Any experienced engineers took a lower position as a “vacation”?

You can be even more creative than that.

Almost thirty years ago, my wife and I were in the process of adopting our two sons (now in their thirties). I had defined my career at the time as a Software engineer for hire (consultant). Technical projects, then and now, really require full attention and devotion to getting things done so I had to find a way to step out of that for a while without losing too much money or technical chops.

I found a position as a Technical Writer having Software reverse-engineering skills which was a step off of the more intense technical treadmill. Over time I found that experience complemented my original trajectory as companies are always looking for better communicators.

Given the rate of change, managing your career in consideration to your life goals is worth curating.

I've done it on and off. Lower paid jobs are often highly correlated with bad jobs though. The people are more toxic, lazier, less intelligent. It can end up more stressful, because you're used to doing things faster and more efficiently, and then just end up with people problems.

FAANG is probably less likely to face this, but if it's a step down from where you are, there's probably reasons why it's that way.

You're also going to deal with shittier code. It doesn't matter how good you are; shitty code hurts. A problem with smarter companies is they have more educated people who don't know what they're doing. Optimizing underengineered code is easy. It's harder to merge overengineered code - often new programming languages, compilers, code being on the wrong abstraction layer. Often people argue that overengineered code is just merging, but it's usually merging things that are built in such a tightly coupled way that it can't be merged. Long build times are a frequent side effect too.

Also don't stick around too long. When I go in, there's some admiration and even a little skepticism why I chose to join. After a few months, you get treated as just another person on that rank, even if you were CTO-tier. I ended up staying longer than I should have because the engineering was fun and there was some desire to prove that I wasn't there for just a vacation.

I did manage to sit around and learn a lot more, but it's slower than learning from a better group. I spent so much time putting out fires that there was rarely ever any time to really learn something. It didn't exactly hurt my career, though, just gave me more drive not to do it again.

I would guess that a typical good engineer could half-ass their job and still get good reviews. You might lose star status on you team and lose out on promotions, but I bet you could work half the hours and not get called out for bad performance.

Stress doesn't scale with seniority. There are laid back positions out there at every level so downlevelling yourself seems pointless. Especially since there's a reasonable chance that you'll take a paycut and get nothing in return for it.

I'm a mechanical engineer, not software, but a few years back I was feeling pretty burnt out from a high stress job so I took a much easier though less fulfilling gig with the plan to get back to interesting stuff when I'd recovered from the burnout. It didn't work out great. Yeah the job was a lot less stressful and I liked my new coworkers, but job difficulty was only one factor in my burnout and it took me a lot longer to recover than I'd expected, and meanwhile there were new sources of stress. My pay wasn't bad for what I was doing but it was still objectively low compared to what I needed to maintain my standard of living and I definitely wasn't padding my saving account. A lot of stress inducing parts of the job like the commute don't scale with pay; I could put up with things like this when I was making good money and working on interesting projects, but I don't want to sit in traffic for an hour just to sit in an office and be bored. Even though the stakes were lower, I was still heavily involved in a lot of projects and my coworkers depended on me, so even after I was ready to go back into "real" engineering, I still dragged my feat for a while as it never really felt like the right time. Looking back on it, I'd much rather have just taken 6 months off from working entirely and either worked on personal projects or travelled than wind up spending about 3 years spinning my wheels with little to show for it.

It’s unclear what you mean here. You are a large system engineering lead with a lot of pressure, and would like to go back to making sketchy internal tools for HR to relief the load for a while? That kind of thing?

I’ve not been in that position, but if I was, I think I’d rather take a 6-month break and do nothing than spending 2 years at a desk doing meaningless work.

Depending on your definition of mid-level, some FAANG companies wouldn't allow this: companies are sometimes "up-or-out" for entry-level and mid-level engineering, and require engineers to get to senior engineer after about 5 years of total of relevant experience or risk getting fired.

At such companies, someone applying with 10 YoE will only be considered for senior engineer or higher roles. But you could go from staff to senior if you wanted.

If you need a vacation, then take one. Negotiate a couple of months off. Travel, do things that you couldn't try otherwise. When you come back to your job you will be recharged and performing better than before you left.

I'm about 7 years in the industry and removed all the full stack stuff from my resume. I haven't been noticing a significant salary delta between jobs that ask you to do front end, back end and dev ops at the same time and more pure back end roles, but I have noticed that I get leaned on harder than my peers have specialized.

You may end up working more. Companies that pay less do so because they are inefficient. This means people work a lot more but in very inefficient ways. I’ve found that companies that pay more usually have figured out how to use the workers to produce real value instead of having them use 3 different tools to ask for a device f.e.

I took a part time job at an airline. After we load the bags on the airplane, the airplane leaves and there is no more stress. No long running projects. No big egos. The pay is rough, but would highly recommend.

What is mid-level FAANG a downgrade from . . ? Mid-level FAANG seems like it'd be a huge "upgrade" in compensation and scale for most developers, and would be the crowning jewel of their career.

I moved to Europe, Denmark specifically. Money is not as good but there are min 5 weeks of vacation per year, first day of child sickness you can take off, ppl leave office at 4-5 pm with rare exceptions, unlimited sick days, 37.5 h work per week and an attitude of "this sounds like a Monday problem" when you get some bug Friday afternoon.Oh, and if you need to be on call they cannot force you unless was specified before in the contract and needs to be paid. I call it my semi-retirement after working both in a FAANG company, startups and Wall St. I do miss sometimes being at the center of tech or the fires I put out that made me feel like super hero, but with a family this life fits me much better.

You might find this is not an easy thing to do! Would you want someone on your team who you even suspected viewed their role as a vacation? Would you hire someone like that above someone who was ambitious and keen to prove themselves?

I do this (mid-level when arguably capable of senior) but in the public sector. This enables me to deal with some challenging caring responsibilities and also have some time for hobbies and family in general. And get to do a 4-day week, which is maybe harder as a senior. Sure it means we have less £, but time is more important than £, and in tech we have the luxury of being able to do this and still get by (with frugal habits). IMHO people should ask themselves why they want to be a senior. Sure you get more money and status if that floats your boat, but you also get more responsibility which could mean stress. If being more senior grants you more autonomy, that could be worth it. Where I work its equal whether you're senior or not, in fact as a mid-level you get more time to code and less meetings. As a way to fight burnout, sounds potentially good, but depends on your employer. If they have a full-on performance mgt system, well, its easier to make the grade for a mid-level than a senior, so that's less stress immediately. BTW this is not a "vacation" to me. Maybe best to think of it as a "sensible life strategy defending against burnout". ;)

A mid level engineer at FAANG is typically a large financial upgrade compared to other industries.

I don’t think it’s a break. Mid level FAANG engineers are expected to do a lot of work, and it’s can be extremely stressful.

I think you’re seeing these as much simpler or less stressful than they are. I don’t think FAANG is on the low stress level, at least not Amazon.

I’m going to quote a NY Times article from many years ago. It was true like 7 years ago, and it’s still true today. The quote was something like, “Amazon is a place where over achievers go to feel bad about themselves.

I work as a senior contractor, and yet I am happy to take more junior roles in teams and let others be the tech lead while playing down my own experience. It’s easy street. It is a bit boring, but it’s not mentally tiring or taxing and I find that I have plenty of headspace to work on my own projects in the evenings, or for other clients.

Do not jump back into that bucket of crabs. There is no clicking your heels to go back. Source: self.

Well, there is such a thing as coast FIRE, but otherwise I don't see why people would choose this. This ki d of job is stressfull on a basic level I believe, and work is work, you're not going to squeeze a lot more of job satisfaction out of it.