6 ms·

I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying

• jryan49 4mo ago
  I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.
  • rwmj 4mo ago
    I know someone who was a DBA and became an electrician and now retired after about 10 years doing that. By all accounts he loved it, spent his days doing odd jobs for old people while chatting with them over many cups of tea. However (here in the UK) you do have to obtain and keep up with certification.
• bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
• inoffensivename 4mo ago
  In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.
• fullshark 4mo ago
  My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks. There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
  • wombat-man 4mo ago
    Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.
  • andy99 4mo ago
    Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
    • JKCalhoun 4mo ago
      Sure, but using the above comment as reference, I think it is increasingly a lot of things that are off-putting in the industry.
  • JKCalhoun 4mo ago
    Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
    • azinman2 4mo ago
      But your performance reviews don’t have anything to do with age, so I don’t see how that could be.
      • coldtea 4mo ago
        Any review that's not a hard metric can be gamed to be about anything the reviewer cares about. They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit. And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.
• spicyusername 4mo ago
  I dream about it everyday. I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry. It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.
  • Bnjoroge 4mo ago
    None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere
    • coldtea 4mo ago
      When it comes to the shit imposed to the rest of society, and the shit imposed on office workers, it's worse in this industry.
      • ap99 4mo ago
        I'd challenge you to point out specifics that are industry wide, not just one company that happens to abuse its employees.
        • harimau777 4mo ago
          Agile is used to create a perpetual sense of crunch since you are never more than ~2 weeks away from your deadlines.
      • Bnjoroge 4mo ago
        No it’s not unless you’ve never interacted with people in other industries. It’s just as bad there, unless you have specific reasons for tech
    • spicyusername 4mo ago
      This is the kind of attitude that keeps the world the way it is.
      • 4mo ago
• bdcravens 4mo ago
  I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.
• fontain 4mo ago
  As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less. Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries. A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
• _ZeD_ 4mo ago
  > how many more years do I need to work in tech? The right answer should be "until you are able to do it". That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
  • 9rx 4mo ago
    Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
• baggachipz 4mo ago
  Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
  • rootusrootus 4mo ago
    I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60. Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
    • ryandrake 4mo ago
      Yep, I could probably retire already if it wasn't for the crippling cost of health insurance and healthcare in general (Thanks, USA).
      • siren2026 4mo ago
        Did you think about doing procedure abroad where they routinely cost 5% of the US cost?
        • ryandrake 4mo ago
          The concern isn't really about the cost of one-off procedures (which ARE ridiculous and potentially financially bankrupting in the USA), but the low burn of everyday office visits and specialists. $50 office visit here, $250 specialist visit there, $1000 in blood tests there... Without any chronic health problems, my family's out of pocket $5-10K a year or so with insurance. Without insurance (or on a crappier plan), it'd be even worse.
          • siren2026 4mo ago
            It really depends. I went without insurance for a couple years. I was able to bring every single price with the provider directly. As soon as I told them I wanted to pay cash in advance they had discount and other incentives. In the end I paid less than even the inflated copay I would have had to pay with insurance. (And I had a lot of procedure and visit that year). There is a good chance your 5-10k$ of copay would become 2-3k$ without insurance (Copay are absolutely inflated based on catalog prices that insurance negociate in the background).
• JKCalhoun 4mo ago
  Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1]. And so at the appointed time, I walked away. (My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.) [1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
  • mountain_peak 4mo ago
    About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout. The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy. If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
    • ryandrake 4mo ago
      Haha, strangely enough that's also my post-retirement plan. Just dip over to Home Depot. And, I also know ex-tech workers who made the same move once they had enough to retire. Wonder what it is about that particular store that's appealing.
• zingababba 4mo ago
  I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
• infraredshift 4mo ago
  [dead]
• scottious 4mo ago
  I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
  • __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
    Is that research still happening? I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
    • scottious 4mo ago
      Fair point. I don't know the answer to that question but we definitely live in one of the worst timelines right now.
• sollewitt 4mo ago
  I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
  • elevation 4mo ago
    > can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI This measure would either be toothless or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
    • bonsai_spool 4mo ago
      > or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired. The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
      • mattrighetti 4mo ago
        In my native country unions have crippled the job market and most of my peers don’t see any benefit from them, we actually hate them for the most part. Unions are just another way to find a single solution that fits everyone and we all know how that turns out. They’re just be another bureaucratic institution for corrupt politicians. Tons of evidence out there, especially in EU.
