice that is necessary for any worthwhile endeavour. The trick is learning to manage it effectively. A personal lesson I've learnt over the covid years is that being able to compartmentalise (or sometimes integrate) these different aspects of ones life effectively and not let one affect the others is a skill that's as vital as it's neglected. Dragging the doom and gloom of an extremely unpleasant client interaction back home to ones family is not acceptable. Physical barriers between different compartments of ones life are easy to build. Mental and emotional ones are harder but are equally if not more important. Nuclear fallout in one compartment shouldn't affect the flowers growing in another.
  - logical_ferry 4y ago
    Once you realize work is work and not some romantic endeavour, then things become easier. All I read from this guy's post is a lot of bitching about how the work he has to do is meaningless and hard and it is just getting in the way of his hobbies. I once read a good line: Be thankful for all the problems out there otherwise you would be out of a job. This guy is lucky he had the money to buy his way out of this situation. If he was forced to stay he would have found a way to cope and everything would have ended ok.
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TheOrange 4y ago
Have things changed much in the industry since then? Perhaps more innovation and more standard code base tools and sharing?
- ornornor 4y ago
  Haha
logical_ferry 4y ago
It's pays off to be rich. Not having to work is a luxury. I love money too much to simply take a year off, even if I could afford it. I would think about the opportunity cost the entire time. Maybe I just haven't had a proper burn out yet.
- haswell 4y ago
  As someone who once couldn’t imagine burning the cash, I’m a month into a 6-12 month sabbatical after finally burning out pretty hard. My advice to my former self would be to take extended time before it became a borderline personal crisis. The funny thing about that opportunity cost - I’m now spending time just building the energy to use this time away for things I find personally interesting. Had I taken the time sooner, it probably could have been shorter, and I’d probably enjoy the first bit of it more.
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  - kingnothing 4y ago
    I originally planned on a 3-6 month sabbatical and I'm now 8 months in and starting to look for work. It's been a phenomenal refresher and I highly recommend it to everyone who is able to do so. I plan on taking another one in 5-10 years if I'm not retired by then.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  A few years ago I wanted to take 6-12 months off, just to unwind and do my own projects for a bit. But then my girlfriend moved in, cost of living went up, and I couldn't afford to dip that deeply into my reserves anymore. But I got another job too where the need to take extended time off wasn't as much of a thing, I got to do more of what I wanted to do without the BS of the company I worked at before.
billllll 4y ago
I sympathize and did the same thing earlier this year: I quit my job to try and strike out on my own. For most tech companies, they sell you on this "mission" and tell you how valuable your work is. Then, you realize all you do is grease the wheels of bureaucracy. Any serious attempts of asking the question "how would anything be different if I didn't do my work" only leads to depressing answers. I've found the result of quitting to be a mixed bag. Yes, the work is more gratifying because it's "yours," but are you really impacting the world more? You're either building and replacing the bureaucracy that you hated, or you're just too insignificant to warrant the bureaucracy. Also, not being paid a ton of money really sucks.
- Termitiono 4y ago
  My strategy is to work as long as I can and have to. Have to means having no debt,.my own land and low living costs. Basically being independent. Then using my career to work 50% with a good salary remote. If I would not do that, I would do the same as you and look for something good to work on. For me I would go and find a company which does things for agriculture or other things which helps us all. Working 40h feels wrong though.
- thisNeeds2BeSad 4y ago
  Its particularly bitter in the big ones. You develop something cool, they patent it and then put the patent "right on the office fridge, that way we get to see it every day" and there the innovation hangs and suffers and you realize not only did you work in vain, you made the life for true entrepaneurs harder for a long time and blocked innovation for years to come. Then you get promoted and oversee the same procedure of poisoning humanitys well executed by a younger generation.
  - tangjurine 4y ago
    Is this really what happens?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > For most tech companies, they sell you on this "mission" and tell you how valuable your work is. That's because hiring is marketing; they're selling a job to you, you pay them in your labor and attention span. Nobody will be attracted to a job where the description says what it is - e.g. "legacy enterprise java application maintenance". Nobody wants to work a job that is just to fill a seat.
napolux 4y ago
“Rich kid cash stocks and stops working in tech to do whatever he likes” Come on.
- warkanlock 4y ago
  I was thinking the same thing while reading through the text
- smallbluedot 4y ago
  100%. The entitlement in that post is comical. Reminds me of startup colleagues bitching about the free gourmet sandwiches being 'shitty'. Some people need a reality check.
- oldandboring 4y ago
  Yeah it really snowballs at the end too, when he talks about opening a Patreon ("Yelp thought what I did was worth some cash, so maybe other people will too). Could you imagine a construction worker quitting her job and opening a Patreon, thinking it's realistic that people give her free money because she used to be productive on a job site? That all being said, the first part of the post is relatable. Tech jobs really can suck the life out of you. And, at least for me, working for other people is really soul-draining. I felt this same way, dreading going back to work even when I was on vacation, the last time I worked on someone else's payroll.
  - indrora 4y ago
    Oddly, I do just that. One of the youtubers that I pay money to was a VP of information security at a major company doing live shows. He produces good content so I'm willing to to fund that.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Not completely the same as construction work, but carpenters/woodworkers etc. have had good success with Patreon and similar. It's more about being skilled and being able to leverage that while also appealing to people willing to fund you to show off the thing you're skilled in
kaon123 4y ago
I think the picture of how he describes life and life-with-a-full-time-job is fairly accurate. One solution is to work 80%. Or even 60%. You can still make plenty of money to support yourself, and you can be happy while doing it.
- guessmyname 4y ago
  > […] the picture of how he describes life […] AFAIK @eevee [1] identifies as she/her [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee [2] https://twitter.com/eevee https://twitter.com/eevee
  - celdon25 4y ago
    does "literally who" work?
- radiKal07 4y ago
  There are barely any 80% jobs and the 60% ones are almost inexistent
  - sunderw 4y ago
    As someone working 50%, I can relate. I answered more than 100 messages last year on LinkedIn from companies/recruiters interested in my profile, and got to the end interview part twice (the answer was always 'working half time is not possible for us', sometimes after wasting a few hours of my time...) But I also got contacted by a recruiter that did a fantastic job. He found a company that was a great fit for me, and that had no problem with part-time. My advice would be : answer everyone telling you're looking for a part-time position. It's long, it's difficult and it's time consuming, but it's not impossible.
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  - shoo 4y ago
ivraatiems 4y ago
In the next few years, I'm planning to go to 60% or 80% time, and then, eventually, to taking at least a couple of years off from engineering relying on savings and my spouse. If I thought I had to be a line engineer making things for someone else forever, I'd probably have to quit just to regain some sense of control. It's good work if you can get it, but it won't be my forever.
noisy_boy 4y ago
> just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work. Pretty much sums up my nightly routine.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Hmm, the going to work part of that is fine. It’s what happens at work that’s disturbing.
j7ake 4y ago
Does this person have a family and kids? I don’t see how anyone can do this unless they contribute nothing to their families or extended families. Sounds to me like a very selfish view of life. Most people in the world have either ailing parents and/or spouse and kids to take care of.
- uwagar 4y ago
  self-ish is not a bad thing.
  - j7ake 4y ago
    Selfish behaviour only works because the rest of society on aggregate are still contributing to the maintenance, development, and research of a multigenerational civilisation.
    - msftie 4y ago
      A society in which almost all are working not out of pure altruism, but out of necessity to satisfy their own selfish needs.
      - Elinvynia 4y ago
        I don't believe it's very selfish to want to avoid starvation and to have a roof over your head.
    - Goronmon 4y ago
      Selfish behaviour only works because the rest of society on aggregate are still contributing to the maintenance, development, and research of a multigenerational civilisation. And those people only make those contributions out of a selfish desire to keep their environment from changing and for their own self-satisfaction of "making a difference".
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  Not having a W2 job isn't the same as not earning a living. They earned enough to pay off their house and all debts in full. They now create and sell games and other software as a solo dev.
