I hired a chef and a manager to do the work professionally, and I pay for wages, rent, material, etc. But I get to learn the immense efforts it takes for a brownie to be on a table, for a cake to bring a smile to face, and a cheesecake to melt in the mouth. It was a fresh experience, and I really like the change of pace it brought. We have been experimenting with waffles, brownie flavors, cheese cakes, etc. It feels like buying a new domain every day!
We've been making cheese going on 8 years now, and have expanded into sheep and cow's milk production, in addition to our goat's milk varieties. Unlike most of the cheese producers around us, we focus on raw milk cheeses with natural rinds. Many of our varieties are inspired by cheese I encountered while working in Europe.
Here's a small gallery of some of our cheeses: https://imgur.com/a/zg0eaTz
https://imgur.com/a/USmPghf
Overall though, it's been net positive for my family, and while I've tried to quit farming at least half a dozen times, I was never able to bring myself to make the break.
Right now I'm in training for ordained ministry in a Christian denomination. I came back into regular church worship a few years ago, and then started studying theology through my diocese and found I loved it. Now I'm close to completing a Masters of Divinity at university, and I'm in my third year of training at theological college.
Software skills have been much more useful to all of this than you might think. In the church the idea of 'calling' has a particular prominence; sort of doing those things that you find rewarding, that you have the skills and aptitude for, and that also help others – God is seen to be in all of that, too.
It took a while but at a certain point I just realised that while I'm really good at software, it's not the other two things for me. It's a funny thing to let it go, slowly, and if I am ordained I think it'll be my equivalent of playing with train sets in the garage.
I guess what I'd take from all of this is that even in a secular sense, we're always learning about ourselves, and it's never too late to be brave and explore something new.
Solar is a fantastic industry. Lots of room for improvement feels like internet did in thr mid 90s. Just a ton of enthusiasm and a sense you're part of something big and important.
I started as a web developer, but I realized that my favorite part of the job wasn't building new pages/apps but helping my colleagues when they ran into roadblocks. I got a reputation as a problem-solver and people would come to me with their thorniest bugs or browser compatibility issues and I loved it - the detective work of investigating and diagnosing the issues, the creative solutions to work around browser limitations, and the satisfaction of helping people achieve their goals.
Then I met a product support engineer at my friend's startup and heard about that role, and realized it was an entire job made of what I loved most about my previous jobs. I joined the team and was on it for years, and have been working in technical support for software products ever since (about twelve years now). I still build websites as a hobby, but I wouldn't want to do it for a job anymore. I'm very happy in product support.
Thought about culinary school and becoming a chef but after reading Kitchen Confidential, I changed my mind. Decided on welding/fabrication and ended up working on a ranch that had a metal fabrication shop. I enrolled in some classes at the local CC so I could improve my skills and ending up getting an AA in welding and a few classes short of one in machining.
Got a part time job teaching metal trades at the local CC which led to becoming a certified welding inspector through AWS, no the other AWS. I accepted a tenure track offer but switched to management after a few years.
I became the director of CTE department that oversaw the creation of a mechatronics and cybersecurity degree program as well as opening up a makerspace. I loved it because it really allowed me to leverage my eclectic skill set. However, due to a staffing shortage I ended having to train, not teach as I wasn't faculty anymore, incumbent workers as part of a industry partnership. So now I was working two jobs, one blue collar and one white collar. This led to working 12+ hour days and coming in on weekends so I could catch up. In a nutshell, my objections to the situation fell on deaf ears so I quit out of frustration.
After a short break I went back to university to finish my bachelor's degree with the tentative idea of pursuing a job in edtech. Right after I graduated lockdowns started so I took the time to explore some other avenues while I looked for a job.
Today, I'm solo dev working on my first indie game funded by selling some Bitcoins I had been sitting on for over a decade. With the current geopolitical situation aside, I couldn't be happier.
[0] https://longwalkwoodworking.com [1] https://github.com/longwalkwoodworking
Started 1.5 months ago, and enjoying every minute of it! No longer occupying my mind with corporate power dynamics saves a lot of cognitive bandwidth, but to my surprise it has been replaced. I thought I'd feel more 'free', but instead I now feel self-imposed pressure to make this one shot count. I know my runway is limited, so every day that didn't tangibly contribute to bottom-line growth feels wasted. I can rationalize it by reminding myself that I can always get a job and try again later, and that I should be spending most of my time on mid to long-term goals that have delayed effects. But that hardly changes how I _feel_. All in all, I'm really glad I made the jump, and I'm still super excited about what I do now.
Let's just say the last 20 years of my life have been an adventure. Life is good.
I'm loving it. I don't sit or stand in place for eight hours a day. I'm learning a ton. I'm engaging with both local builders and master craftspeople. I get to share my work with family, friends, and neighbors. There's a lot of volunteer opportunities that don't require anything but showing up and willingness to help.