        • bonsai_spool 4mo ago
          > In my native country unions have crippled the job market We have to think about this critically. If there were no unions, do you believe there would be more jobs for everyone? If so, what is happening to those jobs? What is happening to the demand that would support those jobs? I'm missing some of the logic here, so want to understand better.
• taude 4mo ago
  I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing... I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
  • coldtea 4mo ago
    >and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?
  • siren2026 4mo ago
    how much have you been saving so far? I talk to a lot of people that saved 10M$ and still feel this is not even close to enough.
    • niij 4mo ago
      If $10M or, hell, even $2M doesn't seem close to enough then there is no amount to satiate one's thirst for more money.
      • siren2026 4mo ago
        A lot of people wouldn't know what to do without a job. Always going for more $$ is a way to save yourself from having to discover what you really want to do with your life.
    • taude 4mo ago
      Ha, if I had $10M, i'd be way gone. Pretty sure I could live my lifestyle for the next 30 years on that. I could live it on $5M, pretty easily. But where I'm at, I'm at the fringe, even if I have to move to Canada for healthcare when I'm old. And I'm saying this from having a house paid-off (where the taxes went up something like 40% last year -- and I'm guessing will keep going up?). I'm not convinced living in the US that all the financial planning algs that big finance institutions are using and going to hold up in the future, and curious how it works for a whole generation. But time will tell. So far the cycle always corrects itself. I'm especially curious how it works when there's going to be a lot more early to mid-50s employees being forced into retirement, who are going to be living a long time, yet. I'm especially paranoid about my prospects of retirement if the market dives 50%. It's happened in the past, and plenty of old hacker news articles about how it really screwed up people's retirement plans. Look back at Stock market returns for some tech companies from 2000 - 2014. That's a big span to fill.... ( I think I read somewhere that the market return for 2000 - 2010 was just over 1% year, someone should fact check that, though).
• corps_and_code 4mo ago
  I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications. Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
• hgoel 4mo ago
  I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech? There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
  • mrhottakes 4mo ago
    A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
  • harimau777 4mo ago
    A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
    • hgoel 4mo ago
      I work at one such research lab, right next to a very big city, with the ability to commute from said city. Similarly there are several in California, located near universities etc.
  • siren2026 4mo ago
    People want to make 500k$/year without the inconvenience of having a job.
    • solenoid0937 4mo ago
      Or rather they want to make good money without being treated like shit. Believe it or not you can have your cake and eat it too.
      • hgoel 4mo ago
• grogers 4mo ago
  Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
• sevenzero 4mo ago
  Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
• alistairSH 4mo ago
  Nothing solid, but if I have to spend 55-62 pouring beer at my local pub to cover medical insurance, I won’t be sad. Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.
• gaoshan 4mo ago
  I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites. It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company. Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's. All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
• anticorporate 4mo ago
  I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op. I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year. There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone. My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
  • HugoTea 4mo ago
    That's lovely
  • moralestapia 4mo ago
    >I had been used to six figure salaries Great post but this is what it reduces to. 99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work. This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.
  • reconnecting 4mo ago
    > I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then. However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
• deadbabe 4mo ago
  If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
• adamtaylor_13 4mo ago
  Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
  • fuzzfactor 4mo ago
    What if you were a brilliant young engineer and you wanted to work for a growing company that is being run by sophisticated business leaders who are financially successful enough, and who respect and value their employees so highly that they can afford not to do any of this degrading employee tracking at all? Is it too late for that already?
    • adamtaylor_13 4mo ago
      Well I wouldn't consider myself particularly sophisticated, but I run just such a business myself. So... no! It's not too late! You can absolutely do that. But you'll have to network hard and find those people. It's not impossible, and you may have to work some of those less-desirable jobs in the process. I have a theory that you'll actually find more of those companies as AI proliferates because the work that a single good engineer can do is being scaled very quickly.
• jm4 4mo ago
  Already did it. Own a coffee shop now. I still do some tech work, but it's mostly for my own use.
