I've recently been diagnosed with an illness that has left me little to no concentration and a very low level of comprehension,as such I will most likely have to leave my job as a software engineer as it's becoming overwhelming. So my question is, if you have had to leave your IT job, what was/is your new job.
When I stopped in 2009, I went tourign Europe with bands for four years, doing mainly roadie/driver/merch guy stuff.
It's been a relieving experience, I went back to thinking only about today, what we had to do for today's show and nothing more, eventually planning tomorrow's trip, but without much stress.
No planning, no meetings, no standups, no due dates, just load/unload the van, mount the stage, check check check one-two-one-two, waiting for people to show up at the merch stand, with a glass always filled with something.
I was in charge of checking that the venues were respecting our rider, so my job ended up being counting beers and having fun with friends while having party every night.
It has also been cheaper than living in my city, everything was already paid: meals, sleeping accommodations, booze, even drugs most of the times.
Then the band I was working the most stopped for a couple of years to write the new album and I went back into programming, learnt Elixir/Erlang, and now I am consulting for different kind of companies (including banks, video games and insurance companies) to eradicate Java from this planet :)
p.s.: during this awesome times I also had the pleasure to work at an EOTM concert with Nick, their merch guy who was brutally killed in Paris at the Bataclan.
He truly was a great guy, may he rest in peace.
p.p.s.: I think I should add that I left because I had been working home for too long, I was stressed, almost burnt out, plus I was having big problems getting paid on time (if paid at all).
It's been one of the economically lowest moments of my life, I barely had enough money to buy cigarettes, but absolutely one of my greatest and funniest achievements.
It gave me the boost to rethink my life in terms of working better and do less, not more.
I was absolutely no kid anymore (I was 30 already) and still doing it from time to time, when i need to take the steam out.
> little to no concentration and a very low level of comprehension
This might sound like a flippant response but it's not: could you move into management? You don't need to know the finer details, but you'd have the experience required to empathise with the developers in your team.
Bad idea. Managers need to know a different set of finer details, not none at all. While individuals on a team have to get deep into the details of what they're doing, managers need to work at the edges - where what Team X is doing integrates with V, Y and Z; and longer term, how what all of those teams are doing now fits in with the work lined up 6-24 months down the road. That's a full time job, even before we've actually done any managing of our individuals. Maybe this gives you some insight, but that's actually why (in my opinion) the first things to fall off with poor managers are 1x1s, meaningful coaching, etc.
Managers also have the stresses of accountability and expectations. There are days where I wish I was still an individual contributor.
I had a manager like this. Didn't know the finer details of what I worked on, had the experience to empathize, but was primarily a resource manager / ran interference for distractions.
I liked him at the time, but once I had a new manager I was blown away at everything I was missing from a more fully-qualified manager.
Now that I recognize that kind of manager - I see a lot of them. OP probably could make it as a manager - and I say that from having seen so many of these managers move up the chain. But I think other commenters are right: managers shouldn't believe they don't need to comprehend details.
I think this may backfire even more. Sure there are stories about how one can get by as a manager without knowing much or doing much, but that's rare. As a manager you have to answer to your boss and make sure team delivery is met. You will need to do budget and stay current with what's happening at work, so that you don't become clueless in meetings. This can be stressful at work since politics is inevitable.
Not really. If you aren't able to concentrate for a long time, how can you join a meeting and catch the important stuff? If your mind is wandering and you appear to ask questions which have been answered you are going to sound like you didn't pay attention. I have seen people struggle to keep up because they have so many meetings so many emails and so many questions to take care. Sure you donmt code anymore, but you have a lot of little things to take care of. I work in infrastructure/operation so maybe that's different from a manager working on iOS product. Point is you will get frustrated and that's bad. It lowers your confidence, maybe.