ptato 4y ago
I can't afford to leave my job, I would only be able to sustain myself for ~1 year. I think I would be satisfied if I only had to work half as much: 4 hours a day, 20 a week. Now I just need to find that job...
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  In my country (Netherlands), most employers are amenable - if not legally required - to allow you to work part-time, IIRC over half the workforce here works part-time - could be 36 hours (so you get an afternoon a week off, or a day off every two weeks, or a day off if you work 4x9 hours), 32, some even work only 24 hours. So basically it is possible, and I think in the US too you can negotiate to work less hours.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Working 24 hours is the holy grail, but now that I’ve been working 40/week for years I kinda feel like I’d suddenly feel my workweeks are too short.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    I believe it's legally required here in Germany, but in most cases you'll be first on the chopping block for layoffs, and you generally need to hide that you'll ask during interviews. (It's illegal to refuse an employee asking but not illegal to not hire you.) Really bluntly, just as value-per-hour starts falling off rapidly after some point, it also increases super-linearly up to some point before that. Most overhead is constant regardless of if you work 24 or 40, you'll miss opportunities when you're not there, and you'll need to spend more time catching up when you are. That doesn't mean you can't work effectively, but I've watched multiple junior-mid devs think they've hacked the system but instead just forgo most learning/advancement opportunities. If you're happy with the current salary and don't need any more fulfillment from your career than turning-the-crank, I guess go for it. (In the US they'll just fire you, maybe even just for asking.)
- giaour 4y ago
  I remember Amazon making a bunch of noise about offering 80% time and 60% time jobs a while back; they may still be doing so. If not, there are plenty of "full time" roles in big tech that only realistically require 24 hours/week.
shp0ngle 4y ago
It seems they get a patreon now Guess it’s working for them? I donno https://www.patreon.com/eevee https://www.patreon.com/eevee
tonnydourado 4y ago
Damn, I remember this, even managed to find my own little comment. 2015, feels like a different life, two countries, three jobs, and five projects ago.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
We talk about externalities. A chemical company pours toxins into a river, an automaker knows its products kill X people per year. These are tangible, understandable. But we don't yet think of the effects on the workforce as social externalities. Industrial safety has made the workplace a much safer space physically, but not mentally. The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it. But I have a few observations. I meet lots of people who "got out of tech". People with PhDs who became landscape gardeners or opened a juice bar. I meet smart and engaging people in their 30s who dropped out of games or media careers. The cost (to society) of educating a graduate is, what, $100,000? Average post-grad education is another 4 years. Then it costs approximately 20% of someones salary to hire and onboard them. For what? So they can drop out after 5 years and go open a wind-surfing school? In a way, these people, the workforce/pool are a national asset, and it could regarded a tragedy of the commons that harming them is inflicting an externality on the whole industry. By culturing inhospitable, mentally harmful environments the tech industry is pissing in its own drinking water.
- gspr 4y ago
  I think you're right. I'm just afraid that any solution here will be much more on the "stick" side than the "carrot" side that you propose.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  There's a great read on this at https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-people-nobody-cares https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-peop... Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure. """ She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support. You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """ """ t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases. Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress. And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """
_jplc 4y ago
> Even the most interesting technical things Yelp is doing probably involve reinventing something hundreds of other companies have already reinvented. > Do you have any internal libraries or systems or platforms at your company? Do you think no one else has ever had the same idea and built the same thing? Sometimes (most of the times?) it's not about being the first one solving the problem in a specific way, but about solving it with the skills and knowledge you have, the best you can, because at the end it's your problem if you took responsibility of it. Personally think that relativizing problems is key, and can find joy in the process of solving them. Food for the brain and personal achievement. Whether it's important or remarkable for anyone else is anyone else's problem. Anyway, none of that matters if the problem isn't interesting for you or you don't care about who you are enabling by solving the problem, doesn't matter if it's a worldwide new problem or a well-known-and-solved one. By looking newer posts at the blog, he/she/they is having fun and writing about problems that aren't novelty, but are anyway personally interesting.
nnoitra 4y ago
To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ. To go to a good university you literally have to be super focused in high-school and do all sorts of extracurricular activities and basically things that look good on a college application. No one cares if you were a caretaker for your grandma. But then once you are in university you haven't even won yet. Now you have to study hard CS classes and do side-projects and apply to internships and practice LC just to get in and even then you aren't done. You need to be super focused at your internships as well to get a full-time offer and even then you aren't done. Got a full-time offer? Well now the expectations are a lot greater and you are in competition with other super ambitious people that don't mind working during weekends. It's just a lifestyle that doesn't leave off much time for anything else. And it never gets easier you just have to start at maximum speed and keep accelerating. The technology changes very frequently and ageism kicks in really early as well. I'm not suprised at all that people quit tech careers. Life is simply put short. Basically the path is like this: 1) Be super good in HS to go to a good school 2) Work super hard in college to get good grades 3) Study super hard part-time doing LC and side-projects to get good internships 4) Do super well on internships to get a full time offer 5) Keep doing well to get promoted If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project. There is a vast chasm between programming for fun and programming under a deadline for a jaded boss with a limited budget who's only concern is squeezing as much productivity out of their employees. We made programming to be fun and now companies just implicitely expect you to code for fun during your free time. If you don't you simply won't be good enough to pass the interviews.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  You can skip all the school and college stuff though. People get MAGMA jobs off of bad tech jobs and grinding leetcode and nothing else. > My bonafides: I’m a college drop-out with a background in mathematics who went from teaching and having almost no coding experience to working at a big tech company in SV in ~3 years. The result is not typical, but I’ve seen it repeated enough to know that I’m not just a fluke. I recently saw another college drop-out make the jump in 18 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385015
slategruen 4y ago
So, what could you advice for people who's about to enter the tech industry? I've been having extreme senioritis for more than two years and one of the reasons, I think, is fear of entering this industry. Don't get me wrong, I love tech and all, it's just that I don't think my personality fits the standard employers look for. I don't want to constantly learn new skills just to prove my worth. Yes, most jobs nowadays require regular updates on your knowledge but the frequency of that update in tech is just ridiculously high.
- downriver 4y ago
  There’s not one “tech industry”, there’s just a bunch of companies and people, all unique, all flawed in their own ways. So join a company, and if you don’t like it, quit and try a different one.
- lostcolony 4y ago
  Most jobs don't actually require, expect, or even provide opportunity for you to learn new skills all the time. And that actually can be part of the burnout problem. You'll have to learn a few when you start. That's okay. What you're feeling as senioritis is basically "I've been doing this same shit for the past 4+ years", and by this point, even in a 'new' class, it feels largely the same, and it's a bump on the road to the outcome you want, and no longer interesting. Remember how you felt as a freshman though? Coming in when you knew nothing/comparatively little, and having to actually learn something, everything ahead was just one big mess of possibilities? Well...that's what getting a job offer for the first time is. For about 4-6 months. After that, most of the time, the rose tinted glasses come off and you realize "oh. I know what I'm doing at this point. I've learned what I need to learn. And there's not really anything left except for me to come in, work toward a known outcome, and then go home". Companies don't adopt new technologies if they can avoid it. They don't care about you learning new things. They just want you producing, so they can capture the value you generate and pay you a part of it. What's left to learn is the business domain and the specific combination of decisions others made in the past that you now have to navigate. Which, if you have a rich enough life outside of work, the job isn't too demanding, and are paid enough to be comfortable, can be fine for some people. The feelings of security a predictable, well paid job provides can fund what they actually care about in life. For others, it feels like they're spinning their wheels on the activity they spend the majority of their time on and they want something else. How you, personally, respond, is going to be something you figure out as you go. And it can change. I was a lot more "I need fulfillment from my job" when I was younger; now I just need a good enough paycheck and enough freedom in hours and such (WFH is a must) to be able to do the stuff I actually care about and find value in. So my advice is don't worry too much about it. Mentally prepare for the process of applying all over the place and potentially not getting an offer for a while, but once you get something you'll almost assuredly be excited and eager to prove yourself, and you can start figuring out what is important to you.