  • dyauspitr 4mo ago
    Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
    • princevegeta89 4mo ago
      100 is no big deal
    • jm4 4mo ago
      Yes. Margins are high in coffee. We serve a high quality product that customers feel is priced in the value range and we are at like 70-80% blended gross margin. There are plenty of busy shops at >80%. It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location. The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on. We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
      • dyauspitr 4mo ago
        I have so many questions. What was your initial startup investment? How did you pick the location to set this up in? What did your business plan look like? How many employees did you start with? How long did it take you to make a profit? Were you a coffee connoisseur before you got into the business? How do you select your beans? How did you do your marketing? I would love if you would answer these questions. Alternatively, how did you figure all of this out when you first started out? Who did you go to so I can find a local analog here.
• dyauspitr 4mo ago
  I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
  • ryandrake 4mo ago
    Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
    • zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
      If anything AI is going to get rid of the lower tier tech jobs. There will be much fewer but they will pay 7 figs. Basically you replace 10 devs with one super dev and a fleet of agents. At least that’s what the CEOs seem to expect.
    • everdrive 4mo ago
      Interesting that they never seem to think the executive suite is overpaid -- for some reasons it's always everyone _else_ who is overpaid.
      • dyauspitr 4mo ago
        This talking point is common but really a non issue. At Google for instance, executive pay makes up less than 0.3% of operating expenses compared to 30% of that being for non executive compensation. You can’t pay for a damn thing by taking that down to 0.2% or whatever you’re asking for.
• kilroy123 4mo ago
  I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI. However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable. The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore. I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
  • leetrout 4mo ago
    Hello! I am in the same boat. Got a kid under 10 too. But I have no regrets yet. The time off was priceless and we never know what tomorrow will hold. My dad was dead when I was 11 so I never planned on playing it safe to try to retire early or even on time. Hang in there and stay with it.
• phyzix5761 4mo ago
  I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months. The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
  • harimau777 4mo ago
    Do you live in a city? That's my number one concern. I don't need a lot of luxury but living in a major cosmopolitan city is a non-negotiable for me.
    • siren2026 4mo ago
      You could live anywhere. Just need to budget for it. Obviously living in Williamsburg is going to be a different than living in Houston.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• Hasz 4mo ago
  save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill
• 5701652400 4mo ago
  probably a year or two. definitely less than three years. by then SWE as a job is gone.
• burner000333 4mo ago
  I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now. Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks). End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day - Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this. - Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break. Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes. Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
  • Mattwmaster58 4mo ago
    > but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts And what job class was this?
    • burner000333 4mo ago
      trading, from the 1800's to about the year 2003, to 2003 to today
• fullstop 4mo ago
  Man, do I feel this, but my situation is a little different in that we are similar ages but my kids are (nearly) all adults. I've put enough in 529s that both of them will be able to graduate without any debt, something that I feel will give them a huge advantage in life. I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.
• xXSLAYERXx 4mo ago
  When I was younger (50ish now) I could juggle full time work with side projects but I just can't now, especially with family demands. Full time work is pretty much burning me out. I'm close to leaving and starting a mobile food cart. When I do get out I'll definitely miss the salary. I'll miss lunch with the other devs. Miss the walks with other devs around the building. Theres something special about folks in engineering. When I'm serving up lunch and overhear some folks talking SDLC I'll smile and reminisce. But its not for me any more. I'm the gray hat now and have no desire to write code for someone elses fortune. Good luck getting out!
• PlunderBunny 4mo ago
  I have similar feelings. When I started working at my first job, we were trying to make our enterprise product so easy to use it would be like 'a piece of software you'd buy on a CD at the supermarket.' (this was the late 1990s). We really did spend time on polish that made the product better and easier to use (it was sold as a product, with optional support), and I loved re-writing bits of UI and refactoring on my own time to make it great. But over the decades that followed, the new features became subscription based, and metrics were introduced, and were gamed... Now I'm quite cynical about the industry. I'm 54, and the company I work for is about to announce a restructure. I'd consider doing something else for a similar last few working years too, but I'm not sure what else I'm good at!
• m463 4mo ago
  Maybe you can stay in tech, but help undoing all the nonsense that's been done. Make a dumbphone (that is actually smart and works for you). An open-source television. local AI models. A browser that doesn't spy on you.
• rwmj 4mo ago
  It's been obvious for a long time that if you get a tech salary you should be saving for financial independence, meaning saving aggressively (above 50%) and investing that in a low fee tracker fund. Like planting a fruit tree, the best time to start was a decade ago and the second best time is now.
• anadem 4mo ago
  I'm SO happy to have retired a few years back!!