If anyone is interested in leaving tech for woodworking, feel free to reach out. My contact info is in my profile.
I had kids, and my spouse flat out makes more money than me for fewer hours and better benefits. So, I am now the full time parent. We decided that having one of us stay home would be the best for the kids. So far it seems to make a difference.
It has really great parts and hard bits too. Basically, after a decade of short deadlines and long hours it's hard to adjust to the final product being your kids be good people by 2035. You get to rediscover the joy of playing at the playground, pet neighborhood dogs, and visit libraries and museums. On the other hand,I think that in the first year of COVID my number of adults interacted with per week approached 1.
I admit that I keep my foot in the door at one of my previous employers where I do someplace between zero and 5 hours a week of work on some legacy systems I helped build and have now been left to grow unchecked for 10 years.
Overall, I think that from a pure lifestyle perspective I don't think I can go back to 50+ hour weeks.
Worked at Twitch as an early-ish employee, we got acquired by Amazon. Made it to Principal Engineer and just got tired of the sorts of problems that are hardest in software at scale: project management, building consensus, migrating systems.
Also got really tired of the wastefulness of software: so much software gets thrown out in under 5 years. Stuff that lasts 10 years is considered extraordinary, and 20 years is almost unheard of. I don’t like knowing how ephemeral all the effort is. Maybe one day we will know how to make good software but we dont today.
So I want to make “permanent” stuff. Nothing meets that bar but furniture and carpentry can at least manage a few hundred years.
I totally love it and don’t miss my old career at all. The pay is way worse but I saw this coming and saved well while I was paid the insane software salaries that are common today. I am on my feet, more fulfilled, and find the mental effort is actually much higher - the problem solving is more interesting to me. Mostly though I am just much more proud of what I make and do.
There's not enough houses for people to live in. Most people hate you for "driving up prices" and "gentrifying neighborhoods" - but it leaves me much more satisfied than engineering.
After paying ~40% tax for a decade and paying ~3x what the Fed and State spend per Capita over a lifetime - it's nice to see my working hours reduced dramatically and my true tax rate drop down to ~12%.
You don't need to make $1M per year, when you don't have to give $400k to the tax man.
Basic reasons for switch: 1) self-taught dev, so felt like I was always playing from behind; 2) wanted to pursue interests I had before going into tech; 3) felt like I wasn't productive in college, and thus wanted to have an intellectual experience.
I didn't think at all during law school that I would go back to being a dev (exiting to in-house counsel role in tech was always a possibility). However, working full-time in law has made it clear this is a huge misfit for me culturally, and also the work of being a lawyer mostly involves a bunch of low-skilled bullshit. I thought that I was leaving a more superficial industry to go into something with more intellectual depth and thoughtfulness, but it turned out to be the opposite.
Happy to elaborate if anyone wants; previous times I have mentioned this on HN, people really wanted to know more, but I was unable to answer them in time, unfortunately.
During that time, I wrote open-source stuff, on the side (unpaid).
Since leaving that job, I am now writing code, more than ever, and still not getting paid.
Not what you're looking for, I know, but that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
I’m currently apprenticing with a master binder who’s nearby.
We were quite successful but the retail was wearing on me. Specifically retail employees are a challenging bunch to manage because retail margins are so low. I developed a saying: "You can either find someone good at customer service or someone knowledgeable. Anyone who's good at both can find a job paying a lot more." The best employees we had always left for a career in a field outside of retail.
My manager was a great guy. He's very personable, remembers everyone's name, very caring, and knows the products inside and out. He does lack a few management skills but I think he's probably near the top in the industry. He's studying to become a social worker.
During the time we had the store, we did a software startup and had a couple of engineers. I was far happier doing that work and working with that team.
When Covid hit and everything shutdown, I was delivering product to customers and thinking to myself over and over again "I would rather be writing code." So we decided to close. It was really sad to close the store after 18 years. However, my wife told me a few months later that I looked far happier than I had been for years. Now I'm really excited to be getting back into the tech industry.
I switched because this is better. Healthier. Saner. Happier. More in line with my long-term goals and general growth.
Compensation wasn’t really effected one way or another since trajectory has been steady upward. I think that slows down nowish since I didn’t come up in the traditional business and many more senior roles are filled by traditional executives.
Like many people right now I’m evaluating options for better work-life balance and really actually miss learning new domains. The downside of looking at other options is the role is so unique I don’t fit exactly into most roles at other companies. So it’s been hard to get a foot in the door with other companies outside the industry I’m in.
[1]: https://bonene.com/
Moved to academia, got a PhD in machine learning, got a bunch of publications in high ranking outlets, and managed to land an entry level assistant position - but now I'm stuck in the same position, just in academia. My work/life balance is probably a bit better. Still love computer science and will probably keep on, but it's a cruel mistress!
