Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

[boredemployee]

I'm really tired of the BS, AI, corporate environment and what not.

Looking for alternatives.

In case you're in the same boat:

What do you plan to work with?

[SolubleSnake]

I now see groups of people just meandering between buzzwords and sort of calling it a career. Honestly I know people who were 'crypto developers' 3 years ago who are now 'senior AI implementation architects' and similar..and they have a 'bootcamp' etc....I am a software engineer who qualified in cs but after working around engineering and manufacturing a lot I'm also qualified in CAD...thinking to get into more physical engineering and become a chartered engineer finally and just get away from the bandwagon boosterism. Or become a nurse or teacher.

i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.

[disillussioned]

One thing I find distressing is how useless most of the knowledge I've accumulated is! I use to try to refresh my knowledge of things learned long ago, once or twice a year, but that's pointless now: everything is a prompt away.

All that, plus the skeleton crew due to my company's offshoring is making me jaded.

[vunderba]

I've worked in both education / tech fields, education is more personally rewarding but if you're used to working as a salaried software engineer you will no longer be able to take a proverbial "bath in a bundle of bills" - unless they're $1 bills.

Medicine is always in demand. I did a brief stint in EMT but felt mostly like a glorified bus driver doing lots of interfacility transport work. In addition to regular nursing, you could look into nurse practitioner as well if you wanted a bit more autonomy.

[nathaah3]

this is exactly how i feel!

[ex-aws-dude]

No because I used to work at McDonald's and loading trailers from warehouses before working in tech.

That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day.

I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job.

It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a software internship. I remember thinking wow they must have a totally different idea of what a good/bad job is.

I can't think of a better value job that working in tech in terms of amount of effort and schooling required.

[cableshaft]

I miss my fast food job (and especially my retail job), to a certain extent. I also worked in a warehouse and a factory for a bit, and there are certain things I miss about those as well. I don't miss the low pay though. And my health is no longer good enough (in part because I've been too sedentary in office jobs the past 20 years) that I can no longer stand for hours at a time (not even that, I can no longer stand in place for more than a few minutes at a time).

I could completely forget about my job when I got home, didn't have to somewhat keep a framework of some giant corporate spaghetti code soup in my head to a certain extent for months or years on end, and interacted with people way, way more than I do now, and made deeper friendships with my coworkers.

Also there was no risk of me working on something for six months and it get cancelled or shelved before it gets used by anyone. At least in fast food and retail jobs you're helping multiple people (sometimes hundreds of people) every day. In my corporate career I've often ended up working on software that only has a handful of high paying clients, or only used internally and not client facing.

If I could justify the insane pay cut and could manage it physically I'd probably do something like be a barista nowadays. Or be a teacher, maybe.

[keiferski]

Just a counter anecdote:

I worked in a bakery / dessert place for 4+ years making barely above minimum wage. 8-12 hours a day on my feet, making dough, talking to customers, etc.

I didn’t absolutely love the job at the time, but I miss the realness of it constantly. Making a real piece of food, talking to real people. The tech industry increasingly seems obsessed with making everything as fake as possible, and I can relate to OP on multiple levels.

[boredemployee]

Well, different people, with different backgrounds, have very different perspectives, feelings, and standards when it comes to the world of work. I’ve also had a physical shit job before, and I don’t want to go back to it at all, and between that and being a developer, I'd obviously rather be a developer. But that doesn't rule out the possibility of wanting a different kind of profession. the current state of things just isn't good. the fact that it's one of the few types of work that still pays well makes it seem like this 'privilege' is often used as an excuse for all kinds of wrongdoing.

[karakoram]

Yep, the whole industry is not in good place right now but tech is still a sure-fire way of netting $1Mil+ after a 5-10 year career, with the most freedom and in the most flexible way.

Several people I know who went to a good university and landed big tech/quant jobs early became millionaires (liquid 1,000,000) after 5 to 7 years. Some got lucky and reached this milestone way earlier.

Medicine takes 12+ years of education before bearing any fruit and finance has very little freedom.

[atlgator]

I think what people are actually tired of isn't "tech" — it's the gap between what they thought the job would be and what it's become.