My experience is limited to product development teams, however where I've worked managers are basically tasked with people management, technical leadership and cross-team relationship management. You are expected to know enough details about what every single member of your team does as well as what other teams are upto at a broad level, so you can act as the tie breaker when critical decisions need to be made. This is very much like holding 1000 different things in your head at a time except maybe not to a great depth. The biggest challenge I've faced switching from developer to manager is being in the middle of all that flies through your team and seamlessly context switching at a moment's notice. It's not deep concentration on one goal but simultaneously chipping away on multiple goals.
Speaking from my own experience it can still be a challenge because you have to context switch a lot and never go deep enough to truly understand a problem. You are relying on your engineers to be your eyes and ears. If you have all good people in your team you are really lucky. Otherwise it is a balancing game coaching some engineers to learn and get better, quickly figuring out solutions to technical problems that are raised, fighting back the upper management pressure while not trying to frustrate your team.
I didn't really mean, "not doing much", but more like being the type of manager that lets the team get on with the work by removing as much of the day to day business nonsense as possible.
As Elon Musk put it, ~"Managers receive the greatest distillation of all the problems. They have the worst job"
They are the ones expected to solve the hardest problems. If someone can't figure it out, it gets pushed up the chain.
That's gross oversimplification. In some models, some managers are pure resource managers as you're describing. A lot of us are functional managers, though. I own the outcome.
It's become really common in engineering, particularly in orgs doing agile, to split resource and functional management. I don't care for that. I spent a long time as a product owner and wondered quite often why I couldn't just absorb the resource manager's responsibilities as well, since the only thing I wasn't doing was writing reviews. Every other problem rolled up to me, since I was accountable for the outcome.
That's an absurd generalisation, and you should probably stop thinking Dilbert is a useful guide to most workplaces.
Some companies work that way, but they are bad companies to work for, IME.
Other companies, managers have got where they are because they know more than anybody else and have the personal skills to marshal a team into solving bigger problems than what is on the board for this sprint alone.
Source: ex-CTO, now Senior Engineer again, done every level of management you can think of, choose to be where I am for a reason, but do not think managers are idiots.
A manager that is doing the job right, is managing. Resources, people, time. Not doing Engineering.
Call yourself an idiot if you like (I don't think I said that anywhere?) Managing is a difficult task that requires knowledge and skills. But not Engineering ones.
There's another name for when a Manager is telling his Engineers how to solve problems: micro-managing
Managers only hear about problems which extend past our team. On the other hand, if I have to spend a whole day chasing an esoteric dependency conflict in our uber-jar, the manager won't be involved in it (and it's probably more annoying and mentally taxing than coordinating work with people on other teams).
Btw there is an interesting trend in London where individual contributors (at least in Big Data) are paid more than their managers - that's because ICs are brought in as consultants at 500+ quid a day, while companies often insist on managers being full time employees, who genrally get paid less.
You can't say something is more annoying or mentally taxing then other thing, just because you think so - and that surelly doesn't reflect on what some are paid (that's just supply and demand).
At the end of the day the problems you find on the technical side only reflect in resources spent - human resources, time, budgets... beyond some level - usually the managers level and above, that's what matters and the only thing that counts.
In a lot of organizations the technical side is literally in a bubble, doing their thing and protected from the chaos of dealing with ignorants, burocracy and shit.
Yeah, that's why I stepped down from being a PM to writing software. I personally prefered the crappy codebase, failing build envs., slow cluster, the boredom and mental exhaustion to having to deal with people in a corporate setting. I'm just not cut for that.
You might have something there - I've seen quite a few people over the years try and move from a technical role to a managerial role fail because they can't cope with not being allowed to focus on something to the exclusion of other items.
I agree. Low level of comprehension due to illness may make management position hell. Half managers success is dealing with politics and various competitors/customers/employees will take advantage of that condition.
Personally, if I ever get to leave IT before retirement, I plan to equip a workshop and start making electric guitars. It connects various craftsmanship skills with some engineering and art. And the best part is, end product is a instrument.
