pcglue

Laid off in 2023 and coped by retiring early at age 48. I look for remote jobs every now and then, but they are getting scarce. Will not be working in office or even hybrid if I don't have to.

I get what he's doing and why and even agree with some/most of it. But a subtle pervasive holier-than-thou attitude in the writing just turns me off.

I burned out bad last year and quit during the summer. As soon as I gave notice, everything became better. I spent the past year learning daytrading (not going well) and working on side projects (also not going well), yet it's not causing me the stress I felt on the job. But I'm about to start applying and trying to find work again. I fear I'm no longer cut out for software dev anymore. I need to find an easy laid-back job where I don't need to be a "leader". It was being a leader that burned me out. I don't want to decide on overall direction or use bleeding edge tech or be responsible for a project. I just want to work on well-defined CRUD.

Embedded software development, $165/hour

Mostly PIC16/18/32, some STM32.

Whenever I leave tabs open in FF, it'll consume 3GB+ of memory and slow my computer to a crawl. I do the same in Chrome and it'll consume maybe 2GB RAM and it's fine. I want to use FF and support Mozilla. In fact, I lived with FF and this type of behavior for years hoping it'll get better in the next update, but it never did. FF is just not usable for me anymore. I reluctantly switched to Chrome and haven't had issues.

May I ask what you did when you quit programming? Are you still doing the same thing now?

Linode, and let me tell you why... I had an unimportant side project running on a Linode VPS. I left it running, almost forgot about it and wasn't checking emails associated with that account. When I did check that email account, Linode has been trying to contact me about my VPS getting compromised and it was running a bot of some sort. It was probably 4-6 months before I saw their emails. All they did was cut off network access to my VPS, so I had to use their virtual console to log in and take care of things.

I appreciated the way they took the minimal action necessary that isolated the problem, instead of just nuking my entire account, and all its data, like I read that Digital Ocean did in a similar situation, only it wasn't an unimportant side project, it was someone's entire ongoing business. I have no affiliation with Linode except being a satisfied customer, but this experience this is why Linode is my first choice, all else being equal.

Additionally contract work allows you to change up the projects you work more easily.

How often do you change jobs as a contractor? What range of rates would you recommend targeting?

I'd recommend to look for a contract role where you help with the maintenance of some old boring tech project.

Would you go through a recruiter to find something like this? How would you frame this to a recruiter that this is the type of job you want? You can't really just say, "I want an easy software job". Or can you? But you especially couldn't say that to the company.

excellent developers decide they simply couldn't take the pressure and head out for something easier

Been working since late 90's with a 1.5 year break for grad school, but going through some extreme burnout right now and I totally want to do this. Don't want to try to "get away with pretending to work" at all, just want something easier with less pressure/stress.

Check they're IT ops/dev organization; note whether they're using a third-party[2]. If you want that "back-end only job", look no further.

Can you name some specific companies to look at for this?

My buddy took my advice and ended up getting an "Easy Corporate Job"

Which route did he go, the DBA team or the third-party IT org?

Thank you, you've given me a lot to be optimistic about.

Realistically you can't retire, not with two pre-teen kids.

Yeah, I think I realize this deep down, and part of why I don't want to.

I took about 3 years off in my 40s

How did your job search go when you decided to go back to work? What was your last job before taking a break and what was the new job that you found? Were they similar or completely different? Did you have any trouble with a 3-year gap? You obviously didn't have any major issues, like not finding a job. But were you questioned a lot about the gap? Sorry so many questions, but I'm intensely interested in how it went for you because I might be doing the same.

If I do take a year off, I figure I could explain it partly with the pandemic, and wanting to take care of my kids (not untrue).

I know my savings allow me a long runway and if I take a career break, I'm sure I could figure something out during that time. But still, actually stepping off that cliff is nerve-wracking, for me at least.

Work climate is much different here in the manic U.S. I'd gladly take the 20% pay cut and be passed over for promotions. I actively decline promotion to team lead/management anyway. Whatever extra benefits there are in pay/title is not worth the stress.

Thanks for your reply. It really encapsulates all the best advice I've gotten from all places.

But also understand that you're probably not going to make the best decisions about this from the perspective of extreme burnout.

I'm (overly) aware that my burnt out state may not lead to the best decisions. That's why I'm stepping cautiously and not making any rash changes.

First step might be to talk to your boss about your workload and see if there are some changes that can be made to make you happy again.

I'm currently in talks with management to see what can be done. It's not really the workload, but the type of work I'm doing that's been the problem. But because I'm burnt out and diminished, the normal workload which is not normally a problem is becoming one. But I also fear I'm just too burnt out to remain working here in any capacity.