darod 4y ago
"i quit tech, long live tech"
mancerayder 4y ago
And inflation makes it even less likely to quit a high-paying job. It ain't < 2021 anymore.
- splitstud 4y ago
tootie 4y ago
I have a modicum of sympathy, but this is such incredibly first world problems. The tech isn't interesting so you dread going to work? And have abandoned an incredibly lucrative profession forever? 99% of my stress comes from people not systems. And 99% of my satisfaction comes from delivering a valuable product and getting recognition for it. I mostly do management these days, but the times I get to write code it's mostly a codebase that is over 10 years old and held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but it's used for a valuable public service so I love it.
saos 4y ago
> I had stock options, and I cashed them all in last week. I net enough to pay off the mortgage, so I’m doing that, which will leave the entire household debt-free and cut our expenses drastically. There’s not a whole lot left after that (lol taxes ), but I can keep us afloat for a while. There you go. These type of post piss me the hell off!!! This type of person you will see making a video on YouTube convincing many other to quit too. They managed to buy their time back which is cool but they should be upfront with it from the off. No wonder some kids today are confused. Spend too much time on social media watching content from these type of garbage users
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  Lol, yeah no shit. If I owned a place and could afford to live indefinitely yeah, I might just quit my job for mental health reasons. Until then I'll have to work on these minor feats of engineering. lol.
- mathgladiator 4y ago
  So, my future post of a similar vein is not welcome. I think there is a deep issue when so many people just stay in the fire long enough. Is this ideal? It feels wasteful, but I get it as I got out. Fun fact, it helped to tell people my goals and I could have brass tax conversations about peoples careers. As a mentor, once you move from 'how you can help the company' to 'how you can retire early by selling what the company thinks it needs', you can drop so many facades.
- aftergibson 4y ago
  Yeah I was looking for the section that explained how you commit to this radical act of just quitting with no plan, roll the start-up dice and win. Great.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
She seems to still be doing stuff in tech (I can't imagine quitting the industry, as I love tech), but maybe she's doing it on her own terms. I can certainly relate to that. I sincerely wish her luck.
robotburrito 4y ago
Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can "go live in a cabin in the woods." I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  "You don't need a million dollars to do nothin. Take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit." - Lawrence from Office Space
- SenHeng 4y ago
  If you absurdly reduce it down to that point then, yes, anyone can live cheaply in a rural area. But that's not the point. Financial independence is about the ability to live a good life without having to worry about next's day food.
  - gkop 4y ago
    Agreed. Also there’s an in-between. I think parent’s point is worth reminding us of, because in our consumer-driven economy, there’s no economic incentive to teach people that reducing their consumption may be a reasonable and “happier” alternative to earning more income. (Above a certain line of course)
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      There are a lot of FIRE people who focus on cutting expenses over raising income. I would say it's more common, which is why people invented the term "Fat FIRE" to distinguish people who want to retire early without seriously cutting expenses.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > Financial independence is about the ability to live a good life without having to worry about next's day food. Worrying about paying for food day to day isn’t why people seek out high-stress, high-pay jobs that are often in expensive cities. If people just want enough financial security to reliably put food on the table there are a million ways to do that without getting a demanding career. The people throwing themselves into demanding jobs and chasing promotions to maximize their salary aren’t doing it just to put food on the table.
akhmatova 4y ago
But I can’t do this any more. It’s running me into the ground. "I'm wealthy enough to retire and not work another day in my life. Oh, woe be unto me"
RankingMember 4y ago
stitched2gethr 4y ago
This is why I quit working at big companies. I'm in my second position at a startup and I couldn't be happier. - no constant meetings - no / less legacy code or dealing with systems that cannot be changed easily because they support a million customers - the problems feel (at least to me) like our problems instead of your shitty problem that I need to deal with It's not all roses, but substantially fewer meetings and directives from leaders I rarely see is half the battle.
jrochkind1 4y ago
So who has an update, how did it work out, what has the author done since 2015?
infinitezest 4y ago
...we're gonna need a smaller violin...
agentultra 4y ago
Even the most interesting technical things Yelp is doing probably involve reinventing something hundreds of other companies have already reinvented, because the existing things don’t work with their infrastructure or they’re written in the wrong language or they’re just kinda bad and maybe doing it from scratch will be better. After 20-some-odd years in the industry... oof. Sometimes it feels like groundhog day. You might have thought about web application authorization. You may have implemented it a few times and figured out how it ought to be done. And you might think that after twenty years it would be a solved problem. But you would be wrong. You're going to encounter yet another web application with a bespoke authorization system. It's going to take a shotgun approach to validation and nobody will be able to tell you if it works the way it's supposed to or not. The tests pass (if there are any). It might have errors in it but we haven't had any reports yet. We hired a pentester last year and they didn't find anything. It's probably fine. So you add a new feature and you need to extend this authorization system to handle it and you spend most of your time trying to make sure things continue working instead of focusing on what matters. The same thing over and over again. The same libraries, the same mistakes, the same solutions.
throw_away 4y ago
One of my favorite musicians. I was not aware of this backstory, but I'm glad it happened :) https://eeveebeats.bandcamp.com https://eeveebeats.bandcamp.com
tabtab 4y ago
Kind of similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/r59nzr/i_regret_going_into_web_programming_should_have/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/r59nzr/i_regret_goi...
charlie0 4y ago
I'm shocked at how much negativity there is towards people quitting early just because they can. I sense a lot of this comes from the idea that a well paying job is embedded so deeply in American culture as a status symbol that people who choose to leave willingly must somehow be either stupid or have something else wrong with them. I'm very glad to work in an industry where people can trade 5-10 years of their lives and then move on to other things that deeply matter to them. My only hope is that those people realize how fortunate they are. The vast majority of people will simply not have that opportunity.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  There are different kinds of education. For example, vocational schools and liberal arts schools. In one we learn to specialize. In the other, we learn how to generalize. While there are advantages and disadvantages to each, I don't buy the argument that only specialists are worthwhile people. (Orson Welles didn't specialize, but had a lot to share.) For example, many schools have programs which cater to technical people. Most of them also require such students to study unrelated electives. I chafed at that at first ("but I know what I want to know"); later on in life I greatly appreciated it. I didn't know enough to know what I wanted to know. Life can be more than doing what's expected or trendy ... as most of history shows us. A lot more. I enjoyed reading about someone making that leap. It has its perils, yes. But. A couple of quotes from Joe Campbell (learned about him in one of those non-tech courses): "If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." " People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality."
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165 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time: I quit the tech industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9691002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9691002 - June 2015 (548 comments)

