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This article is not a "I want to leave tech" article. It is an "I want to have more ownership of the nature of my work" article. Practically every recommendati

This article is not a "I want to leave tech" article. It is an "I want to have more ownership of the nature of my work" article. Practically every recommendation is also a tech job, its just not "big tech" where you have very little real decision making power. Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package.

benreesman 1y ago
This is the most important comment I've read in a while. It has become really easy to feel trapped in software as a trade even though I love working on software as much or more than ever in the details of the work. I'm fortunate that my current gig doesn't involve doing anything that I find directly objectionable in a Hippocratic Oath sense (though some might, its trading stuff which I long ago decided is about a 1.01 out of Meta on a scale of 1 to OpenAI). The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies: - Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers) - Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer - Computer People Know What's Best Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle). I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up. What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.
- catlover76 1y ago
  [dead]
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  Insightful comment. I think there's a dividing line in society between those who understand systems and those who don't. The systems people look at the non-systems people as stupid; the non-systems people look at the systems people as evil.
  - benreesman 1y ago
    I think that my understanding of how systems work has had very differing degrees of effectively translating into other regimes. Math and the hard sciences? Very effective, doing stuff in biotech or something has always been a fruitful two way street. But for human systems? Eh... Yeah I struggle with agreeing there. I think much harm has come from trying to think about human systems like computer systems both in the small of my own immediate life and in larger regimes. No matter how you feel about Elon Musk and DOGE? That didn't look like it went great for either side of that equation to mention one recent high-profile exanple. That looked pretty lose/lose.
    - cjs_ac 1y ago
      I agree: systems thinkers' inability to fully represent the complexity of human systems is a large part of why non systems thinkers think systems thinkers are evil.
  - pydry 1y ago
    Having systems thinking is a bit like being Cassandra: doomed to know the future yet doomed never to be believed. What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally. As an example, I can think of one politician (edit: not trump) who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.
    - rgreek42 1y ago
      Successfully leverages barbarism isn't a virtue of systems thinkers. You're proving GP's point.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Everything that exists to make money, gradually takes it to an extreme as it becomes more difficult to make money on the up and up. Everything that doesn't exist to make money ends up existing to make money once it reaches a sufficient size - this includes nonprofits and charities. This is one of the many reasons I tend to be vehemently in favor of decentralization. A lot of these problems are just because organizations become too large. It also feels kind of dystopic, or sterile at least, how you can be a thousand miles away and have a main street that looks largely indistinguishable from the one you just came from.
  - benreesman 1y ago
    I don't really disagree with anything you've said, other than a vague sort of discomfort around practicality. I dislike market failures very much, I war-crime dislike engineered market failures (the two co-occur with alarming frequency). But markets are effectively part of the natural world: if you engineer the most oppressive, regimented, panopticon nightmare prison available to human deviousness you will succeed in creating a black market, not in eliminating markets. So any solution has to be about preventing market failures, not eliminating markets. If North Korea can't effectively inhibit markets from forming, it's a pretty convincing demonstration that no acceptable amount of anti-market intervention is going to be okay.
    - spacemadness 1y ago
      I’m not following. I don’t think they said anything about eliminating markets, rather halting monopolies.
      - benreesman 1y ago
        Like I said, I'm broadly sympathetic to your view. I was just pointing out that you led with "things that exist to make money..." and while the point you raise is true (or often true), its kind of an unsolved problem. On halting monopolies I would vote and canvas for you if you ran on it. I agree about the appeal of decentralization, I just don't know how to make it happen in a world where centralized control is enforced by MQ-9 Reaper drones with sole executive discretion on "kill or capture" of anyone and decentralization is considered a national security priority. An example would be the people who argue that inherently sovereign and anonymous money would liberate people. What it would do is get you shot for fucking with the Mint.
pydry 1y ago
one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity. In general (with a few exceptions like finance that are generally up front about what they are), the chillest, sanest jobs with the most accomodating environments tended to pay the best and vice versa. I also have too many friends who tried sacrificing pay for better working conditions and more meaningful work and ended up bitter because they were sold a hollow dream.
- hamandcheese 1y ago
