Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

(OP here) I wanted to avoid a wall of text, so I'll elaborate here on where I'm coming from.

My complaints with FAANG have to do with perverse incentives that reward nonsensical decisions, poorly thought-out and over-engineered projects, grandiose documents, duplication of work, selective reporting of metrics, etc.

The few times I had a really good manager, a sane environment, and fulfilling work only lasted until the next reorg. It seems like most organizations are either stressful with a lot of adversarial behavior, or have almost nothing to do but depressing busywork. I also find the social aspect lackluster if not downright alienating. I feel at a dead end both in career growth and opportunities to learn on the technical side. I could roll the dice with another team change, but I'm not eager at the prospects.

Most of my work experience is in ML, but I don't want to box myself into that. I find the current hype around generative models insufferable, and the typical ML project today consists of somewhat sloppy Python and a lack of good engineering practices. I'm also tired of the increasingly long and opaque feedback loops (come up with an idea, wait for your giant model to retrain, hope that some metric goes up). I'm still passionate about some aspects (e.g., learning representations, knowledge grounding, sane ML workflows).

I hear that academia has similar issues (though again I mostly know about ML), and I imagine lots of industries have worse conditions than tech. I realize that sloppiness and politics are a fact of life, so I'm wary of falling into the "grass is greener" trap.

I burnt out hard after almost 20 years programming, mostly web things, last decade in the full-stack JavaScript ecosystem. Last year I started building simple electronic stuff with the Raspberry Pi Pico board. It's not far off from programming and I had to learn C (Python feels too JS somehow), but being able to literally move things with electrons and code and talk directly to the metal awakened something in me.

I got YouTube Premium, unsubscribed from all the "funny stuff" and subscribed to makers, builders, creators, electronic, aviation, etc. channels only. I am AMAZED at what you can build right now in your own home. I am building an electromagnetic jet engine from scratch. It sounds crazy when you say it out loud but it's the 2023 equivalent of assembling model gliders from balsa wood decades ago.

Here are a few channels that inspired and helped me the most:

Fantastic explanation of how electricity/circuits/elements work:

https://www.youtube.com/@ELECTRONOOBS

https://www.youtube.com/@greatscottlab

These guys are into aviation and actually iterate on their projects:

https://www.youtube.com/@rctestflight

https://www.youtube.com/@TomStantonEngineering

These two are wizards of explaining physics and engineering:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheActionLab

https://www.youtube.com/@Nighthawkinlight

I can't even comprehend the level of engineering this guy does in his garage:

https://www.youtube.com/@StuffMadeHere

PS. If you're getting into electronics from programming it's really, I mean really easy, to do the programming bits which most makers struggle with (because they are pros in circuits and other things). A lot of the learning curve is stuff like "what is a compiler" or "how to install an IDE" which you got covered.

> Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.

Sports/activities are great. I don't know how old you are, or if you have kids or not, but if you have little responsibility, I would pick an activity and then move somewhere that the activity is easily accessible.

If it's surfing, then move to somewhere and live on the beach. If it's skiing/snowboarding, live on a mountain during the season. Hiking, move to near mountains with fairly good weather (or bad weather if that's your thing), etc.

It's the advice I give everyone that feels like they are burning out since it helped me, but obviously everyone is different.

If you are able to, I'd recommend to take a sabbatical. I took 6 months off 9 years ago and I'm still super glad I did. Give your mind some rest and peace, disconnect and everything will follow. If that's not an option, why not join a smaller company where you can work fully remote and only 4 days a week? I have yet to meet somebody that went from 5 to 4 days/week and regretted it. There are so many profitable companies that pay good salaries (although not on a FAANG level), but don't come with the politics, give you the freedom to structure your day while still doing impactful work.

When it comes to burnout, the general advice I received is take minimum 1 year off work.

I left my job a few months ago as the burnout got so bad I wasn’t able to conjure up the motivation to tackle the simplest of tasks.

First couple months I didn’t feel any better and I was getting worried. But I’m _just_ starting to feel better now. I’m finding myself more positive and less stressed.

So what am I doing? I’m living out of my car travelling around NZ, doing a crazy amount of hiking, and a tiny amount of freelancing.

> Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.

I left my job 2022 February to not sit in meetings and mostly be a preventer of bad engineering rather than a builder of good stuff. On a good day, I told people how they were wrong - on a bad day, I told them how they were wrong, again.

If you have the option of taking a sabbatical, I would recommend taking one out of your own choice rather than being an unemployment statistic due to your own lack of motivation.