raptorraver 4y ago

Would be interesting to know what has happened to the author after the blog post.

angulardragon03 4y ago
It looks like they are still not in full-time employment, and seem to be enjoying themselves.
guessmyname 4y ago
They posted an update a year later → https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/12/one-year-later/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/12/one-year-later/

wly_cdgr 4y ago

I totally get it and will of course do the same as soon as I can afford it. That's the holy grail, baby

hardlianotion 4y ago

Hope he’s doing well.

guessmyname 4y ago
> Hope he’s doing well. AFAIK @eevee [1] identifies as she/her [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee [2] https://twitter.com/eevee https://twitter.com/eevee
- morelisp 4y ago
  - Elinvynia 4y ago
    - morelisp 4y ago
      - lostcolony 4y ago
        Is it? I've never heard a person introduce themselves as "woman". I've heard people identify themselves with their pronouns plenty of times. In fact, given the links, literally all I see from eevee is their preferred pronouns, not "woman". I don't see anyone even calling out that she's trans (is she?), just correcting a misconception from the original comment that she uses he/him pronouns. Those particular pronouns may imply being a woman (I don't know enough to venture an opinion there; certainly I've seen people use combinations of pronouns such as "she/them" that don't make such an implication straightforward), but calling out the pronouns she uses to identify herself seems like a perfectly natural response to correct someone using the wrong pronouns, and not some sort of 'gotcha' to differentiate someone being trans (doubly when it's not at all apparent she's trans), especially when the person in question...identified themselves with those pronouns.
        morelisp 4y ago
        wollsmoth 4y ago
        >calling out the pronouns she uses to identify herself seems like a perfectly natural response to correct someone using the wrong pronouns I feel like this pronouns thing started up in just the past few years. To me it seems more natural to say someone is a man/woman. If someone doesn't fit into one of those boxes then I think it makes sense to clarify the preferred pronouns.

