I spent about a decade as a PM in early-stage enterprise software companies (Box and Talkdesk, among others) and left in 2019 to open a dog boarding business!
I found real estate, had plans drawn up, got permits, found a contractor and ways a few days away from closing my SBA loan. Then the bank called and said they were putting a hold on new underwriting because of this COVID thing... this was March of 2020.
Had to shut that down before I ever opened my doors, but then I started a dog treat business, and that's going well!
I'm retired from tech. Former product manager/intrapreneur and a bunch of other things. Burned out twice. Decided I was done working for someone else. Last year I sold my house with contents, rental property, business, and car to be nomadic and see the world.
I'm doing small projects for fun. My favourite is helping people get unstuck in 15 minutes with 3 questions. A few coaches have expressed interest in offering a similar service so it's accidentally turning into a micro-coaching business where people who don't normally have access to executive coaches and get help with something specific in a defined period of time.
My advice to people in tech who want to stay in tech, build stuff for yourself. If you're not sure how or don't have ideas, there are people who can teach you myself included
Even though im a bit earlier in my career, i'd be interested in learning more about how you figured out what you wanted to build. I've been toying with the idea of building something myself for a long time but i can just never commit to an idea. I actually had an idea for building a coaching service as well after watching the show billions (wendy rhoades) and having a friend go through a messy separation so your comment really spoke to me
I was in a bit of a funk when my dad passed away, and I got laid off last year. I didn't know what to do other than not have obligations (investors, employers, employees).
A friend of mine recommended I do 100DaysOfNoCode. That was a great suggestion. It's free. They send you an email every day with a 30 minute activity. The activities introduce you to a ton of tools. I learned about 20 new tools and built over 15 websites and apps.
Because you're starting with the technology you're almost forced to come up with business ideas.
I'm new to Hacker News so my apologies if video links aren't allowed
What I do myself and what I recommend is if you have a spark of inspiration for any idea, do something to action it (send an email, tell someone, build a landing page, etc). Follow your curiosity without expectations of any outcome. If you get early traction, keep advancing to the next step. Let go of things that don't interest you.
It's never too early to build something yourself. There are an insane amount of tools and opportunities. Imagine if you built 1 thing a month and had 3 things a year that you enjoy and generates a steady stream of revenue. Now image doing that for 10 years.
That last sentence sums up why the home server is still a hobby, even though I pay the bills administering systems. People ask me how I do both without going nuts.
It's simple. At home, the things that annoy me about the job don't exist.
If it's broken and I don't feel like fixing it, it stays broken. No due dates, no planned outages, no SLAs. If I like an app it stays, if not it disappears. No processes or approvals. No people problems. No BS.
They're really not the same thing at all, and I'd imagine many careers that are also hobbies work the same way for many. Playing with cars on the weekend isn't the same as being a full time mechanic.
The industry is still relatively young. Plenty of tech workers have retired but they weren’t web devs because the web wasn’t as prevalent yet. My dad was one! He was a project manager for giant mainframe stuff that doesn’t really exist these days.
Startups can easily lead to burnout. Tech itself doesn’t necessarily. I think I’d be quite happy spending my twilight working years at some kind of bigcorp saving up for retirement.
I am retired from tech but I might want to build a family of happy chickens and freeze dry their eggs. No idea if I would do it as a business or just stockpile freeze dried eggs and share with the neighbors.
This idea was prompted by the recent supply chain issues, egg shortages, panic buying, weird world issues and finding that freeze dried foods are expensive. I can see why. Freeze dryers are expensive, time consuming and a little noisy. Either way I will be building a quonset style barn with as much solar as I can put on and next to it. I carved away a little bit of land from the horses so that I have more room for solar and chickens.
Right now, I'm just a cog in the machine, iterating on the same boring products for consoomers and to maximise shareholder value and increase executive salaries and bonuses whilst earning just enough money to keep me motivated for another day.
When I think about my work and life it's incredibly depressing, but I have no idea how to create monetary value doing something meaningful and productive.
Planning on jumping ship to some other technical or scientific discipline. I’ve thought about all sorts of crazy things from going into industrial research to joining the NOAA corp. There are a number of things I want to try in my life, some easier to obtain at certain times than others. If I ever find somewhere I’m willing to settle down, there’s also a lot more that’s enabled. Unfortunately prioritizing is an issue because some things will naturally or artificially become difficult to do as I age. I already found out that universities don’t seem to care for anyone who’s not a 17-18 year old who’s groomed themselves for higher education. I figure though I’ll eventually stop holding out for things in life and just give up and embrace it. Whether that time comes while I’m still old enough to live an interesting life is the question.
I am not a fan of programming or software anymore, and while the moneys nice I don’t want to spend many more decades sitting on my ass, working on stuff o could care less about. Money is nice, but it’s certainly not keeping my content.
There's a lot of things I'd like to do after tech: learn to draw or paint, play games with friends, learn to cook, read, maybe learn to write, work on my garden, play video games, strength training, learn chess, study history, travel ... anything that I would have time and energy to do, both of which I am running out of as I pass through middle age.
I was considering "retiring" from tech after leaving my last job. I had a plan to hack on fun side projects and (hopefully) eventually transform one of them into a lifestyle business -- something I've done before and previously enjoyed.