I quit rather than a sabbatical, because I could hand-pick my successors for the roles I occupied and it was better to kick about 3 people into core roles & get them promoted for it, than have them do the work only for me to show up 8 weeks later to hand it all back in for no benefit to their careers.

Took me 3 months before I didn't feel the need to "accomplish something today" to feel good about my day and mostly I went through my Netflix list, read through a ton of books that I've always meant to read and went for walks to the coffee shop instead of driving.

This isn't the first break of my life and it's technically possible to double your summer break in a year, because we've got options for winter.

The biggest thing that has always helped me in these situations is to head to the other side of the planet, because being in a cold place with short days feels bad when you wake up and there's nothing to do immediately on your mind.

I just got back from a trip to Patagonia and the only reason I haven't headed back to New Zealand again, is because I'm now interviewing again for jobs (also kids, kids need to be in school).

If you are talented, with a significant experience going back years, the fact that you took a break from your career to do something else for a bit isn't going to matter to a single employer. Oddly enough, I also spent enough time away to be out of the no-competes for a few work related systems, so my open areas expanded because of a break.

If you're tired of work, don't find another job - you probably need to remember who you are outside of work, before you can go back in to do something else.

In 2018, I took a year-long sabbatical from a FAANG company (FYI, I was principal level and it required VP approval). I had previously taken a few 1-3 month breaks between positions prior to the sabbatical. Although am I grateful for the extended breaks, they are far from a panacea and downright stressful if you set your expectations too high :).

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further.

I felt less and less excited about tech/programming over the years. Not sure if I would call it burnout, but just a sense of boredom and that I didn't learn new and exciting stuff anymore.

7 years ago I decided to just leave it all, reset my life, and try something new. After trying some different things I found a new passion for photography. Which in turn lead me to start a youtube channel about photography. Which is now my full time job. Never been happier in my life!

If anyone is curious about my story, I have a 20 minute video about the transition from tech entrepreneur to photography youtuber here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHvh87gm7M

Better a small boss than a big servant, right? (Chinese proverb I believe)

No need to hesitate - you've worked 10 years in FAANG, you'll get 10 jobs offers per month if needed. So, just do it.

But remember, freedom is responsibility.

So, have fun while doing 3 or 4 projects of your list. Switch between them to keep it light and fun. If you get depressed or if you start to just consuming full-time (gaming, Netflix, sleeping, party/drugs etc) for a prolonged period (>month) you don't have the "rigor" and you should get back to a job where people tell you what to do.

In essence, be your own best parent/teacher.

Good luck.

Related

Go to work for a Fortune 100 company. In my experience, the salary isn’t as good, the food and massages aren’t free, but the work life balance is much better. I never feel stress. I enjoy the work. I like my coworkers. I’m the complete opposite of burned out.

You might want to look at computational biology. Jim Allison won the Nobel Prize back in 2018 for his work on immunotherapy for cancer and there's a lot of basic research work to be done to perfect this approach. Epigenetic clocks are really interesting too (see Steve Horvath's work). Also, there's synthetic biology, where you could, for example, explore this package that's written in Go: https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly

If you've spent 10+ years at big companies, you should have ample savings to have at least a couple of years to yourself to try and build your own great idea.

Sitting in front of a computer sucks less when you're working for yourself rather than making money for others.

I did something similar and stopped working for over a year. I just took on some basic contracting and just let my curiosity drive me. The whole idea was to just not plan and let things happen naturally because I was tired of trying to minmax everything I did. I tried many things, shared it with people, and then ended up finding my passion as well as a new job in an area that I haven't considered before.

As a reminder, what you are passionate about and what you do for work does not have to be the same. I would say it's best to keep it separate. Keeping it separate helped ground myself and care less about my career. At the end of the day, I can't say the last 10 years of my career was something I am proud of sharing with my friends and family. No one cares that you built a dashboard that saved the organization a million dollars; I certainly don't. People care about your passions and what drives you, and I care about working on something that I can be proud of.

My suggestion would be to just pick anything you are interested in and just go with the flow. When you get to a point where you are no longer interested, next.

Let yourself be and you'll see.

I couldn't suggest what you should do next with your life because of course that's different to everyone.

But seeing that your experience is mostly on FAANGs and big companies, have you thought of going with a smaller early-stage company? These are environments where people usually expose them selves to a broader spectrum of things, even having the ability to choose specifically what they want to work on.

Workplace politics unfortunately are everywhere, small or big companies. You can't really avoid those.