  Strong agree. It takes very little effort to pay someone a few more dollars, whereas all the other intangibles are a lot harder to offer. So it is exceptionally rare to find one without the other.
- parpfish 1y ago
  A few years back I left “big tech” for a much lower paying tech-ish job that had a meaningful mission. I was fine having a lower paying job, but what I didn’t expect was that the lower pay meant that the skill level for my colleagues was also much much lower. Years of the “Dead Sea effect” [0] had turned it into an environment where the blind were leading the blind and they weren’t even aware of how bad things were. So high pay also means “better coworkers” [0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
- karaterobot 1y ago
  > one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity. Being 'underpaid' is different than being paid less, though. Describing a job as underpaid is, almost by definition, assuming a company is exploiting its workforce. It's not hard to believe such a company would also be a toxic environment in other ways. But if two companies pay different amounts, but they're both paying a fair salary, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about the company that pays less.
PoshBreeze 1y ago
Working in smaller tech companies with worse pay is worse than working these tech jobs. Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors. > Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner. The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.
navi0 1y ago
A corollary to this is that “tech” is simply the method of accomplishing a business’ goals/objectives. At this point, all companies employ lots of hardware and software in their operations. No one working in a modern company can “leave tech,” but OP’s comment about “big tech” stands.
antithesizer 1y ago
Wow! Tech people have a really difficult time figuring out normal people's diction!
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
Glad this was the top comment. It is extremely easy to "leave tech" (or, as you point out, leave "big tech") - you just have to accept that you will most likely make substantially less money and that your "standard of living" will have to adjust accordingly. I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay. But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  What do you do with kids when you want to downsize? Give them away?
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    Of course, because that's obviously the only option.
    - deadbabe 1y ago
      Finally! No more $2k/month/per kid for daycare expenses!
      - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
        It always astounds me of how relatively well-off people simply cannot even fathom how the vast, vast majority of Americans with kids manage to get by without paying $2k/month/kid in childcare expenses.
spacemadness 1y ago
It blows my mind people feeling mistreated at X FAANG company just to go to Y FAANG company and expect any better treatment. They are all the same at this point. At least the unhinged career ladder climbers on Blind aren’t kidding themselves.
- staticautomatic 1y ago
  Meta seems like it's definitely worse than the others now, though, since you're liable to be explicitly labeled a "low performer" if you get laid off.
pseudocomposer 1y ago
How “high paying” a job do you need though? My last three companies, I’ve worked on products that don’t involve marketing or data mining of any sort that I’d consider unethical. While they have certainly involved automating away jobs (car sales/bank loan people, pathologists, and now accountants, respectively), they were all software designed to benefit humanity. And they all paid $180k+, the last two $200k+, in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. I only work over 40 hours if I’m working on something I’m passionate about. I realize FAANGs can go into the $400k+ range, but… do you really need that? Is it worth it? For the stress, the rat race, the pressure and all that? Granted, they’ve been remote roles, and I live in North Carolina, not one of the HCOL metros (I don’t see how anyone can justify living in NYC, SF, or LA, honestly). But like… this just seems untrue. There are plenty of good-paying, ethical roles to be had. Moreover, I’d say if you spend some time actively seeking out ethical, fairly (not excessively) compensated roles… they’ll find you, without you having to search for them.
- michaelbarton 1y ago
  I agree, in the same boat as you. There are a lot of tech jobs that are a net positive for society. I think you nailed it - once you have that salary giving up 400k, 600k, 800k TC is a really big decision.
dataflow 1y ago
> every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package. Well, a lot of them. Not every. There are jobs at big tech companies where you work on good things benefiting society, like improving security in open-source, or developing a lot of the OSS tools out there. (Think Project Zero, or many of your favorite major OSS project, which are developed by engineers at big tech.) They are not nearly as common as other roles obviously, but they do exist, and it's worth at least attempting to get them.
OjotCewIo 1y ago
> tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package A thousand times, yes. And even if you find ethical jobs (e.g., paid-for and ethically committed open source work), they are much-much more difficult to do well. Distrust and secrecy are absolutely rampant between you and your (inevitably proprietary) partners; reverse engineering plays a central role. It's a warzone -- and the constant fighting, battling, against measures put in place by other humans, just takes the will to live out of me. It should be possible for well-paying, ethical, interesting, and co-operative jobs to exist. They only exist as exceptions.