When I took a few months off, however, my perspective changed. After the 2nd month of doing nothing, I started to really miss the intellectual stimulation of hanging out with other engineers, working on shared goals, etc., so I decided to go back to work at a new company.
I'm now happily employed full-time, working with a larger team, and still building things in my free time. Life is busy, but I enjoy it.
I still think this may be my eventual destiny, but for now I'm happily working with other people and just trying to enjoy life as much as possible.
I'm curious why you think tech would be any different from any other industry? People definitely retire from tech.
Yes, there is lots of burn out as well. I suspect much of the burn out is due to lack of having a reason to do what they do.
For the last 40 years, tech has been a tool of creation. It's becoming a utility. Part of the fabric of everything we do.
Almost every company has tech, just like every company has accounting.
I believe burn out is often a result of a lack of purpose. If you are on a mission, you are less likely to burn out. This also assumes you are taking good care of yourself, taking breaks, being well rounded, etc.
I don't expect to have any other career between tech and retirement. My hope is simply to be able to retire eventually so I can sit around and do the stuff I really enjoy, on my own schedule. What will I do after retirement? Hard to say, as there's a lot of "it depends" in there. But riding bicycles, tinkering with old cars, reading, and traveling will hopefully be major parts of that portion of my life.
I plan on reading non-technical stuff more often, gardening/yard work, and woodworking. I've found that while IT pays the bills, doing things with my hands provides more enjoyment, creating tangible things. I love the mental challenges of solving IT puzzles, but that's faded over the years.
Oh, and I'm going to travel much more than I've done for the last 30 years.
my plan is to teach cs101 at a community college. pays basically nothing compared to tech, but it can be an extremely chill way of life while making a huge impact on people's lives and the benefits are amazing. might also work on side projects and sell whatever makes sense, since i really enjoy doing that
Retiring in the US as a member of Gen X in the tech industry is quite achievable, if you can move out of high cost of living areas. Large parts of the South and Midwest are quite affordable, and there are still many manufacturing organizations with needs for in-house software and IT support (though often this is contracted out, you will usually move along with each contract though). In software/IT you can make 2-4x the median household income in areas of NC, GA, OH, IN, and others, if not more. Areas where buying a 1 acre or larger property with a 2000 sq foot or larger home was doable in the $150k-250k range throughout the 2010s. Harder now with pandemic price increases, but we'll see how the next 2-3 years play out on home prices.
I've already got a house on .33 acres in PA. Not sure I'd want to move to the South or Midwest. I might be a bit right-wing compared to neighbors who are either part of the professional-managerial class or wish they were, but I suspect I'd be pretty far-left compared to people in the areas you recommend and might find the local culture unwelcoming as a result.
I saw a couple of people retire from big old blue chip tech companies (think Intel and IBM). I saw a lot more people burn out, die before retirement or change careers. I burnt out a few times and now make VR games for a fun semi-retirement.
TLDR; I've got some Windmills to tilt at as I go off into the sunset.
I am now, apparently, a retired person. It came as a surprise, and relief. (The fine line between retired and homeless cuts through every human heart)
I intend to write a lot of code, make a lot of 3d printed stuff, and enjoy my time with my friends and family.
For the next month or two, I can't do much due to eye surgery.
I've picked up (with a lot of help from HN) a Forth variant from the 1970s previously known as STOIC, to work on. It's written in C, which I've avoided since the 1980s. (I hate case sensitivity, and the shenanigans that happen with Macros, and the insanity that is \x00 terminated strings)
If possible, I intend to write a C library that does Reference Counted, Count Prefixed Strings, to route around the standard *char grief.
I'm also working on a set of tools to deconstruct HTML and recast it as an Actual Markup language that you can apply to HyperText, in a sane manner. (Throwing all the layers together with a blender in "HTML" was a tragedy)
Oh... and I forgot earlier... I want to at some point use an OS as a daily driver that implements the principle of least privilege. WASM might be a work around for this.
I thought so too around your age but I’m 39, still working in tech and am feeling better than ever about my career! For me starting my own startup was the best thing I ever did (so far…)
Oh I'm a bit older than you. I have no doubt that if I put in enough time I could find a job that is perfect for me, but it can take months to find a job and months to decide if a job is right for you.
And TBH I'm kind of tired of tech. There's a lot of busy work and "automation" that requires more upfront time than you save in a year or maybe even years. It's exhausting keeping up with the young'uns and their new-fangled software that they don't fully understand. (It's incredibly uncommon for them to consider failure modes).
I've considered my own startup. I have ideas. I'm not a salesperson though. Raising funds would be a challenge, as would hiring.
Sorry for the brain dump here. I've got a lot built up. And unfortunately I have a lot of "but"s and excuses. It would have been better if I intervened in my life a decade ago.
Raising could be challenging now due to current circumstances. Hiring I’ve never found that hard, and you can hire people for sales (and learn the basics yourself).
I spent about a decade as a PM in early-stage enterprise software companies (Box and Talkdesk, among others) and left in 2019 to open a dog boarding business!
I found real estate, had plans drawn up, got permits, found a contractor and ways a few days away from closing my SBA loan. Then the bank called and said they were putting a hold on new underwriting because of this COVID thing... this was March of 2020.
Had to shut that down before I ever opened my doors, but then I started a dog treat business, and that's going well!
Here's an AP article that covers it... that's me at the top with my dogs: https://apnews.com/article/business-coronavirus-pandemic-8ea...