bitwize 4y ago

noufalibrahim 4y ago
I echo this sentiment. My "real life" has improved massively because of the fact that I work in technology. Money can't solve all your problems but there is a class of important problems that only money can solve effectively and tech. is a good way of making that money. I'm extremely grateful for this and wouldn't diss it. On a more general level, the stress of working on multiple projects, dealing with different kinds of people, managing a team etc. all take their toll on a person but what kind of job doesn't? There's some amount of sacrifice that is necessary for any worthwhile endeavour. The trick is learning to manage it effectively. A personal lesson I've learnt over the covid years is that being able to compartmentalise (or sometimes integrate) these different aspects of ones life effectively and not let one affect the others is a skill that's as vital as it's neglected. Dragging the doom and gloom of an extremely unpleasant client interaction back home to ones family is not acceptable. Physical barriers between different compartments of ones life are easy to build. Mental and emotional ones are harder but are equally if not more important. Nuclear fallout in one compartment shouldn't affect the flowers growing in another.
- logical_ferry 4y ago
  Once you realize work is work and not some romantic endeavour, then things become easier. All I read from this guy's post is a lot of bitching about how the work he has to do is meaningless and hard and it is just getting in the way of his hobbies. I once read a good line: Be thankful for all the problems out there otherwise you would be out of a job. This guy is lucky he had the money to buy his way out of this situation. If he was forced to stay he would have found a way to cope and everything would have ended ok.
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TheOrange 4y ago

Have things changed much in the industry since then? Perhaps more innovation and more standard code base tools and sharing?

ornornor 4y ago
Haha

logical_ferry 4y ago

It's pays off to be rich. Not having to work is a luxury. I love money too much to simply take a year off, even if I could afford it. I would think about the opportunity cost the entire time. Maybe I just haven't had a proper burn out yet.

haswell 4y ago
As someone who once couldn’t imagine burning the cash, I’m a month into a 6-12 month sabbatical after finally burning out pretty hard. My advice to my former self would be to take extended time before it became a borderline personal crisis. The funny thing about that opportunity cost - I’m now spending time just building the energy to use this time away for things I find personally interesting. Had I taken the time sooner, it probably could have been shorter, and I’d probably enjoy the first bit of it more.
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- kingnothing 4y ago
  I originally planned on a 3-6 month sabbatical and I'm now 8 months in and starting to look for work. It's been a phenomenal refresher and I highly recommend it to everyone who is able to do so. I plan on taking another one in 5-10 years if I'm not retired by then.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
A few years ago I wanted to take 6-12 months off, just to unwind and do my own projects for a bit. But then my girlfriend moved in, cost of living went up, and I couldn't afford to dip that deeply into my reserves anymore. But I got another job too where the need to take extended time off wasn't as much of a thing, I got to do more of what I wanted to do without the BS of the company I worked at before.

billllll 4y ago

I sympathize and did the same thing earlier this year: I quit my job to try and strike out on my own. For most tech companies, they sell you on this "mission" and tell you how valuable your work is. Then, you realize all you do is grease the wheels of bureaucracy. Any serious attempts of asking the question "how would anything be different if I didn't do my work" only leads to depressing answers. I've found the result of quitting to be a mixed bag. Yes, the work is more gratifying because it's "yours," but are you really impacting the world more? You're either building and replacing the bureaucracy that you hated, or you're just too insignificant to warrant the bureaucracy. Also, not being paid a ton of money really sucks.

Termitiono 4y ago
My strategy is to work as long as I can and have to. Have to means having no debt,.my own land and low living costs. Basically being independent. Then using my career to work 50% with a good salary remote. If I would not do that, I would do the same as you and look for something good to work on. For me I would go and find a company which does things for agriculture or other things which helps us all. Working 40h feels wrong though.
thisNeeds2BeSad 4y ago
Its particularly bitter in the big ones. You develop something cool, they patent it and then put the patent "right on the office fridge, that way we get to see it every day" and there the innovation hangs and suffers and you realize not only did you work in vain, you made the life for true entrepaneurs harder for a long time and blocked innovation for years to come. Then you get promoted and oversee the same procedure of poisoning humanitys well executed by a younger generation.
- tangjurine 4y ago
  Is this really what happens?
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> For most tech companies, they sell you on this "mission" and tell you how valuable your work is. That's because hiring is marketing; they're selling a job to you, you pay them in your labor and attention span. Nobody will be attracted to a job where the description says what it is - e.g. "legacy enterprise java application maintenance". Nobody wants to work a job that is just to fill a seat.

napolux 4y ago

“Rich kid cash stocks and stops working in tech to do whatever he likes” Come on.