I'm gearing myself up to find another job, to avoid having to job hunt while unemployed in my 40s, and hopefully be able to take a month or two before starting. Job hunting/interviewing is hard in the best of circumstances; it's doubly so in my current burnt out state.

[Long runway, can retrain in another field]

Also under consideration. Front-runner is GIS. Always had an interest doing geo-analysis/maps.

I would absolutely love to find a software position with 24-32 hour week, but I have not heard of such a thing, short of going out on your own and freelancing. No employer I know of (in software field, I don't want to go work retail) would consider allowing employees to work part time.

I have considered contracting or even freelancing too, but I've been a W2 worker my entire career. I'd have to look into how to do this.

I fully admit the "can't" is mostly in my head. Need to work up the courage to do so, due to many reasons. Societal (what a bum!), family (what kind of role model would I be for kids?) and just fear of running out of money due to black swan event. I wouldn't say my fear is completely irrational, but it's not all rational either.

Pre-pandemic, I'd take 3-4 weeks a year. I've only taken a 2 weeks off this past year, mainly because there's no where to go, so I've taken the 2 weeks just for mental health.

Everything you say makes sense and I am considering all of it, especially taking a lower paying, lower stress job.

No, don't have a financial advisor, but considering one now. Before I burnt out, I was also planning to early retire around 50, when my nest egg should be at least $5M. Thanks for your insights. What kind of financial advisor did you use? Fee-only CFP/CFA?

2.8M nut, about 50/50 in regular/retirement accounts. I'm mid 40's, married with two pre-teen kids, annual expenses of $80K, live in HCOL area (Southern California). Would you FIRE in this situation? Would you take a year long hiatus? As much as I would like to FIRE, I can't/won't, even though the "numbers" say I probably could. But seriously considering a months to year long career break/sabbatical/hiatus, because I'm extremely extremely burnt out. Has anyone here taken a gap year in their 40's/50's? Was it difficult to find another job?

What's your FIRE number, if you don't mind, and what area do you live in (HCOL/LCOL, urban/rural, etc.)?

This is why porch piracy will increase. I suspect the intersection of people who are non-violent druggies and who are porch pirates is huge. I hate porch pirates.

We wouldn't need this VPN if Google didn't suck up all our information in the first place.

Anyone know how nanomsg (https://nanomsg.org) or nng (https://github.com/nanomsg/nng) compares?

Interesting that nanomsg tries to better zeromq (https://nanomsg.org/documentation-zeromq.html) and then nng tries to better nanomsg (https://nng.nanomsg.org/RATIONALE.html)

edit: just noticed nng and nanomsg share the same domain, so probably the same people behind them.

OK, never mind, it just takes a while for it to be deleted (around 10-15 seconds). I've just been impatient.

But when I delete the last bookmark for a given tag, I still see the tag in the tag editor, even after a page refresh. And I can still click on the tag which brings up 0 bookmarks. Does it just take a while to be removed?

While you're here, add a "used none" filter (alongside existing "used once") in tag editor please?

I use Quicken, but not happy with it since they moved to annual subscription model. But with more than 20 years of data in it, I'm locked in. Looking to migrate to beancount, but the data migration is hard. I'm contemplating starting anew with beancount and forgoing my historical data. I could easily do without the data, but something psychological is at play, and I can't get over it yet.

Nothing you say in an exit interview can help you in any way, but can only harm you. The company does not give a damn about you. Just say, "Thanks for the experience", and leave.

Quicken, but trying to migrate to beancount. It's hard due to the 20+ years of history/transactions I have in Quicken. If I were starting from scratch, I'd never consider Quicken now. On current versions, if their cloud is down, you can't do jack even if everything else (MY internet, the banks' servers) is up.

Any downsides to using the email service provided by your webhost, aside from the pain of potentially switching webhosts in the future? I've been using webfaction for hosting and email for 4 years now, and it's been great for both.

These guys are being roasted, and rightly so. But let's also cut them some slack. Lord knows what kind of trouble I would have gotten into if the Internet had been around in its present form when I was in high school/college.

So there was no Internet or WWW when I was young. Instead, when I was 14 or 15, I was into the BBS scene. I found a file manager utility I liked that was shareware. Being dumb and young, I took a hex editor to the executable and modified the name/address of the author to my own, and re-uploaded the utility, hoping people would send money to me instead. Nothing good or bad came out of that, but I can imagine doing the equivalent these days would land me in hot water.