Unfortunately, this is not the best career choice where I live in (Eastern Europe). Although if you are good, you could make a living out of it. At least I would have better website then the competition :) Backup plan is to build modern/minimalistic furniture where there is no guitar orders.
Another direction would be to create a hub for amateur craftsmen. Well equipped workshop where you can rent a space to make things on your own, or take a course.
As you can see, I would pursue something related to making things as that's something I really love, and I'm doing as a hobby (IT takes a lot of time though). So, my advice would be to find something you love and see if you can make a living out of it.
with your it skills you can easily go global. make a great website with a customization widget or twitch the making of a guitar. lots of possibilities to distinguish yourself
It is true, and I will try it for sure at some point. Thing is that I tremendously enjoy software development as well, so this idea is on hold for now. Going global asks for solving more problems like logistics, but it is certainly worth the effort.
Inspiring, but it looks like the business failed sometime around 2013 for violating health code / zoning laws. Disappointing, as someone who likes the idea of leaving tech to run an ice cream shop.
Become an artist. Don't make art based on your expression of your feelings or whatever. Take it on like you would a startup. Create things you think will sell and based on what works iterate quickly. Make lots of work, sell it at cost and increase your price as you refine your process.
You can involve computers in the process of creating work. Things like conceptual art doesn't even have to involve any artistic skill necessarily, but there are many other areas that do if you want to try it out. Paintings from unknown artist can sell for $5K and if you have the energy and space to make sculptures, they can sell for much more.
Always keep in mind who the buyers are, it isn't always directly to customers (galleries, governments, large corporations). Only make work that sells. In the process your pitch will need to be refined. It can't be simply that you want to make money, it has to speak the the audience.
There are many different customers out there looking for different things. Keep in mind there are very few people who devote themselves to this and few of these people have any sense of business, branding, marketing, or even creativity as deep as what is available in technology today. Sure many people can draw or whatever but this isn't want makes a successful artist.
Success comes from all of the same stuff that every other industry focuses on.
> Success comes from all of the same stuff that every other industry focuses on.
Sure, but a major difference is that art is highly subjective and typically bought with arbitrary disposable income as opposed to a value-based purchasing decision. The kind of art that large corporations buy isn't what any artist actually wants to make.
>The kind of art that large corporations buy isn't what any artist actually wants to make.
I think that's exactly what they are suggesting. Make art that will sell, not art that artists want to make. Methodically approach art to appeal to a specific niche (be it corporate clients, government orgs all the way down to stay at home moms and anime fans). You could argue that at that point it isn't really "art", but that's kind of the idea. Take art out of it and sell a product to appeal to a certain market.
Great perspective! If I ever go into art, that's how I'll do it. That wouldn't even feel like selling out, because what makes my teenage self's taste (which defines what I'm driven to create by default) any more valid than other people's tastes today?
It's a good idea no matter what other activities the OP decides to pursue. Having base income could open up many options.
There are lots of meaningful and rewarding ways to participate in society, including volunteering for charitable organizations, that do not require the highest levels of skill and competitiveness.
Well, there is another group of jobs that is not yet outsourced to machines and doesn't use concentration and comprehension as much: detailed, complex manual work that requires years of training. For instance high quality wood work, soldering, fine grained painting.
I like this suggestion because it allows for the application of learning techniques and discipline that a developer would typically have honed throughout a software career, yet the accumulated skills do not require the mentally taxing global awareness of many factors at once.
Soldering? Soldering for electronics is almost all automated now, and with most electronics being surface-mount it's mostly done by stenciled solder paste and reflow. The exception is for the few remaining items that can't be done that way, such as when wires need to be soldered to PCBs (though here for high-volume stuff they usually use connectors because the wires can be assembled with connectors elsewhere, and then the wire harnesses simply plugged in during final assembly).