warkanlock 4y ago
I was thinking the same thing while reading through the text
smallbluedot 4y ago
100%. The entitlement in that post is comical. Reminds me of startup colleagues bitching about the free gourmet sandwiches being 'shitty'. Some people need a reality check.
oldandboring 4y ago
Yeah it really snowballs at the end too, when he talks about opening a Patreon ("Yelp thought what I did was worth some cash, so maybe other people will too). Could you imagine a construction worker quitting her job and opening a Patreon, thinking it's realistic that people give her free money because she used to be productive on a job site? That all being said, the first part of the post is relatable. Tech jobs really can suck the life out of you. And, at least for me, working for other people is really soul-draining. I felt this same way, dreading going back to work even when I was on vacation, the last time I worked on someone else's payroll.
- indrora 4y ago
  Oddly, I do just that. One of the youtubers that I pay money to was a VP of information security at a major company doing live shows. He produces good content so I'm willing to to fund that.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Not completely the same as construction work, but carpenters/woodworkers etc. have had good success with Patreon and similar. It's more about being skilled and being able to leverage that while also appealing to people willing to fund you to show off the thing you're skilled in

kaon123 4y ago

I think the picture of how he describes life and life-with-a-full-time-job is fairly accurate. One solution is to work 80%. Or even 60%. You can still make plenty of money to support yourself, and you can be happy while doing it.

guessmyname 4y ago
> […] the picture of how he describes life […] AFAIK @eevee [1] identifies as she/her [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eevee [2] https://twitter.com/eevee https://twitter.com/eevee
- celdon25 4y ago
  does "literally who" work?
radiKal07 4y ago
There are barely any 80% jobs and the 60% ones are almost inexistent
- sunderw 4y ago
  As someone working 50%, I can relate. I answered more than 100 messages last year on LinkedIn from companies/recruiters interested in my profile, and got to the end interview part twice (the answer was always 'working half time is not possible for us', sometimes after wasting a few hours of my time...) But I also got contacted by a recruiter that did a fantastic job. He found a company that was a great fit for me, and that had no problem with part-time. My advice would be : answer everyone telling you're looking for a part-time position. It's long, it's difficult and it's time consuming, but it's not impossible.
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- shoo 4y ago

ivraatiems 4y ago

In the next few years, I'm planning to go to 60% or 80% time, and then, eventually, to taking at least a couple of years off from engineering relying on savings and my spouse. If I thought I had to be a line engineer making things for someone else forever, I'd probably have to quit just to regain some sense of control. It's good work if you can get it, but it won't be my forever.

noisy_boy 4y ago

> just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work. Pretty much sums up my nightly routine.

Aeolun 4y ago
Hmm, the going to work part of that is fine. It’s what happens at work that’s disturbing.

j7ake 4y ago

Does this person have a family and kids? I don’t see how anyone can do this unless they contribute nothing to their families or extended families. Sounds to me like a very selfish view of life. Most people in the world have either ailing parents and/or spouse and kids to take care of.

uwagar 4y ago
self-ish is not a bad thing.
- j7ake 4y ago
  Selfish behaviour only works because the rest of society on aggregate are still contributing to the maintenance, development, and research of a multigenerational civilisation.
  - msftie 4y ago
    A society in which almost all are working not out of pure altruism, but out of necessity to satisfy their own selfish needs.
    - Elinvynia 4y ago
      I don't believe it's very selfish to want to avoid starvation and to have a roof over your head.
  - Goronmon 4y ago
    Selfish behaviour only works because the rest of society on aggregate are still contributing to the maintenance, development, and research of a multigenerational civilisation. And those people only make those contributions out of a selfish desire to keep their environment from changing and for their own self-satisfaction of "making a difference".
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
Not having a W2 job isn't the same as not earning a living. They earned enough to pay off their house and all debts in full. They now create and sell games and other software as a solo dev.

ptato 4y ago

I can't afford to leave my job, I would only be able to sustain myself for ~1 year. I think I would be satisfied if I only had to work half as much: 4 hours a day, 20 a week. Now I just need to find that job...

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
In my country (Netherlands), most employers are amenable - if not legally required - to allow you to work part-time, IIRC over half the workforce here works part-time - could be 36 hours (so you get an afternoon a week off, or a day off every two weeks, or a day off if you work 4x9 hours), 32, some even work only 24 hours. So basically it is possible, and I think in the US too you can negotiate to work less hours.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Working 24 hours is the holy grail, but now that I’ve been working 40/week for years I kinda feel like I’d suddenly feel my workweeks are too short.
- morelisp 4y ago
  I believe it's legally required here in Germany, but in most cases you'll be first on the chopping block for layoffs, and you generally need to hide that you'll ask during interviews. (It's illegal to refuse an employee asking but not illegal to not hire you.) Really bluntly, just as value-per-hour starts falling off rapidly after some point, it also increases super-linearly up to some point before that. Most overhead is constant regardless of if you work 24 or 40, you'll miss opportunities when you're not there, and you'll need to spend more time catching up when you are. That doesn't mean you can't work effectively, but I've watched multiple junior-mid devs think they've hacked the system but instead just forgo most learning/advancement opportunities. If you're happy with the current salary and don't need any more fulfillment from your career than turning-the-crank, I guess go for it. (In the US they'll just fire you, maybe even just for asking.)
giaour 4y ago
I remember Amazon making a bunch of noise about offering 80% time and 60% time jobs a while back; they may still be doing so. If not, there are plenty of "full time" roles in big tech that only realistically require 24 hours/week.

shp0ngle 4y ago

It seems they get a patreon now Guess it’s working for them? I donno https://www.patreon.com/eevee https://www.patreon.com/eevee

tonnydourado 4y ago

Damn, I remember this, even managed to find my own little comment. 2015, feels like a different life, two countries, three jobs, and five projects ago.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

We talk about externalities. A chemical company pours toxins into a river, an automaker knows its products kill X people per year. These are tangible, understandable. But we don't yet think of the effects on the workforce as social externalities. Industrial safety has made the workplace a much safer space physically, but not mentally. The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it. But I have a few observations. I meet lots of people who "got out of tech". People with PhDs who became landscape gardeners or opened a juice bar. I meet smart and engaging people in their 30s who dropped out of games or media careers. The cost (to society) of educating a graduate is, what, $100,000? Average post-grad education is another 4 years. Then it costs approximately 20% of someones salary to hire and onboard them. For what? So they can drop out after 5 years and go open a wind-surfing school? In a way, these people, the workforce/pool are a national asset, and it could regarded a tragedy of the commons that harming them is inflicting an externality on the whole industry. By culturing inhospitable, mentally harmful environments the tech industry is pissing in its own drinking water.