benreesman 1y ago

This is the most important comment I've read in a while. It has become really easy to feel trapped in software as a trade even though I love working on software as much or more than ever in the details of the work. I'm fortunate that my current gig doesn't involve doing anything that I find directly objectionable in a Hippocratic Oath sense (though some might, its trading stuff which I long ago decided is about a 1.01 out of Meta on a scale of 1 to OpenAI). The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies: - Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers) - Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer - Computer People Know What's Best Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle). I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up. What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.

catlover76 1y ago
[dead]
cjs_ac 1y ago
Insightful comment. I think there's a dividing line in society between those who understand systems and those who don't. The systems people look at the non-systems people as stupid; the non-systems people look at the systems people as evil.
- benreesman 1y ago
  I think that my understanding of how systems work has had very differing degrees of effectively translating into other regimes. Math and the hard sciences? Very effective, doing stuff in biotech or something has always been a fruitful two way street. But for human systems? Eh... Yeah I struggle with agreeing there. I think much harm has come from trying to think about human systems like computer systems both in the small of my own immediate life and in larger regimes. No matter how you feel about Elon Musk and DOGE? That didn't look like it went great for either side of that equation to mention one recent high-profile exanple. That looked pretty lose/lose.
  - cjs_ac 1y ago
    I agree: systems thinkers' inability to fully represent the complexity of human systems is a large part of why non systems thinkers think systems thinkers are evil.
- pydry 1y ago
  Having systems thinking is a bit like being Cassandra: doomed to know the future yet doomed never to be believed. What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally. As an example, I can think of one politician (edit: not trump) who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.
  - rgreek42 1y ago
    Successfully leverages barbarism isn't a virtue of systems thinkers. You're proving GP's point.
somenameforme 1y ago
Everything that exists to make money, gradually takes it to an extreme as it becomes more difficult to make money on the up and up. Everything that doesn't exist to make money ends up existing to make money once it reaches a sufficient size - this includes nonprofits and charities. This is one of the many reasons I tend to be vehemently in favor of decentralization. A lot of these problems are just because organizations become too large. It also feels kind of dystopic, or sterile at least, how you can be a thousand miles away and have a main street that looks largely indistinguishable from the one you just came from.
- benreesman 1y ago
  I don't really disagree with anything you've said, other than a vague sort of discomfort around practicality. I dislike market failures very much, I war-crime dislike engineered market failures (the two co-occur with alarming frequency). But markets are effectively part of the natural world: if you engineer the most oppressive, regimented, panopticon nightmare prison available to human deviousness you will succeed in creating a black market, not in eliminating markets. So any solution has to be about preventing market failures, not eliminating markets. If North Korea can't effectively inhibit markets from forming, it's a pretty convincing demonstration that no acceptable amount of anti-market intervention is going to be okay.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    I’m not following. I don’t think they said anything about eliminating markets, rather halting monopolies.
    - benreesman 1y ago
      Like I said, I'm broadly sympathetic to your view. I was just pointing out that you led with "things that exist to make money..." and while the point you raise is true (or often true), its kind of an unsolved problem. On halting monopolies I would vote and canvas for you if you ran on it. I agree about the appeal of decentralization, I just don't know how to make it happen in a world where centralized control is enforced by MQ-9 Reaper drones with sole executive discretion on "kill or capture" of anyone and decentralization is considered a national security priority. An example would be the people who argue that inherently sovereign and anonymous money would liberate people. What it would do is get you shot for fucking with the Mint.

pydry 1y ago

one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity. In general (with a few exceptions like finance that are generally up front about what they are), the chillest, sanest jobs with the most accomodating environments tended to pay the best and vice versa. I also have too many friends who tried sacrificing pay for better working conditions and more meaningful work and ended up bitter because they were sold a hollow dream.