Are you talking about some other kind of soldering, such as for stained glass or plumbing? Stained glass with real lead and real glass is pretty rare these days, much more rare than high-quality woodwork, and mainly for hobbyists. Plumbing soldering is done with a blowtorch and isn't all that difficult, but worse, copper in plumbing is being replaced by plastic which doesn't use soldering, but rather press-fit connectors. So don't count on that as a long-lived profession either (the soldering part I mean; plumbing itself will be around as long as humans have biological bodies and need to use water for cooking, hand-washing, toilets, and bathing, it'll just be easier as new technologies replace legacy ones).
That is mass production you are talking about. But there are a lot of people who build their own special purpose devices, and all the alpha/beta testing happens with manually soldered hardware, since prepping a machine for just 10 boards is way too expensive. For that reason even in production many of these devices are at least partly manually assembled to save money. We are talking 1000+ devices to make machine production profitable. Many devices don't have that many customers, at least until the next set of hardware is there.
>But there are a lot of people who build their own special purpose devices,
Those are called "hobbyists".
>and all the alpha/beta testing happens with manually soldered hardware, since prepping a machine for just 10 boards is way too expensive
This is absolutely wrong. You can't manually place BGAs with any accuracy. I work in an R&D environment; our electronics are custom-built in-house at very low volumes, and they do use machines even for a one-off. Some parts can be fixed manually if they didn't get reflowed right, but BGAs cannot.
Even if you're doing boards with nothing smaller than SOICs, even there it's simpler and easier to just get a Kapton stencil and use solder paste, though you can of course pick-and-place with tweezers.
I "left" IT to travel for a year. When I resettled in another country I took different jobs (waiter, bartender, air traffic controller trainee). Software development was always my passion so I got involved with a lot of social causes by building and hosting websites and forums for them. Which eventually led me back to working in IT.
I'm not sure what your symptoms are but if this is a degenerative brain disease you may wish to use that time to visit family, friends, and experience new things.
I hate to say it, but sometimes corporate IT support in mid-size companies might be the way to go if you are dead set on staying in your lane. Depending on the company, it could be as simple as going through a binder for answers, logging in requests into a ticketing system, rinse & repeat.
I am sorry to hear that you are suffering such an illness, it definitely sucks to lose physical abilities and it takes great personal strength to get through it. I wish you all the best to still keep your intended career path, but if not I wish you all the same in finding an ideal worksite for yourself.
Quit my job as a system architect / software engineer and pursuing martial arts and spiritual cultivation full time in China.
I don't plan to give up IT for good. Having been in the industry for 10 years, I know I must follow my heart to be happy and be a well-adjusted person.
I would take a break and perhaps work in animal cares or something that would give you a break from human politics. Call it therpay if you want. For me I might eventually get a master and teach in university but in your condition this is probably a bad idea. The best thing right now is use up your vacation days and sick days and quit if you can support for a while before look for a new job.
Banking teller job is also a good option that makes decent money without having to work extremely hard all day long. Museum Tour guide is also a good one but I imagine the pay will be quite low.
I raise pigs, cows, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits and grow organic produce. It doesn't require much concentration. You might think this is a huge reach from I.T. but it still requires a lot of problem solving skills and discipline. It doesn't require the same kind of concentration, but you find out very quickly that the concentration it does take is engaging. It holds your attention because like the ocean, if you turn your back on it, it'll get you.
A lot of people's response to this has been "wow, that's my dream, but I could never do that because X, Y or Z"
3 years ago, I lived in the city, no land, no first hand experience rearing animals, could barely keep a tomato plant alive long enough to get tomatoes off it. I grew up in the country, I had some friends whose parents were farmers, my Dad had horses and we had 2 cats - that was the extent of my experience.
Anyone saying "Oh that's my dream but I could never do that because I have no land, I have no experience, I don't know where I would start." Neither did I. I found a place I could rent that had enough land to make a start that was within my means. Enough to learn how to grow fruit and vegetables and raise chickens, then by the time I ran out of room, I had a pretty good idea that I could do this and rented a place with more land. The side bonus is that the kids now have 100 acres to run around on and be kids without having to micromanage them like I did in the city, they can find themselves and grow like we used to as kids, learning their own limits and building confidence with no parents helicoptering over them making sure they don't hurt themselves - and they love it.