My role now still has me involved in solving problems, and I will still review technical architecture (eg why are you proposing a GraphDB for this highly structured data, how are you going to address the fact that Cassandra is eventually consistent, etc.), but it’s a lot more people and solutions driven. A lot of email, Excel, and Zoom. Very little writing scripts and running queries, which I do once a quarter or so.
When I talk to developers, a lot of them expect me to gush about how much better things are once you’re away from the code. The truth is that I frequently regretted not sticking with a basic software developer trajectory from the start.
Management of any type is far more difficult than it appears from the outside. A huge part of my management jobs has been handling and hiding all of the problems that come up so that the team doesn’t have to deal with them. The better I’ve done my job, the easier it looks from the outside. My teams should never have to know about the difficult battles I’ve dealt with, down to some of the most bizarre and even scary personnel problems I’ve had to handle.
Software development felt like the most difficult and least-appreciated job at the company when I was young, but after a tour of management positions I miss the days of being able to sit down with a team and solve hard problems in the code.
I’ve had three dev jobs since then and have learned that while I love coding I can’t be a professional dev for the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with it, I just need more variety.
So I founded https://careerswitchtocoding.com to help new devs and career switchers land their first dev job.
I’ve also grown a dev focussed Instagram account to 56K followers along the same lines https://instagram.com/allthecode
I’m now full time on this and working out how to build a proper sustainable business model around it.
I love coding and developers and so I want to help new developers have awesome careers.
Friend of mine though, he became a postman, about ten years ago. He was never quite happy being a software engineer. I see him occasionally and he's always happy with a job where he gets to work by walking around in the open most of the day.
I often wonder what it would be like to live that life without the money pressure they have. Where you're not trapping beaver to pay for bullets, so you can hunt deer to have enough food for the winter etc. There are lots of other shows like this ("The Last Alaskans", "Life Below Zero", "Yukon Men" etc).
I went to college for CS, but I knew I couldn’t manage a 40+ hour work week. I did some part time web dev for local companies and hated it. I then shifted to being a photographer, with the idea that the seasonality of the work would let me work on my own projects in the winter.
That kind of worked out, but it turns out that the photography takes up a lot more of my time than I thought. I released an app for the Wii U/3DS that did decently well. I made some extensions for Photoshop that absolutely flopped, though I did get a job offer due to it that I had to turn down due to timing.
At some point during all that I/my doctors figured out what was wrong with me - somewhat, at least. Treating my terribly low testosterone helped significantly and I take stimulants to make up the rest.
Now I’m settled with my wife and baby where we grew up, which is rural. I’ve been thinking about quitting the photography to go back in to development but I’m 33 with basically no relevant work experience. Quite frankly, I don’t know how good I’d be at the job either. I have no basis for comparison for my programming skills and I haven’t exactly kept up.
I’m guessing I could get a local job but I don’t know if the pay would be better than what I make now. Theoretically with a few years under my belt I could maybe get a remote position that I’d possibly enjoy and would pay better.
I feel stuck. I love doing (high school) senior photography, so I’d hate to give that up. It’s also just a small portion of my business and I’ve had a hard time expanding it even though my work is definitely the best in the area.
Don’t discount how nice actually using your brain during your job is. Retouching/editing is largely brainless once you’re at my level and the only thing that keeps me sane are podcasts/audiobooks.
I’m switching because first of all, I have the financial luxury of doing so. Secondly, because, as another person said, I feel like it’s my calling. My meaning and purpose in life that was missing from a tech job that I actually really loved, but wasn’t spiritually fulfilling.
Life is short, and money is only one part of the equation, so we’ll see how it goes from here. =)
The previous change also moved in that direction, but it was still in software, but then we started a foundation and built data systems that supports countries that receive development aid, and those organisations that supported them.
The work is super rewarding. But more work than either of the previous half a dozen startups.
But I started a cleaning company. I build custom software to help run the business because I could not find anything to fit my needs. My skills also came in handy to build the website to make it exactly for our needs.
And things like building a chatbot to help bring on new cleaners is what we are starting to build right now.
I still code, but not so much these days. Mostly manage and architect. But occasionally I get my hands dirty to deal with things I want quickly and efficiently.
I want to become a full time writer, part time programmer/indie hacker.
Life is much more than a big tech salary you can’t leave. You can bet your bippy that I’m going to work hard enough to be able to leave that behind in the next few years or retire early on reduced income to pursue it for awhile.
I went through chicken farming, loading trucks at a builder's merchant, handling directory enquiries phone calls, fork lift driving, designing kitchens, fruit picking, managing vehicle fleets, and more.
Eventually concluded dev work is what I love and returned to it about 5 years later.
Honestly, not much of a career change, but given the new position, I can be much more exposed to new technologies, get to try out new things, like IoT and Blockchain as well. Hopefully with the new knowledge I acquired, I can start my own business someday. Mostly since somewhere along the road of coding 8-to-5 as a developer, I want to create something for myself instead of building other's dream.