I also can't stress enough other replies here about really exploring your self outside of work. What do you like spending your time on outside of working hours? Any hobbies that take your mind off? If there aren't any, can you start exploring new activities (without necessary having to take a sabbatical or move to another place?)

If Ableton is an escape valve for you maybe don't make that your work right now. Keep the pieces of your life that are 'working' 'working' don't go changing them yet.

You list complex systems research. What about looking for marine research adjacent jobs? They are trying to understand complex interconnected systems and need help integrating so many different projects across many universities. Not sure if MBARI or UCSC have something interesting where you could go on a boat out to sea but back in the late 90s there some really cool jobs relating to that that would have recharged me. Improve the world's knowledge, on a boat out at sea, and maybe a little scuba. Heck yeah!

Maybe you would enjoy reading about why I quit tech to become a therapist: http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/

As a random suggestion for a project to pursue, over the past few years I've thought that there needs to be some way to cryptographically sign media that was recorded by a camera - basically a way to say "Yes, this is a real thing that happened, and you can prove it with this signature." Especially given the leaps in audio, video, deepfakes, etc, we're all going to need a means for verifying that something is real.

I'll grant that something like this is not a panacea - we need good solid media literacy. But I think a technical solution will help us out.

What helped me was surround myself with people I like - I mean, work wise. That’s much easier said than done.

Michael and Dalton touch on this on a recent video where they compare modern FAANG with Goldman Sachs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0

The founder culture is so full of kool-aid that it can be tough to find those people there, too, but I found overall that that was the best place for me. Interestingly, I found the older and more successful people to be much more sane, and super happy to meet smart sane young people. I have a lot of older friends now; many are founders of large companies who are just glad to have normal conversations - the kind of people that as a FAANG middle manager would be status contacts to brag about but now are just nice folks to grab a pint with.

The good people in tech still exist, and they’re often at key positions. But at Goldman Sachs I mean FAANG you’ll have a tough time fighting through middle management. And BOY was that FAANG culture bad for my mental health…

I hope this makes some sense. Watch the video, I think it will cheer you up big time:).

If I were in your position, I’d evaluate my relationship with “work”. Challenges you describe might be perennial wherever you go, so maybe the question is not “how can I be more fulfilled at work?” But rather “how can I maximise the fulfilment I get outside of work?”

You sound like you’re going to have to trade your labour for money (ie you don’t have enough to become independent yet) so if you accept that fact, perhaps you can find a non stressful job and discover meaning in the Real parts of your life. Good luck

If I had $1m lying around now I would drop everything and focus on longevity/medical research. Who cares about making improvements to gadgets if we're all going to die in a few decades.

The faster this tech bubble bursts and people stop flocking to engineering the better.

"working in ML", nothing like research on an arbitrary deadline to burn out staff. "Distributed systems" is hard, but working on Julia seems like a natural consolidation of your interests.

A 1 year break is a good idea, if you are at the burn-out stage with persistent neck pain, and constant illnesses due to immune system stress.

The ikigai chart is pretty good guidance: https://management30.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IKIGAI--...

Generally, most take a graduate course, or pick up a new certified skill.

Synthetic biology study is interesting, as it approaches some problems in unique ways. Also, a course on Human Behavioral Biology may be interesting if you are interested in Neuromorphic engineering.

Different people have different ideas of fun. =)

If you're burnt out, I suggest a proper vacation. You can then do anything from your list of interests.

My personal journey out of burnout: Stop chasing ‘latest new tech’ (where that be node packages, gadgets, or whatever) and social status. Sell things you don’t actually use and refuse to buy more. Listen more than you speak. Assume good intent by everyone. Assume individuals (differentiate this from the opinions on popular media however) are right and you are wrong. Finally: volunteer, in person, at a charity of some sort. Helping people in need does a lot of things, including resetting perspective.

You mentioned office politics but some of the FAANG parts aren't that bad. Why don't you see how your friends feel? Friend of a friend works at google with autonomous vehicles (I think it was android for cars), he liked it there while the web dev at google left pretty quickly.

If you have a passion and want to share it, see if you can contribute to home assistant, there's a project to add a chat gpt like to it although it looks more like a decision tree.

I’d agree with you that a sabbatical would be ideal. However, I’d say it’d be interesting if you make it a somewhat “active” sabbatical.

In your place, I’d read, exercise, or just dig deeper into something I’m interested in.

Personally, whenever I feel I’m close to burning out, I realize it’s not because of how much I work, but because of thinking I have no purpose. Choosing my own path gives me purpose, and that’s very helpful.