I also don't have to put up with the marketing bullshit that we're bombarded with about how awesome our manufactured food is, which it may be, but probably not. I know where my food comes from, from my land to my plate. I know what they've been fed, I'm happy with how they've been treated. I can see they're happy before they go to the freezer. I know my produce isn't treated with harmful pesticides and herbicides.
It's not for the feint of heart though, I knew it was going to be a lot of work going in, but I had no comprehension of the fact that it's not like a job you can put down when you're not feeling up to it. There's no "I just don't have the motivation to get out of bed today" or calling in on your depression because you just can't face the world. It's there, day in, day out, come rain, come shine, come mosquitoes, come drought, come blizzard, come flood. It's there and needs tending to. There's no days off or vacation without arranging someone to cover for you.
Animals have their own behaviour and their own way of doing things. They have their own motives and desires. They will show you very quickly that you cannot control the world around you and that all you can do is learn to harness and exploit their behaviour against them to keep things working. If you're not already, you will quickly learn to be adaptable, you will quickly learn to improvise with the things you have to hand right now, you will quickly learn to do whatever it takes or you don't have food on the table.
There are many days when I wonder what the fuck I've done and want to go running back to the safety and convenience of the city where I can be lazy without any repercussions. But when the sun comes out, the animals are behaving and happy and you've got a full harvest in front of you, you smile to yourself and you know why you did it. That's a level of satisfaction you just don't get anywhere else.
When I finally decide that programming is too much for me - which seems like a long way off yet, this side project will become my main gig. I have other ideas that will become side projects to complement this, but for the moment this is taking a fair portion of my free time and energy.
I have considered farming in the past, quite seriously. I think bringing an engineering/scientist mindset to it might be a distraction, but it might also actually help me stay interested in what looks like otherwise very tough work.
Farmers have moderately high suicide rates: isolation, hard work, long hours, and the inability to just stop, as you state.
I read your account - and have read many others like it - and immediately start to think of farming more like Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea": hard work, rewarding, but there's little choice in getting on with the work.
Bringing an engineering/scientist mindset isn't a distraction - it's often a godsend. Another tool in your belt. It gives you an ability to research, to understand, to figure things out. It puts you streets ahead of a lot of farmers.
You don't need to be isolated nor put in long hours. But it's more work than I should perhaps have described as "a side project." If I made it my full time job and quit programming for a living, I'd probably be able to say it was only a part time job relatively quickly.
The hard work and inability to just stop are inescapable. You need to be aware of that going in. As the quote about surfing big waves from Point Break goes "You can't just call time-out and stroll on into the beach if you don't like the way things are going" much as I sometimes wish I could.
The peace of mind and living in harmony with your surroundings is good for your soul though. It definitely makes you more aware of living in the moment and having backup plans.
Yes, we have classes for various bits. The thing is, most people aren't going to want to take on the whole shebang - at least, not off the hop. Some might just want a "how to keep a couple of plants alive long enough to get fruit?" or "what do I need to know to be able to keep 3 chickens in my back yard?" type lessons. There are so many small aspects to farming that are overwhelming hurdles to people that just teaching the basics goes a long way.
Once you get to scale then you need to start worrying about how to keep the animals watered in the dead of winter, how to extend your growing season, how to prep and store your produce over the winter months when you can't grow fresh. These all seem like tiny things when you think about them individually, but they quickly make people panic and go running for the nearest grocery store.
What is this magic?! Please enlighten. I, like many IT folks, loathe sales. As such I can not sell myself out of a paper bag. Do you have any resources to help in this matter?
Check out The Interview Guys- that site was invaluable for me earlier this year when I pulled myself together and left my horrid horrid horrid OldJob. I had a lot of good resources for putting together a great resume but up until I found that site I hadn't found anywhere that laid out exactly what to do in an interview.