When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has slowly drifted from "engineer solving problems" to "employee managing process." You spend your morning in standups, your afternoon fighting with CI pipelines someone else configured, and your evening wondering what you actually built.

The people in this thread who say "just get perspective, you could be loading trucks" aren't wrong exactly, but they're answering a different question. Nobody here is saying the pay is bad or the chairs are uncomfortable. They're saying the work feels hollow. Those are different problems, and "be grateful" has never been a lasting fix for the second one.

What I've noticed — both in myself and in people around me — is that the ones who stay engaged tend to have found a way to shrink their world back down. Fewer layers between them and the user. Fewer abstractions between them and the machine. Whether that means a tiny company, freelancing, or just a side project you actually care about, the pattern is the same: make the feedback loop short and real again.

[tacostakohashi]

The problem you are getting at is alienation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships.

As much as people say AI is killing jobs, even before that, interesting jobs were mostly being killed anyway by agile, sprints, and product managers anyway, to the extent that replacing those kind of jobs with AI is no great loss.

Loading trucks, and manual labor, can potentially be quite satisfying, especially if it's your truck, or your business, or your product being loaded.

[jsnsll]

Yes I am very tired of it as well. I thought the crypto craze was as bad as it would get but boy was I wrong.

I’m going to live a simpler life where I work on making video games as a creative endeavor. I’ll try to find a part time job to earn some money, but mainly just adjust my expectations to be happier with what I have as opposed to what I could have.

I’ve wedged myself into the correct shape to fit into what companies classified as a productive tech worker for 10+ years mainly out of fear of being poor, so now I must repay that debt to myself by doing things just for the sake of enjoyment or fulfillment and not to build a skill that makes me better at making more money.

[beratbozkurt0]

Actually, regardless of the sector, as people get older, they get tired and bored of working.

[rzzzwilson]

Actually, not always. I didn't want to retire, I liked working and I was good at it, but I had to retire for medical reasons. My environment was a bit different than most, though, working with scientists developing tools for analysis, visualization and simulation.

[tokenless]

That is way to general, I doubt it is true for most. Any studies on this?

[AnimalMuppet]

Funny you should ask that. I'm retiring today.

But turn on "showdead" and read nivcmo's top-level reply. Or if you won't, here's what for me was the most important line:

> Smaller teams, clearer missions, direct customer relationships. That's the antidote.

Maybe, after a few months off, I'll be open to that, if I can find it.

[fuzzfactor]

>I'm retiring today.

Congratulations, it's once in a lifetime :)

Oh wait, they keep calling me out of retirement too ;)

>direct customer relationships.

That's the main thing I would put full-time effort into now.

It's nice to be off the treadmill until you are good and ready, once I get going again I don't plan to stop for a long time, if ever again, so retirement has been a good break.

[lyfeninja]

I hear ya. I'm particularly tired of working for other people who can barely keep their priorities straight, let alone give clear direction or have a vision. That's why I'm trying to start something of my own. I'm a year in, and it's not easy, but it's very rewarding. It's tiny, but my tech already is light years better than my employers and I get to decide where it makes the most sense to put my energy.

I would say pick/find something you're passionate about or interested in where you think you could make money, find a market and go for it.

[SenHeng]

I’ve been fantasising about getting certified as a CPA. People don’t believe me when I say this but my childhood (<14) dream was to be an accountant. I was poor and I enjoyed counting all the coins I saved up (that my dad would eventually borrow to pay the loan sharks) and also watched ducktales a lot.

Having run a business for almost a decade, I’ve accumulated a lot of accounting and tax knowledge that I think would be cool to properly certify. Also it would be to re-live a childhood dream.

[vunderba]

Gotta get that number #1 lucky dime first - I've heard it helps to pass the CPA exam!

[fuzzfactor]

Have you ever done anything else that you always wanted to do?

That can be a feeling all its own :)

[mancerayder]

One big problem is spending 10 years or more learning something that's completely obsolete - I experienced Unix and systems engineering, Perl and much much more becoming useless on my CV. Now, someone will point out how those foundational items prepare you for other things (i.e. Python is absolutely easy if you mastered Perl, deep unix systems knowledge is useful to grok containers, etc.). Problem is interviewing. No, I don't think I should have to learn Go, a zillion new SRE buzzwords used by salespeople, but more than that I feel like I have a right to not be punished in LeetCode interviews because supposedly all infrastructure is code. It's not.