Maybe that’ll give you some food for thought. Hope it helps.

Have you been 10 years at the same company? That is a long, long time. Simply trying something new might be enough to knock you out of your slump. ML is just one niche - why not move to an infra team, security team, sre team or similar? It will be completely new and may reignite your love for engineering.

I'm mixed on sabbaticals. I think the key thing with a sabbatical, for me at least, is it should be treated as doing another job for a while - pick a personal project, some open source you are interested in, and deliver some major functionality on it over a few months. You mentioned Emacs - there is lots of work that Emacs needs for improvement, so it is ripe with things you can pick up and work on. The worse thing for me is just sitting around and doing nothing, that leads me to depression if I do it for long enough.

As others have said, I'd also suggest working on your relationship to work. Seeing a therapist may help with this. If you can find fulfillment outside of work, then the work itself becomes less big in your life and it's easier to avoid burnout.

Go to Hawaii or Tahiti and lay on the beach till you can't stand it.

Definitely take a sabbatical, but it should be at least 6 months, preferably a year. Do what you feel like during that time.

> - Cryptography and security (not cryptocurrency/blockchain): I have a math background and I was always an algebra/discrete math person, so this seems a potential fit.

There's lots of cool stuff happening with zero-knowledge proofs at the moment, if you want to look in that direction.

Go travel for a few months. Some place you don’t know the language. Change your environment to something different than what you’re used to!

It may not immediately reveal what the best option is. But you won’t regret traveling, and this sounds like the perfect time to do it.

It's hard to suggest things tbh because it's very individual.

I decided to buy and move to a farm we're I will renovate it myself and create an environment which is quite, green and lively.

I also hope that this will give me the balance and allows me to look outside in my future park while working and also being able to transition into life work balance which is worth it.

Then I will try to design a sustainable day to day schedule for enough time for outside and study time. The study time itself will than be containing all the things you mentioned like learning music or another language.

It's crypto related but a bit on its ear, but AML/KYC firms (disclosure, I work for one that got bought by Mastercard) take a more rigorous, and less hype-centric approach (mostly because it's about Anti Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism funding on Crypto, than about Crypto itself). Lot's of data, lots of interesting problems.

Otherwise, I'd say if you have a musical bent, certainly any Ableton like project would be a bounty of "fun" (I've always wanted to see a drum programming rig that equal parts Ableton and Reason)

A bit of time off will do you good. Then consider your skill set and the things you liked and didn't like about your past experiences. Try to find something that lies in the intersection of those things.

I would offer that the more clearly and honestly you formulate those things, the more likely it is that the right opportunity will present itself. Nothing magical about this philosophy, it's a simple consequence of being able to say "no" to the many possible wayward paths that we normally waste precious time on.

> I'd also like to minimize the type of workplace politics I've experienced at FAANG.

You're going to find workplace politics everywhere. I suggest you make professional communications your next vocation, which will teach you how to master like a ninja all those uncomfortable political behaviors and situations you dislike and turn you into the technology achiever you want to be. Possessing professional communication skills teaches one how to slice through politics with katana sharp language and words.

Burnout compounds and is hard to come back from. I’d be very careful. I’ve seen a couple of bad cases over the years, where these people really aren’t quite the same as they were.

Have you ever seriously looked into doing your own startup? I've been founding SaaS startups for the past 5 years and I can't go back. Hasn't been as lucrative (thus far) as FAANG would have been, but it's paid the bills and has been far, far, far more enjoyable than any corporate job.

Would be more than happy to give you my perspective and what it's been like as a small, moderately successfuly SaaS founder. Ping me at scottmas@altmails.com

Cryptography and security, on a professional level. But I would say just take a sabbatical, travel and enjoy life without a computer. P.s. Italy has good food :)

It's important to prioritize self-care and manage work-life balance to avoid burnout and finding ways to enjoy life beyond your computer screen.

Transition to contracting can provide a change of pace and allow you to have more control over the projects you work on and the clients you work with. This could give you the time and help you determine if you'd like to stay in the tech field or venture into something different.

> Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.

If you really want to get outdoors a lot and also do something technical, move somewhere really rural with low cost of living and start a wireless ISP or tiny regional fiber to the home ISP. Depends how good your network engineering knowledge or ability to teach yourself is, and level of interest in doing residential access ISP operations, of course.

Since you have done some ML and have math background, you can perhaps look into 'Distributed Machine Learning'. The recent development such as ChatGPI required huge resources for training and data. Perhaps, distributed ML has a potential to democratize ML space.

