Ask HN: Anyone left software to study non-STEM subjects? Has anyone left software engineering to study something not in the sciences? How did that go? |
Ask HN: Anyone left software to study non-STEM subjects? Has anyone left software engineering to study something not in the sciences? How did that go? |
depending on how rural you're willing to go, and how much labor you've got to throw in, you can get a lot of land on the cheap. tractors, air seeders, watering -- that can get expensive, but may not be needed.
"The best way to make a small fortune in farming is to start with a large one"
But the money in software is pretty good and I need it. So maybe when I'm 50 years old after 10 years.
My day job was writing cpp and elixir, although I kept my job and returned to it. I've been thinking about leaving software completely though.
I know a few lawyers, including my roommate from undergrad, and they strongly advised me no, with the caveat that you'd better go in and treat it like the priesthood -- whole-soul into it.
Once he got citizenship he'd had enough of the academia and coding... dude changed to cheese making. Like, he is a full-time cheese consultant now, and travels around the world to assist in cheese making efforts, setting up cheese caves, etc. Does a bit of other culinary stuff too, occasional pop-up restaurants, etc.
I think about that a lot, especially when I have to sit through change control meetings that go nowhere...
The world is a whole lot more dangerous and confusing for everyone else
I have already abandoned a software development career for data science and enterprise API management, which is much better. I still super enjoy writing JavaScript, but not for work. In the corporate world of JavaScript your leadership is often shit and your peers are entitled children drowning in insecurity looking out for themselves on a sinking raft. After my next my next military promotion my children will be out of the house and I will make just as much in the military as I do as a senior developer. Something to think about.
What do you think the biggest mistake that people who don't last as a teacher make?
It is also very focused and goal oriented practice as I don’t have the time to otherwise mess around.
I vouched for this one because it seemed reasonable. I know I struggle with making time for practice.
There are a lot of things that I miss and don't miss at the fire dept. I miss dinners at the FD. We would sit down to a nice, home-cooked meal, laugh, argue and rag on one another. I don't miss getting a call at 2 a.m. for constipation (true story). I worked 24 hours on / 48 hours off, thus if I took one shift off it was a total of 5 days I had off...miss that. Definitely don't miss the politics between management and the field - typical politics of every other job I've had regardless if blue collar or white collar.
But those are all FIRE-like activities, I don't see any realistic way to maintain my income in another field unless I go into extremes.
Plenty of money to be made there, even as a hobbyist out of your garage. Unfortunately, most of the real-world work is also tedious, that part is hard to escape in any job.
Hit the $1.4 million mark, which has a safe draw of like 35-40k a year without lowering principle, and then chill.
Chill doesn't imply not working, just working on your terms, and a part-time job as a mechanic might be unsustainable normally, but with a FIRE background you could make it work.
Anything else that interests me, STEM or non-STEM is pointless without a PhD or a decent masters program at least. I don’t even have an undergrad degree. I was more or less willing to bite the bullet until I got laid off and had to start oissing away my savings trying to find another job I hate this time with less pay less enticing benefits in a shittier market, and it doesn’t seem like it’s possible now or in retrospect. Even if I did manage it, I’d have to lose basically the rest of my life to go all in on one thing in hopes it works out.
Computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
Yet I have never desired to work as a professional software developer. I majored in history and Spanish at Columbia while working for the university's Unix systems group. Before graduation I interviewed and got offers (including one explicitly as a developer) at various tech startups. Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies; my manager was looking for a CS major but I was able to convince her that I had the equivalent thereof. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772>
I'm glad, for the sake of civilizational and economic progress, that others are able and willing to program for pay. Meanwhile I will continue to putter around with Elisp at home.
She left her engineering job ~18 months ago to study music on the way to a music career (she had studied a lot of music during her earlier school years and has been composing for years). The music program involved everything from the physics of sound to composition, production, engineering, performance, etc. It was a deeply intensive one year program that she has now completed.
She keeps getting offers to do software around music (effects, workflow management, etc.) as there aren't enough well qualified software/ML engineers around that deeply understand the composition / production / engineering process. But she wants to be more on the music side. She has taken one such gig to pick up a mentor who composed the scores for several prominent video games, an area she's interested in.
She still has more than a year of runway, so she's taking 2024 to generate a portfolio of her own music and sort of build a brand (my words, not hers).
So, she's finished the school part, but hasn't completed a career transition. It's exceedingly unlikely that she'll ever replace her tech comp, but that was never the goal. It's been great for her mental health. Part of that is that she's been very actively working on her mental health through all of this. This new journey has required its own kind of resiliency because the path is far from clear and requires a lot of reflection and a lot of strategy planning about how to proceed. A supportive spouse has been a huge plus.
I'm back in tech now, working for an AI services startup, but I leveraged my experience to create a role where I can bring coaching within the organization and to our clients through change management coaching.
I was inspired by my mindfulness practice and by Chade-Meng Tan's work at Google, where he used his 20% time to create mindfulness courses within the company. Especially as technological advancement continues to accelerate, there will be a huge need for personal growth initiatives to help people lean into the kinds of skills that AI can't replace: social/emotional intelligence, empathy, creativity, for example.
My interest in human behavior was fueled by family systems theory which really lens itself to engineering thinking about predictable patterns and human systems. It is by far the most objective set of concepts I've seen that explain about human behavior. I still participate in that professional network and have an app for diagramming automatic versus deliberate behavior in a family system over time. Now I just have to figure out how to make it my job still planning for retirement.
OP shouldn't try to imitate his friend, thinking he'll find similar success. It's an unpleasant conclusion but it's conducive to staying alive