Technical writing/Technical Communication. Throughout my IT career, I've always been "the guy who documents everything". It's actually my favorite part of my job because I feel like I'm adding a layer of structure and peer reference to what is otherwise chaos and tribal knowledge.
would love to know your path into it. part of my job now is to mitigate the frictions between views of devs and users but not nearly enough for me. instead i have to code a lot (which i am not too good at).
My dad left and does Heating and Air work now-- but that still requires being analytical with the electrical work. He owns his own business.
Others in my family do concrete, which is physically hard but they also seem to make good money. Again they own it themselves.
Hard to get jobs that compare to IT money though without being management, sinking time into school, or starting your own business.You'll probably have to try a few things out to figure out what you can actually do. I know that might be frustrating, but hang in there. You'll find something that works at some point.
If you have the ability to do so, maybe you could make some apps at home? You could pace yourself. You might have to change the way you work, using a lot of written organization, but it depends on how your mind works.
I left my job to help people quit their jobs. Seriously. Even though I was writing code and managing teams for big clients (Google, Starbucks, P&G) I found people's individual careers more exciting.
Really sorry to hear about your illness and struggles. That sounds pretty tough. Would you say that IT feels like "your calling?"
I've had friends and clients leave tech for more fulfilling, but lower wage work in cooking, farming, design, music, art, after-school work, and non-profit work.
There are a lot of good ideas on this thread, but it would be easier to speak to your situation if I had some more details.
Email me if you're up for sharing more, I'd be happy to help if I can:
Not so many good responses to an evergreen question. I left my best IT job ever to be FT caregiver for my folks, years longer than I'd intended. If you a diag of early stage dementia,cardiac, diabetic etc, fix those 1st. Nothing works if your brain doesn't. Your choice is IT, in or out. You offer the same skills in lesser potions in law, real estate, or where contracts are written.
If you are truly going out, know that's what will happen. No insurance, no bennies. If you have a progressive chronic disease, take what stock you can today. Pre-existing conditions are back. If you have migration route, take it.
I left my original job (not in IT)so that I could pursue my passion in this field. I've seen many people leave IT for more pure careers such as teaching, food service or farming.
the answer lies inside of you, not in HN. what are your passions and interests other than IT? if its say "farming" you may not be able to go start a farm, but maybe you can go work for Home Depot in the garden center for 6 months, and start "farming on the side" (ppl do this) from there.
If I can, to the ranch with the family, breeding plants and apiculture.
If I can't... depend in function of my physical condition. Repairing cars, welding, industrial agriculture, photography lab or making photos... Or simply one mill and make pieces.
If you can choose, be yourself, live, one Shabbatical year can be a good election.
I'm sorry Jerry I hope it is nothing. My best wishes.
I left a sysadmin role to become a land surveyor and GPS/GIS technician. Loved the job but then in 2008 the commercial real estate market tanked, and took surveying down with it. So I went back into "IT", but instead of going back to sysadmin I started working in web dev.
Tragically things like Dementia and Alzheimers can do this. Also numerous mental conditions e.g. depression, stress, etc.
I knew one guy that got a degree in Comp Sci and in his first job began getting severe debilitating headaches. He was diagnosed with a visual problem and was told to stop using screens in his day to day job. He quit a promising career as a software engineer and went and joined his dad's gardening business.
Lots of options actually. If you're healthy, able to concentrate on things for a long time and your brain is sharp then count your blessings.
I once (for only a few weeks, but it felt much longer) had to use medication that made my brain feel like mush, comprehension capabilities were a fraction of normal. Very humbling experience, scared to death of losing my faculties and ending up in that fog for some reason that can't be cured so easily.
Pretty much any serious illness can do this. I've dealing with the effects of an autoimmune disease. Other than my slowly worsening condition, I have sat in meetings wondering...how long can I live a normal life...how will I take care of my family if I'm not around... That pesky software bug I'm asked about seems so trivial compared to the health problems I'm dealing with.