gspr 4y ago
I think you're right. I'm just afraid that any solution here will be much more on the "stick" side than the "carrot" side that you propose.
CalRobert 4y ago
There's a great read on this at https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-people-nobody-cares https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-peop... Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure. """ She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support. You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """ """ t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases. Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress. And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """

_jplc 4y ago

> Even the most interesting technical things Yelp is doing probably involve reinventing something hundreds of other companies have already reinvented. > Do you have any internal libraries or systems or platforms at your company? Do you think no one else has ever had the same idea and built the same thing? Sometimes (most of the times?) it's not about being the first one solving the problem in a specific way, but about solving it with the skills and knowledge you have, the best you can, because at the end it's your problem if you took responsibility of it. Personally think that relativizing problems is key, and can find joy in the process of solving them. Food for the brain and personal achievement. Whether it's important or remarkable for anyone else is anyone else's problem. Anyway, none of that matters if the problem isn't interesting for you or you don't care about who you are enabling by solving the problem, doesn't matter if it's a worldwide new problem or a well-known-and-solved one. By looking newer posts at the blog, he/she/they is having fun and writing about problems that aren't novelty, but are anyway personally interesting.

nnoitra 4y ago

To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ. To go to a good university you literally have to be super focused in high-school and do all sorts of extracurricular activities and basically things that look good on a college application. No one cares if you were a caretaker for your grandma. But then once you are in university you haven't even won yet. Now you have to study hard CS classes and do side-projects and apply to internships and practice LC just to get in and even then you aren't done. You need to be super focused at your internships as well to get a full-time offer and even then you aren't done. Got a full-time offer? Well now the expectations are a lot greater and you are in competition with other super ambitious people that don't mind working during weekends. It's just a lifestyle that doesn't leave off much time for anything else. And it never gets easier you just have to start at maximum speed and keep accelerating. The technology changes very frequently and ageism kicks in really early as well. I'm not suprised at all that people quit tech careers. Life is simply put short. Basically the path is like this: 1) Be super good in HS to go to a good school 2) Work super hard in college to get good grades 3) Study super hard part-time doing LC and side-projects to get good internships 4) Do super well on internships to get a full time offer 5) Keep doing well to get promoted If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project. There is a vast chasm between programming for fun and programming under a deadline for a jaded boss with a limited budget who's only concern is squeezing as much productivity out of their employees. We made programming to be fun and now companies just implicitely expect you to code for fun during your free time. If you don't you simply won't be good enough to pass the interviews.

barry-cotter 4y ago
You can skip all the school and college stuff though. People get MAGMA jobs off of bad tech jobs and grinding leetcode and nothing else. > My bonafides: I’m a college drop-out with a background in mathematics who went from teaching and having almost no coding experience to working at a big tech company in SV in ~3 years. The result is not typical, but I’ve seen it repeated enough to know that I’m not just a fluke. I recently saw another college drop-out make the jump in 18 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385015

slategruen 4y ago

So, what could you advice for people who's about to enter the tech industry? I've been having extreme senioritis for more than two years and one of the reasons, I think, is fear of entering this industry. Don't get me wrong, I love tech and all, it's just that I don't think my personality fits the standard employers look for. I don't want to constantly learn new skills just to prove my worth. Yes, most jobs nowadays require regular updates on your knowledge but the frequency of that update in tech is just ridiculously high.

downriver 4y ago
There’s not one “tech industry”, there’s just a bunch of companies and people, all unique, all flawed in their own ways. So join a company, and if you don’t like it, quit and try a different one.
lostcolony 4y ago
Most jobs don't actually require, expect, or even provide opportunity for you to learn new skills all the time. And that actually can be part of the burnout problem. You'll have to learn a few when you start. That's okay. What you're feeling as senioritis is basically "I've been doing this same shit for the past 4+ years", and by this point, even in a 'new' class, it feels largely the same, and it's a bump on the road to the outcome you want, and no longer interesting. Remember how you felt as a freshman though? Coming in when you knew nothing/comparatively little, and having to actually learn something, everything ahead was just one big mess of possibilities? Well...that's what getting a job offer for the first time is. For about 4-6 months. After that, most of the time, the rose tinted glasses come off and you realize "oh. I know what I'm doing at this point. I've learned what I need to learn. And there's not really anything left except for me to come in, work toward a known outcome, and then go home". Companies don't adopt new technologies if they can avoid it. They don't care about you learning new things. They just want you producing, so they can capture the value you generate and pay you a part of it. What's left to learn is the business domain and the specific combination of decisions others made in the past that you now have to navigate. Which, if you have a rich enough life outside of work, the job isn't too demanding, and are paid enough to be comfortable, can be fine for some people. The feelings of security a predictable, well paid job provides can fund what they actually care about in life. For others, it feels like they're spinning their wheels on the activity they spend the majority of their time on and they want something else. How you, personally, respond, is going to be something you figure out as you go. And it can change. I was a lot more "I need fulfillment from my job" when I was younger; now I just need a good enough paycheck and enough freedom in hours and such (WFH is a must) to be able to do the stuff I actually care about and find value in. So my advice is don't worry too much about it. Mentally prepare for the process of applying all over the place and potentially not getting an offer for a while, but once you get something you'll almost assuredly be excited and eager to prove yourself, and you can start figuring out what is important to you.

darod 4y ago

"i quit tech, long live tech"

mancerayder 4y ago

And inflation makes it even less likely to quit a high-paying job. It ain't < 2021 anymore.

splitstud 4y ago

tootie 4y ago

I have a modicum of sympathy, but this is such incredibly first world problems. The tech isn't interesting so you dread going to work? And have abandoned an incredibly lucrative profession forever? 99% of my stress comes from people not systems. And 99% of my satisfaction comes from delivering a valuable product and getting recognition for it. I mostly do management these days, but the times I get to write code it's mostly a codebase that is over 10 years old and held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but it's used for a valuable public service so I love it.

