Techxit strategy?

When I speak with people outside of tech, they’re usually surprised to hear that I know a lot of folks who’d like to get out of the industry. “But! But! The money is so good!”

Well, yeah. It is. And we all look really good in golden handcuffs, but that doesn’t mean we like it.

Tech is more capricious than any other industry with which I’ve worked (unfortunately, doing tech things). It’s far from a stable situation. You cannot (and should not) rely on your job existing in a year, and that adds a great deal of stress to an industry that already glamourises overwork.

If you work at the level I do, you also get to watch a lot of extremely poor business decisions as they’re happening. These decisions don’t typically have a lot of logic or strategy behind them, and they impact the welfare of not only employees but also customers of the business. Even if you get to provide advice (as I do), there’s not usually a lot you can do to stop these strategic and operational mistakes. It’s demoralising in many ways.

So, yeah, many of us would like to get out if we can. In the past few years I’ve started to admit that I should be counting myself in that number. Unfortunately, unlike most folks I don’t have a partner on whom I can rely for another income, which makes my golden handcuffs fit more tightly than usual. It also means that when someone rips those handcuffs away—say, by laying me off—it hurts a lot more.

This most recent layoff is another opportunity for me to consider my techxit strategy. Is it even possible for me to leave tech? What would I do instead?

For a change, I’m legitimately considering these questions rather than letting them cross my thoughts, tank my mood, and disappear. I’ve come up with some possible options (which I’m not willing to share yet) and am actively investigating one so far. Even if it works out, I don’t expect it’d be something to which I could switch full time, at least not immediately, but it could provide some sort of a safety net. Maybe.

Anyway, I’m looking into it rather than simply sitting around wringing my hands, fretting, and complaining about the state of the industry.