Speaking from personal experience, something as simple as a concussion can create such symptoms. For that reason, I find it very easy to believe any illness which could impact your brain physically (such as with fevers or inflammation) could have strong negative impacts on your mental capabilities.
ADHD can cause similar symptoms and more and more people have it. It's something very unpopular to diagnose in adults because many psychiatrists are convinced that it's just a childhood illness.
Many Software Engineers reach for Adderall or Ritalin to help them with this.
Left IT to go back to school and get my degree in Computer Engineering. Not a good choice for someone with little to no concentration / comprehension. Take all the stuff you do in (embedded/systems) software, then add in hardware design.
Do you really need to leave IT just because of these symptoms? There are so many areas to work in.
Anyway, what illness are you talking about here?
Boredom?
Got stuck in a place where the project sucked the life and general interest out of you?
OCD?
Depression?
Anxiety?
UPDATE: Got good answers about what can cause these symptoms.
If you want to leave IT then try to find jobs that are still challenging your creativity, but don't need huge amount of concentration in the same time. Like becoming a carpenter, professional gardener, etc...
These still make you use your creative side, but rely on more physical work then intellectual.
Being a carpenter might involve handling tools that are potentially dangerous if handled without one's full attention. So, may I suggest that one avoid such endeavours unless one is able to fully focus on the job at hand.
Ever tried it? You sound someone who has a great deal of experience in the field.
My father was one and I loved the smell of wood in the workshop.
I would have loved to be a carpenter. It's one of those professions that might never go away. Even having mass production stuff, there are still people who prefer the human touch and the originality in the arts and crafts.
There are construction carpenters (framers) that work outside in the sun, rain, cold hammering dimensional lumber together to construct the skeleton of a building. It's physically demanding and chance of injury is significant.
There are finish carpenters who do the detail trim work like window and door frames, baseboard, wainscotting, etc. You work indoors but still on-site.
There are cabinet makers and furniture builders. You probably work in a fixed location/shop.
Probably a bunch of others that I haven't thought of.
> So my question is, if you have had to leave your IT job, what was/is your new job.
I think I answered. That's what I would do, maybe it sparked a new idea in him, maybe it didn't. Maybe he can do something that can be documented and be turned into a novel by someone else. He's in a stage when he can still perform and plan ahead.
What factors make storytelling and film more taxing, deliver scripts on time, shoot the scene, video processing?
I'd think that fixing bugs on a tight schedule and delivering features would be more taxing? It depends on setting as well I presume.
Writing scripts itself is the most relaxing part of the job, it takes some concentration though.
Film and TV production is on a whole other level. Breaking down scripts for production schedule and framing everything within a budget and then talking to a lot of people where their job is to take your money and yours is to keep it. Then keeping track that everything is in order for production to take place and solving lots of last-minute crises, everything involving a lot of people. If it's a live TV type of situation or there's an oversight from larger production, stress gets amped up a lot. It's a busy hive, somewhat like an organised chaos where most of the work is handling people and being handled by people. That's production. Pre-production alone is, more or less, stress free process. That might be a direction to explore if you're art or organization oriented.
If I had such an illness then what I would do would depend on my financial situation.
E.g. can partner support you for a bit? Do you have children? Do you have total and permanent disability insurance or temporary sickness insurance. Assets? Own an expensive home and can downsize or move to cheaper city to access equity etc. Etc.
Based on this and a target income and number of work hours I'd look for jobs that don't require much mental agility.
It depends what is meant by no concentration but most jobs require some. However something with more carpe diem like waitor, cleaner, gardening etc where you d your days work and that's it. A small fuck up usually doesn't mess your backlog etc. In these jobs.
If financially able consider doing no work but plan daily activities to keep from stagnating. E.g. long walk and salsa class every day or whatever. Or learn Haskell for an hour a day but turn off if concentration becomes an issue.
Unless you are close to retirement, the new job you should be seeking is "How do I heal myself". Unless of course you want to go through the rest of your life with your condition...