I suggest lookin the following page

https://michaelkamp.org

to be honest i don't understand what the problem is. I never worked at a FAANG so maybe i don't get it or i'm insensitive. you made a shit ton of money. you probably have so much money you can retire. what is your problem? i worked on a startup for 15 years and never got funding despite products an revenue. i'm tired too and i have nothing saved up for retirement and i'm in my 40s. problems are relative ... there are people much worse off than i am. sure you might have to figure out what's next but if you have $ in the bank is that really a big deal?

i see googlers on linkedin making a big drama they are fired. really? you made all this money, who cares? you can go do something else or retire. how many people have been waiting for years to get a FAANG job? as a googler you need to wait a year and you call that a problem? people are so far of from reality it is mind boggling. and they think because they worked at google they are entitled to a job tomorrow pronto.

May I ask why you're even looking for a "fix" to the job situation? More than 10 years at the highest-paying companies will likely have set you up with more money than the average person will make in two lifetimes. Why are you looking for work at a place with less office politics instead of not working and just doing whatever makes you happy?

Lower your expenses. Move cheaper. Be more basic Say you can live on 40% of your current salary. Join a startup or smaller company for a smaller salary. Perhaps you can even work 3 days a week? Spend the other 2 in passion projects.

I recently started to make mods for various Unity games. It is a lot of fun, I do it in my pace and the way I want it.

Try public service. The knowledge and experience you would bring to the table would be extremely valuable. The sector may not move as fast as big tech but everyday you go home, you will know that you made an impact on your community. It will be gratifying at a deeper level.

what about a really long vacation?

like half a year or more. call it a sabbatical.

if you have kids and/or a significant other, take them with you.

you are already thinking about what to do next. find a way to not do thing, other than sun and relax and maybe some bodily activity.

(From my experience, had more than 1 burn out over the years).

> - Helping out with homelessness, loneliness, the elderly or disabled

I think solving problems in that space or just helping out will give huge amounts of good vibe energy and eventually lead to something you want to do in the long term.

Join HVM and Kindelia’s Discord. https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

Read Interaction Nets paper

I am more or less in the same situation (s/FAANGs/startups) with a shift in interests (though still interested in CS somehow...), would be great to chat if you are up to.

Love your list of problems.

I would say they are all great ideas.

Do wonder why something tangential to climate crisis isn't on there?

Lots of interesting work in green-tech. It's all heavy on distributed systems too.

Can't you just retire after 10 years at FAANG? Just do what you want for a year.

I find it mind-blowing that people actually need advice on what to do with their free time.

> Formal verification / theorem proving

You could use your sabatical to learn F*, Agda or similar.

Easy to then transition to a nice, slow moving and meaningful engineering position.

adjacently related to purpose-driven projects, I've founded the company that competes with college by creating a pathway from high school to careers, and we are starting to get some momentum. I built an mvp to get some awesome pilots going, but now looking for someone to take over the tech role as we go from 0++

if it sounds like this might fuel you rather than consume you, email me: dbreggs22@gmail.com

> Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

small tech

Look back from 2030. Which one of these will have added most to the stories you will tell your grand-kids.

Are you taking proper vacations?

I mean for 10+ consecutive days. Completely disconnected from work. No email etc.

For those of you with families and took a sabbatical, what did you do about health insurance?

Switch to a remote team and work less hours. 4 hour work week by Tim Ferriss blah blah blah

How about a smaller, more meaningful but still well-funded ML company like Anthropic

I know self-driving cars have had a rough several years, but there are still some good companies out there where ML would be highly valued and the problems are more grounded.

(Cruise, for example - have a friend who works there)

Take a year out and travel somewhere, reset.

How do you feel about founding a startup?

I am in the exact same place. Feel ya.

Go to a farmhouse and farm for a year, off and on.

You will recover.

Layoffs.

>I want to leave tech, here are some alternatives I’ve considered

>all tech roles

I am now going to be mean, pardon my early morning attitude:

You spent > 10 years at a FAANG and you are burnt out. Oh-kay, if you played the cards even half way right, you have more money in the bank than any three of us, and you can just leave and figure out which one of those (good) ideas you listed you would like to do. Heck, you probably made a lot of good connections there, and could take your (deserved) abbatical and then create a startup with friends exploring one (or more) of those good ideas at your own pace.

To me, in my eyes, what I just wrote down sounds like a pipe-dream. If I could I would...