saos 4y ago

> I had stock options, and I cashed them all in last week. I net enough to pay off the mortgage, so I’m doing that, which will leave the entire household debt-free and cut our expenses drastically. There’s not a whole lot left after that (lol taxes ), but I can keep us afloat for a while. There you go. These type of post piss me the hell off!!! This type of person you will see making a video on YouTube convincing many other to quit too. They managed to buy their time back which is cool but they should be upfront with it from the off. No wonder some kids today are confused. Spend too much time on social media watching content from these type of garbage users

wollsmoth 4y ago
Lol, yeah no shit. If I owned a place and could afford to live indefinitely yeah, I might just quit my job for mental health reasons. Until then I'll have to work on these minor feats of engineering. lol.
mathgladiator 4y ago
So, my future post of a similar vein is not welcome. I think there is a deep issue when so many people just stay in the fire long enough. Is this ideal? It feels wasteful, but I get it as I got out. Fun fact, it helped to tell people my goals and I could have brass tax conversations about peoples careers. As a mentor, once you move from 'how you can help the company' to 'how you can retire early by selling what the company thinks it needs', you can drop so many facades.
aftergibson 4y ago
Yeah I was looking for the section that explained how you commit to this radical act of just quitting with no plan, roll the start-up dice and win. Great.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

She seems to still be doing stuff in tech (I can't imagine quitting the industry, as I love tech), but maybe she's doing it on her own terms. I can certainly relate to that. I sincerely wish her luck.

robotburrito 4y ago

Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can "go live in a cabin in the woods." I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.

hotpotamus 4y ago
"You don't need a million dollars to do nothin. Take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit." - Lawrence from Office Space
SenHeng 4y ago
If you absurdly reduce it down to that point then, yes, anyone can live cheaply in a rural area. But that's not the point. Financial independence is about the ability to live a good life without having to worry about next's day food.
- gkop 4y ago
  Agreed. Also there’s an in-between. I think parent’s point is worth reminding us of, because in our consumer-driven economy, there’s no economic incentive to teach people that reducing their consumption may be a reasonable and “happier” alternative to earning more income. (Above a certain line of course)
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    There are a lot of FIRE people who focus on cutting expenses over raising income. I would say it's more common, which is why people invented the term "Fat FIRE" to distinguish people who want to retire early without seriously cutting expenses.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Financial independence is about the ability to live a good life without having to worry about next's day food. Worrying about paying for food day to day isn’t why people seek out high-stress, high-pay jobs that are often in expensive cities. If people just want enough financial security to reliably put food on the table there are a million ways to do that without getting a demanding career. The people throwing themselves into demanding jobs and chasing promotions to maximize their salary aren’t doing it just to put food on the table.

akhmatova 4y ago

But I can’t do this any more. It’s running me into the ground. "I'm wealthy enough to retire and not work another day in my life. Oh, woe be unto me"

RankingMember 4y ago

stitched2gethr 4y ago

This is why I quit working at big companies. I'm in my second position at a startup and I couldn't be happier. - no constant meetings - no / less legacy code or dealing with systems that cannot be changed easily because they support a million customers - the problems feel (at least to me) like our problems instead of your shitty problem that I need to deal with It's not all roses, but substantially fewer meetings and directives from leaders I rarely see is half the battle.

jrochkind1 4y ago

So who has an update, how did it work out, what has the author done since 2015?

infinitezest 4y ago

...we're gonna need a smaller violin...

agentultra 4y ago

Even the most interesting technical things Yelp is doing probably involve reinventing something hundreds of other companies have already reinvented, because the existing things don’t work with their infrastructure or they’re written in the wrong language or they’re just kinda bad and maybe doing it from scratch will be better. After 20-some-odd years in the industry... oof. Sometimes it feels like groundhog day. You might have thought about web application authorization. You may have implemented it a few times and figured out how it ought to be done. And you might think that after twenty years it would be a solved problem. But you would be wrong. You're going to encounter yet another web application with a bespoke authorization system. It's going to take a shotgun approach to validation and nobody will be able to tell you if it works the way it's supposed to or not. The tests pass (if there are any). It might have errors in it but we haven't had any reports yet. We hired a pentester last year and they didn't find anything. It's probably fine. So you add a new feature and you need to extend this authorization system to handle it and you spend most of your time trying to make sure things continue working instead of focusing on what matters. The same thing over and over again. The same libraries, the same mistakes, the same solutions.

throw_away 4y ago

One of my favorite musicians. I was not aware of this backstory, but I'm glad it happened :) https://eeveebeats.bandcamp.com https://eeveebeats.bandcamp.com

tabtab 4y ago

Kind of similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/r59nzr/i_regret_going_into_web_programming_should_have/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/r59nzr/i_regret_goi...

charlie0 4y ago

I'm shocked at how much negativity there is towards people quitting early just because they can. I sense a lot of this comes from the idea that a well paying job is embedded so deeply in American culture as a status symbol that people who choose to leave willingly must somehow be either stupid or have something else wrong with them. I'm very glad to work in an industry where people can trade 5-10 years of their lives and then move on to other things that deeply matter to them. My only hope is that those people realize how fortunate they are. The vast majority of people will simply not have that opportunity.

8bitsrule 4y ago
There are different kinds of education. For example, vocational schools and liberal arts schools. In one we learn to specialize. In the other, we learn how to generalize. While there are advantages and disadvantages to each, I don't buy the argument that only specialists are worthwhile people. (Orson Welles didn't specialize, but had a lot to share.) For example, many schools have programs which cater to technical people. Most of them also require such students to study unrelated electives. I chafed at that at first ("but I know what I want to know"); later on in life I greatly appreciated it. I didn't know enough to know what I wanted to know. Life can be more than doing what's expected or trendy ... as most of history shows us. A lot more. I enjoyed reading about someone making that leap. It has its perils, yes. But. A couple of quotes from Joe Campbell (learned about him in one of those non-tech courses): "If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." " People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality."

deleted 4y ago

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