Comment by teiferer

7 days ago

> It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales

I'm feeling the same. The moves I'm considering are

1. Landscaping 2. Carpentry 3. Small scale agriculture

(All made easier by a cushion of investments that are most of the way to passive income, so the new thing doesn't really have to make me that much money.)

7 comments

teiferer

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cpursley  7 days ago

My father runs a commercial landscaping company with 15 employees. His truck fleet insurance went up 35% just this year. His light industrial facility that he operates out of property taxes went up 55% last year. All of his commercial clients are cheaping out on all the little things that used to make extra money (pine straw, seasonal flowers, etc.). He’s having to deal with poorly educated staff who are constantly breaking equipment and doing stupid dangerous things. He’s so burned out by it all, and the fact that his actual salary is less than several of his top staff that he’s thinking about just shutting it all down. When I was working as a software developer, my income was probably twice as much as his without any of the risk or headache.

  • teiferer  6 days ago

    I hear you man. Didn't intend to paint a rosy image of hard working landscapers. What I meant was do it more like a hobby that pays a little on the side. Doesn't have to be much, just pay some bills and let me do sth I like. Cause supervising a bunch of immature LLM agents is not something I'll like to do all day, I'd rather trim trees and plant flowers on the cheap.

    • rkomorn  6 days ago

      I'm all for it but maybe with caution.

      I bailed out of a FAANG job to cook in restaurants in the Bay Area and it was very double-edged. I gave up after a year for a variety of reasons.

      The actual work was definitely more enjoyable.

      "Paying the bills", on the other hand, actually took a lot of money (and I had a laughably small mortgage and two people sharing it at the time).

      I also worked way more hours (30-40% of which were unpaid because yay fine dining), and it was physically way more brutal.

      But then again, almost 10 years later, I'm back to the idea of opening a place of my own because the current tech landscape really doesn't attract me at all anymore and I can't get myself to last in it.

  • muldvarp  6 days ago

    No one is claiming that any of the alternatives are better jobs than software engineering has been for the last 20 years.

    We don't live in the last 20 years anymore and software engineering is either becoming a different (worse) job or simply vanishing.