hamandcheese 1y ago
Strong agree. It takes very little effort to pay someone a few more dollars, whereas all the other intangibles are a lot harder to offer. So it is exceptionally rare to find one without the other.
parpfish 1y ago
A few years back I left “big tech” for a much lower paying tech-ish job that had a meaningful mission. I was fine having a lower paying job, but what I didn’t expect was that the lower pay meant that the skill level for my colleagues was also much much lower. Years of the “Dead Sea effect” [0] had turned it into an environment where the blind were leading the blind and they weren’t even aware of how bad things were. So high pay also means “better coworkers” [0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
karaterobot 1y ago
> one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity. Being 'underpaid' is different than being paid less, though. Describing a job as underpaid is, almost by definition, assuming a company is exploiting its workforce. It's not hard to believe such a company would also be a toxic environment in other ways. But if two companies pay different amounts, but they're both paying a fair salary, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about the company that pays less.

PoshBreeze 1y ago

Working in smaller tech companies with worse pay is worse than working these tech jobs. Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors. > Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner. The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.

navi0 1y ago

A corollary to this is that “tech” is simply the method of accomplishing a business’ goals/objectives. At this point, all companies employ lots of hardware and software in their operations. No one working in a modern company can “leave tech,” but OP’s comment about “big tech” stands.

antithesizer 1y ago

Wow! Tech people have a really difficult time figuring out normal people's diction!

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

Glad this was the top comment. It is extremely easy to "leave tech" (or, as you point out, leave "big tech") - you just have to accept that you will most likely make substantially less money and that your "standard of living" will have to adjust accordingly. I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay. But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.

deadbabe 1y ago
What do you do with kids when you want to downsize? Give them away?
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  Of course, because that's obviously the only option.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Finally! No more $2k/month/per kid for daycare expenses!
    - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
      It always astounds me of how relatively well-off people simply cannot even fathom how the vast, vast majority of Americans with kids manage to get by without paying $2k/month/kid in childcare expenses.

spacemadness 1y ago

It blows my mind people feeling mistreated at X FAANG company just to go to Y FAANG company and expect any better treatment. They are all the same at this point. At least the unhinged career ladder climbers on Blind aren’t kidding themselves.

staticautomatic 1y ago
Meta seems like it's definitely worse than the others now, though, since you're liable to be explicitly labeled a "low performer" if you get laid off.

pseudocomposer 1y ago

How “high paying” a job do you need though? My last three companies, I’ve worked on products that don’t involve marketing or data mining of any sort that I’d consider unethical. While they have certainly involved automating away jobs (car sales/bank loan people, pathologists, and now accountants, respectively), they were all software designed to benefit humanity. And they all paid $180k+, the last two $200k+, in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. I only work over 40 hours if I’m working on something I’m passionate about. I realize FAANGs can go into the $400k+ range, but… do you really need that? Is it worth it? For the stress, the rat race, the pressure and all that? Granted, they’ve been remote roles, and I live in North Carolina, not one of the HCOL metros (I don’t see how anyone can justify living in NYC, SF, or LA, honestly). But like… this just seems untrue. There are plenty of good-paying, ethical roles to be had. Moreover, I’d say if you spend some time actively seeking out ethical, fairly (not excessively) compensated roles… they’ll find you, without you having to search for them.

michaelbarton 1y ago
I agree, in the same boat as you. There are a lot of tech jobs that are a net positive for society. I think you nailed it - once you have that salary giving up 400k, 600k, 800k TC is a really big decision.

dataflow 1y ago

> every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package. Well, a lot of them. Not every. There are jobs at big tech companies where you work on good things benefiting society, like improving security in open-source, or developing a lot of the OSS tools out there. (Think Project Zero, or many of your favorite major OSS project, which are developed by engineers at big tech.) They are not nearly as common as other roles obviously, but they do exist, and it's worth at least attempting to get them.

OjotCewIo 1y ago

> tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package A thousand times, yes. And even if you find ethical jobs (e.g., paid-for and ethically committed open source work), they are much-much more difficult to do well. Distrust and secrecy are absolutely rampant between you and your (inevitably proprietary) partners; reverse engineering plays a central role. It's a warzone -- and the constant fighting, battling, against measures put in place by other humans, just takes the will to live out of me. It should be possible for well-paying, ethical, interesting, and co-operative jobs to exist. They only exist as exceptions.