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Ask HN: Has anyone quit programming and switched to a passion field?

by novagameco on 5/29/24, 4:06 PM with 24 comments

• by JohnFen on 5/29/24, 4:12 PM

  Programming is my passion, so no, I haven't. I have friends who have taken a break from it and done something else for a while, but they've always come back.

  > I love programming, but the industry is very high-pressure and high-stress for me.

  "The industry" is very broad and diverse with all sorts of different characteristics. Not all involve high pressure and stress. You can be a dev without having the high pressure and high stress by carefully selecting where you work.

• by schmookeeg on 5/29/24, 4:48 PM

  I love programming but have burned out on doing it for others a few times now. I once jumped to fly cargo for UPS.

  I gotta say. It's nice to remember how good we have it. Doing a harder job for 1/10th of the pay refilled my empty gratitude bucket very quickly. :)

  Today I gripe about waking up at 8am to do another useless standup meeting, but once in awhile, I remember waking up at 3:30am to meet the UPS jet and wait until they loaded my little Beech 99 so that I could fly through low clouds and ice so that the folks in roseburg, eugene, and la grande could get their amazon prime tchotchkes. Then waiting around in the bumblefrick motel for 6 hours for the UPS truck to return that afternoon with the unwanted returns of last week's amazon prime tchotchkes.

  Yeah programming for others sucks. But it sucks less than a LOT of other things, and pays a whole lot better. Get while the gettin is good. When you want to run screaming in the other direction, may I suggest a pause, a walk, and a reflect first -- lest you kill the golden goose and never be able to get it back.

  $0.02 :)

• by al_borland on 5/29/24, 9:43 PM

  Not a programer, but pretty good systems admin I worked with was going to school to become a medical doctor. Looks like he graduated, but just an undergrad, not a PHD. Next thing I knew he bought a sailboat and was starting a YouTube channel to chronicle is journeys. I fellowed him, but he only made a few videos.

  I just checked out his LinkedIn. Looks like that didn't pan out, as he bounced around to about 9 different companies and is now at a FAANG.

  I think about it a lot, but keep waiting for the company to force my hand and lay me off. We usually have a couple rounds of layoffs per year. I figured I wouldn't make it past a few years and now I'm closing in on 20 years. At this rate I'll be hoping for a well timed early retirement package.

• by marssaxman on 5/29/24, 6:33 PM

  It's a fuzzy line between "retiring" and "quitting to do something else" when nothing else a software engineer might want to do is likely to provide more than a quarter to a third of the income they are used to.

  Second careers I have witnessed include: yoga instructor, aerial-performance studio operator, author & public speaker, eco-village manager, photographer, carpenter.

  Second careers I have considered include: fashion designer, boutique drum-machine manufacturer, and DJ - but while I have taken a couple of long sabbaticals over the years, software keeps drawing me back. I don't suppose I will ever really quit.

• by beretguy on 5/29/24, 4:19 PM

  I haven’t but thinking about how to make it possible. There are 2 major things that burn me out:

  1. Technologies are constantly changing and I can’t keep up. I used to do .NET MVC (4.7 or whatever, the old stuff) development. Then switched to cold fusion for a different employer and recently tried to do the latest .NET web stuff. It has changed beyond recognition. I have to start studying everything from scratch. I don’t have neither time nor motivation for this. What if next years update to .NET will make all my knowledge obsolete again? Screw that.

  2. Job interviews and finding jobs.

  I wish I could make a living playing in a rock band.

• by mikekaer on 5/31/24, 6:04 PM

  I quit commercial coding, switched to PM role and own SaaS. Currently consider to quit coding in my personal projects too. I like software industry but probably coding is just not for me and I need years and X burnouts to understand this and that's ok.

  I want to stay some years to have stable house and savings situation and I consider to study something more interested and work in less stresful place.

• by davidthewatson on 5/29/24, 6:45 PM

  The closest I've come to switching to a passion field is that I worked a landscape crew for a summer when I found myself out of work twenty years ago. This was obviously prior to the race to the bottom of landscaping by aliens and robots. Then I cofounded a startup that didn't involve aliens or robots. I know it sounds absurd - but I'm hyperactive.

• by vunderba on 5/29/24, 5:56 PM

  I did. I dropped everything for years, bought a one way ticket to Taiwan and grabbed the first ESL job I could find. In my mind, it was the most natural way to gain fluency in traditional Chinese which had always been a passion of mine.

  I enjoy education as much as I enjoyed traditional software engineering.