If school medicine won't help you, you should start looking for some alternate approaches, there are enough out there.
Why is non-school-medicine inherently non-evidence based? Yeah there's a ton of garbage out there, but I think it's been abundantly shown that incentives are screwed up enough that many mainstream healthcare providers will often ignore potential treatments or even conditions for which there is evidence (but for which they don't have a pill to sell you) or leading to it not getting studied enough to be considered evidence-based.
Classic example is fibromyalgia: family member of mine believed they had it and now has a formal diagnosis, but was told by multiple doctors that it wasn't a real thing and probably all in her head. Went to a chiropractor who dabbled in all sorts of stuff who ended up helping her manage it really well with some diet and lifestyle changes. Now I don't know how well those recommendations were backed up by evidence, but I was blown away at how a few months later there was a widely-advertized FDA-approved drug to treat a condition that according to at least 5 or 6 doctors in our town didn't exist (and they all suddenly recognized it and had fliers for it in their offices). It's amazing how suddenly the "evidence" came up the minute it had a marketable drug.
So school medicine is evidence based, huh?
Anyway, I even said "if it does not help you"... Obviously that means that instead of accepting your illness you should try other methods. If you think that school medicine has the interest of helping you, or that if they can't help you, you are out of options... Well then you are wrong on both counts.
Maybe read up a bit about Rockefeller medicine. He also founded the American Cancer Association. I am sure he didn't do it for money.
School medicine is a trillion dollar business. You are a fool to believe that their best interest is your health. That of course does not mean that it won't help you, but it also doesn't mean that it's in your best interest (neither health wise nor cash wise) and that it has answers to all illnesses (in fact, only if it brings money, and not curing chronical illnesses brings in a lot of money).
That again does not mean that school medicine is all cash and business. There are people who take it seriously and want to help people (most doctors I naively assume). But here are equally many who don't (pharma lobby) and those are much more powerful. It is a constant battle between good & evil to your disadvantage. The least you can do is have a critical eye on what they have in store for your illness. If you blindly accept any treatment and diagnose they give you, then I am sorry for you.
Just to note, @martamoreno did mention that once conventional medicine has exhausted its options to then try alternatives. I don't know whether it was meant as tacit approval of those methods but it was merely suggested that there are alternatives (though in my opinion I would have mentioned that they are alternatives in name and not intended to equivocate them to conventional medicine.)
Homeopathy is non evidence based but there have been and still are various schools of medicine which works for people. Irrespective of something proving it in trials, once you have exhausted the tradition optional, placebo is all you have.
It's been a relieving experience, I went back to thinking only about today, what we had to do for today's show and nothing more, eventually planning tomorrow's trip, but without much stress.
No planning, no meetings, no standups, no due dates, just load/unload the van, mount the stage, check check check one-two-one-two, waiting for people to show up at the merch stand, with a glass always filled with something.
I was in charge of checking that the venues were respecting our rider, so my job ended up being counting beers and having fun with friends while having party every night.
It has also been cheaper than living in my city, everything was already paid: meals, sleeping accommodations, booze, even drugs most of the times.
Then the band I was working the most stopped for a couple of years to write the new album and I went back into programming, learnt Elixir/Erlang, and now I am consulting for different kind of companies (including banks, video games and insurance companies) to eradicate Java from this planet :)
p.s.: during this awesome times I also had the pleasure to work at an EOTM concert with Nick, their merch guy who was brutally killed in Paris at the Bataclan.
He truly was a great guy, may he rest in peace.
p.p.s.: I think I should add that I left because I had been working home for too long, I was stressed, almost burnt out, plus I was having big problems getting paid on time (if paid at all).
It's been one of the economically lowest moments of my life, I barely had enough money to buy cigarettes, but absolutely one of my greatest and funniest achievements.
It gave me the boost to rethink my life in terms of working better and do less, not more.
I was absolutely no kid anymore (I was 30 already) and still doing it from time to time, when i need to take the steam out.