We have become so cloud-native (god forbid!). Just recently I realised that I can save an interesting page to my hard drive instead of saving its link. What a wonderful word has opened since! It's so liberating to live without all these bs tools.
I can totally feel the 'half-assed' part. One of the real reasons I am avoiding getting a well-paid job is because it feels that it's impossible keep it and dedicate enough time to anything else really, let alone building a business on the side.
I'd caution you about giving up a well paid career.
In "The psychology of Money" the author warns the reader to don't make bets that need to go perfectly to plan. Creating a project every month until somethings sticks, requires that at least one of them can become a sustainable business. But if you can't achieve that, its very difficult to catch up to your peers or re-enter the workforce.
I spent the last 5 years working in Big Tech and have a large amount in savings where I plan on leaving, not b/c it make sense financially, but I just need something fresh in my life. Even if that fresh thing fails horribly, I have more than I need for retirement due to low lifestyle costs and careful saving.
Why not just work part time, seems a no brainer to me. Work 10 less hours a week, you'll keep up with your peers easily, and you'll have fresh time and projects on the side
8 years ago, the startup I worked at folded with an eng team size of 8. I spent 3 years working part time and side projects, my coworkers joined big tech (LinkedIn and Airbnb). They road the 2021 boom and ended up 1-2 levels higher than me with 3-5x more pay. 5 years after returning, I’m just now catching up to them.
Thats unfortunate I'm sorry to hear. But it is also a sample size of 1.
My experience, working part time for 6 months, is that my side projects have differentiated me from other candidates, and get me a foot in the door for interviews. They usually say most candidates are the exact same, and the only way to differentiate and get an edge is: Perfect GPA; Successful projects; Sought after niche skills; Leadership experience.
But I've also had 2 relatively successful side projects (and tens of failed ones), so without those I'm not sure how I'd go
I have a few friends that left tech for personal reasons and layoffs.
The ones that stayed out for a while, lost their ‘drive’ to reenter. They tasted the good life of no leetcode or on-call duties.
They make enough to support themselves but still less than half of what they could make in tech.
They realize their good life isn’t on the right trajectory and would like to reenter, but just don’t want to put in the effort, especially since the roles available to them are behind their friends that didn’t take a break
Take an "easier" but stable job. In this market, one needs stability over high income.
Spend your 30-40 hours at your job, drop to part time (3 x 10 hour days if you can) up-skill at your job, and use the extra 2 days to build stuff. Its very do-able
Re this:
>I'm currently working part-time on retainer, which allows me to work less than full-time and still make enough money to live (definitely less than a full-time job, but enough to live comfortably)
That's quite a good position to be honest.
> Then start working on taking part-time work on top of your full-time job.
This is what I've been doing for the past 3 months but only to save some extra money as our main income is 90-100% spent on necessities every month. I charge per hour probably within the 50-70 percentile bracket in my location. But I can't see how I could charge more without being much more specific than just doing regular software engineering.
As a qualified engineer and owner (in terms of responsibility), I quite often get compliments on how well I handle things - with attention to detail, without oversight, pushing things to the completion, etc. This made me think that probably I'm lowballing myself with this (shitty) startup job.
But on the other hand, I don't know where else I could 'remain myself' in the way of not becoming a professional SLOC cruncher or, God forbid, the ultimate PSC-driven developer.
I am not really sure. It negates me needing to subscribe to all audio services and some video services. I don't need to buy corresponding media apps for my iPhone. The internet can go down and my stuff will continue working just the same on my home network.
I think I spend about $60 per month on streaming services. How many hours are you working on these projects because it may be more beneficial to do a few hours of consulting rather than saving a few dollars here in there.
I didn't think about explaining the obvious right away, so putting a comment here. Having a 'regular' job of a manager or a software engineer is fine but feels like I am not using most of my skills and not developing as a person. So the question really is how to apply this broad skillset to the world without getting into the confines of typical SWE roles.
Sounds like you should do some reflection and evaluation on the emotional side of things. What part of your dream of being an entrepreneur actually sounds good to you? If you want fame, software entrepreneurship may not be optimal for example.
Ultimately a job can be evaluated as: ( Money * Job Satisfaction * Impact ) / (Time * Energy )
Thanks for the question. I believe it's impossible to answer once and for all.
Currently, I like doing many things, finding the bottlenecks, and overcoming them. Today it's demand generation, tomorrow it's product and tech, and ultimately it's me being inadequate in some capacity. Which means lots of growth as a person, which feels very real, like you can be shy of being in front of another person and therefore avoid doing sales calls. This is big and feels much more real than 'growing' in an organisation where you're told to do XYZ to impress your manager so that they can beg their managers to get you into the raise quota, or even worse, simply bang your head against the 'we don't have money now' wall at a typical smaller company.
Being in control, jumping on interesting things to constantly learn something new and stuff like that are a good bonus as well.
I'm really similar to you. I could've written this post. You might have ADHD, at least subclinical. I know I have it. I don't see it as a disorder but as a difference - in my case that is (given that it is subclinical). Sometimes the difference is empowering, sometimes it isn't.
What you could do, if money is not too much of a concern: job hop to different jobs. I'm currently re-entering the job market as a data analyst. I've been a SWE for 4 years. I might get back to it (probably on the data science or data engineering side) but man I'm happy to have a different task set for the next 2 years.