So I went into consulting, and also management. The throwaway experience I had of my deep knowledge going obsolete in interviews has created a built in aversion to learning every new thing that comes out - something I loved in my 20s.

That's my issue with the field. I think developers are in a better spot - you're either a strong developer or you're not. Systems or ahem, "DevOps" suffers from this commodification of resume buzzwords over and against analytical, learning and adjacent mastery of skills.

[muzani]

If none of the alternatives are appealing, the sad truth may be that it's the best you have. We can probably get jobs in a mine or processing sewage.

If I do switch, it would be sales. If the cost to build things really goes to near zero, sales would be a lot easier. People love to buy things that are better.

[lyaocean]

I hit this twice. What helped was separating burnout from career mismatch: first fix sleep/on-call/calendar load for 6-8 weeks, then decide. If you still feel flat, move closer to a domain with visible outcomes (healthcare, logistics, education, local government) and keep tech as the tool, not the identity.

[runjake]

No, I'm more tired of the tech apathy and lack of motivation and desire to improve. It's very draining and adds additional load onto the rest of us.

I've worked in a number of other fields, some pretty crappy. Nothing has kept me engaged like tech.

[svilen_dobrev]

i know what you mean. i am die-hard DIY but that does not pay bills.

And also.. i have been asking myself alternative question..

Who do you plan to work with?

s/plan/imagine/ but still where do u find those..

[WarOnPrivacy]

I'm an on-call IT guy for small/med biz. Everyone is happy to see me and I am treated very well. Most have volunteered a desk or office for my use.

I do not tire of it.

[disillussioned]

It's a depressing state of affairs. I used to enthusiastic, but for the past few years I've been soldiering through boredom. Just a job right? Work isn't supposed to fun, right? Ya that mindset is not working for me anymore. I regret wasting my time with jobs that were just glorified crud work. My life outside of work is great, but work is now the drag on my life.

My plan is to go back to working in logistics, still have friends there, it's a rough time in that field right now: but I can't imagine myself enjoying the next few years reviewing slop, babysitting Claude, and surviving the next layoff.

[boredemployee]

Yes, I totally feel you, exactly my case.

But I have no idea what to do next, because being a dev is already my 2nd profession, but my enthusiasm is going down hill these days.

[austin-cheney]

When I want an education I write my own software to solve real world problems. Otherwise I do what they tell me and get paid.

You have to realize corporate software exists within a bell curve, which means don’t be awesome. Be compatible, at least at work. In your own software be as awesome as possible according to features and numeric measures.

You also have to also understand you will likely be surrounded by people who think they are awesome when they actually suck really bad. You can look for some place that does not have shitty people or learn to let them make all the noise so that you can just chill and use company time for your own personal desires. To avoid shitty people look for jobs with the highest barrier to entry.

If you want to be in management learn to do 6 things at once all day, really care about people, and develop vastly superior communication skills, and finally learn when to STFU.

[markus_zhang]

Definitely burned out already. But, hey, it is what keeps bread on the table, so I can't complain too much. I just need to patiently wait until my kid goes to college and then I can drift by. We plan to pay for his tuition, gift him a small apartment once he goes job hunting, which I think is pretty generous. Of course he needs to earn as much $$ as he can and be independent.

I should make myself a clock saying "X days until college". Once it clicks I'll go straight to a local university to register some courses, rent some cabins, and enjoy life.

[solarisos]

The shift from 'building cool stuff' to 'navigating endless layers of abstraction and compliance' is definitely wearing people down. It feels like we spend more time managing the 'noise' around the work (Slack, Jira, AI-generated emails) than actually writing code that solves problems. I've found that working on a small side project with a very constrained, 'old school' tech stack is the only way I can still find the joy in it lately.

[codevark]

I'm tired of working in tech but fortunately (or not) it's my hobby so even if I retired I would still be doing all the techy things at home on my 17 'puters (loose count). Plus being the IT Guy for several extended families. I'm live. I'm nationwide. But, I do plan to do more art, music, gardening, etc.

[fuzzfactor]

fyi it seems like all your other comments are shadowbanned?