Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

If I were to transition from software engineering, I'd prioritize a role that meets the following criteria:

  1. Minimizes screen time and doesn't rely heavily on computers for productivity.

  2. Allows me to disconnect after work without constant notifications or calls.

  3. Offers stability, requiring minimal adaptation to new trends or technologies.

  4. Lastly,  and more importantly, not easily replaceable by AI in the near future.

Any ideas on actual roles?

I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.

Masseuse or physical trainer are the only jobs that I can think would qualify.

No screen time, no one needs a midnight massage (although your work hours would probably not be 9-5.), not reliant on technology, and going to take a while for AI to replace.

Very few good jobs fulfill criteria number 2.

if you live in a place with lots of sun and rain you can make a pretty good living owning a yard service and employing a small crew. A childhood friend of mine in FL worked as a mower and then bought the business when his boss was ready to retire. I think he does well into 6 figures and supports his family with it.

edit: i will say he and his crew are pretty amazing at what they do. Speed and quality is unbelievable (it's been 20 years since i've seen him work though)

edit2: i've also heard of people buying a backhoe, dump truck, and a trailer and making 6 figures doing random contracts.

Construction trades (e.g., any role involved in building a house).

Get a portable Laguna or Woodmizer saw mill. Optional kiln.

IMHO, Farming is the ideal switch for a techie. Technically, you are switching from the likes of Matrix to speaking to animals.

Another activity that I believe would bring more joy than 99% of jobs, if not all, is charity.

I hear that being a utilities locator is good work. Pretty much all your requirements, plus:

- lots of outside time and exercise built into the day

- independent work

- low credential barrier to entry

Don't most physical labor jobs and trades fulfill number 2?

Are you speaking from experience? Personally - speaking as someone who had needed to plant, hill, water, weed, and harvest plenty of sacks of potatoes by hand as a child - I would say that coding is vastly preferable over farming; and in fact, that most things are preferable over farming.

Teacher seems to fit some of those.

I've wondered for a while now, how difficult is sustainable farming now if you incorporated all the modern technologies?

It should be ridiculously easy to self sustain with all this stuff we've built! Instead we just work just as long to produce ton of crap that does nothing for our happiness.

These are the roles I seriously considered and actively explored to some degree or another.

1. Electrician. It's not something you can just jump into, even if you're the type who can grok 100% of the theory, equipment, and electrical code overnight. Even after you're all trained up, you have to rank up through various levels, most of which require working under someone else for X number of years. It takes a decade or more before you really have much of a choice of what you get to work on, and start making decent money. In other words, it's a serious career change on-par with doctor or lawyer, just with much less pay.

2. Aircraft mechanic. I love planes. Aircraft are expensive machines. Getting them repaired and maintained and also extremely expensive. So being an aircraft mechanic should be lucrative, right? Sadly, no. I don't know where the money goes, but most aircraft mechanics make significantly under under the median wage and don't have much flexibility on where they can work.

3. Pilot. I would LOVE to fly airplanes and get paid to do it. But this is also another whole career in and of itself. The training costs are extremely exorbitant. A regular job would have me away from home more often than not. According to Real Pilots, airlines are some of the worst employers to work for. But all that aside, I would be a poor pilot because I have a hard time mentally keeping track of numbers. And pilots have to memorize and juggle an insane (to me) amount of numbers just to land safely. I couldn't memorize more than about three numbers for more than 10 seconds or so even at gunpoint.

4. Real estate investor. Lots of people get surprisingly rich from this. But it is a lot of work. The idea is pretty simple: buy a run-down house at a discount, fix it up well enough to rent, re-finance it to get your money back out, and then you effectively have an income-producing property for free. Take that money and go do the same on another one. The problem with this is that the devil is in the details. Every deal is different and unless you're lucky enough to have a mentor willing to share resources and vet your deals, you are GOING to mess it up. I tried this and it didn't work out for two big reasons: 1) I can stay on top of projects, but running all aspects of a business myself is not for me. And I could not find anyone that I trusted to partner with. 2) The sudden large increase in interest rates in the middle of my rehab meant that refinancing was not a viable option. I was forced to sell the property after it was done. I broke even monetarily, but gained a lot of wisdom. I might dip my toes into the water with a simpler strategy in the future, but that's a good 5-10 years off.

5. YouTuber. YT was nice in the beginning, but has consistently been giving the shaft to content creators while keeping all the profits for themselves. On top of that, I found that I really hate editing video.

Right now, I've made peace with the fact that my current destiny is getting paid fairly good money to sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day. The goal at this point is to sock away as much as I can into index funds, to grow it as quickly as possible, and retire early enough that I can essentially devote my whole day every day to hobbies, grandchildren (if I have them), and friends (if I have them).

Something that fits all of that is a career as a professional athlete. Are you any good at golf? ;)

I can strongly recommend taking advantage of the engineering salaries while you have access. 15 years in and I finally quit my software career to start up a homestead/farm with no debt.

Closest I've come to a new job so far was almost taking a job at a local sawmill, I just haven't quite tied up my own projects yet to commit the time. Its run by an older local guy who has been milling for decades. The list of things I could learn from him is very, very long and access to good lumber is a great perk.

you win life.

In case anyone is looking for the dead opposite, I highly suggest practicing law.

I'm doing it with almost none of the modern technologies. Loving it so far, but it definitely isn't for profit. Farming is a losing business these days, few make profit that isn't effectively living off of government subsidies.

I wouldn't trade it for the world at this point though. Its a very strange, and satisfying, experience to raise, butcher or harvest, and cook food that you raised on farm.

How long does it take you in a day?

I had saved up a good amount of money (before losing it all lol, where I could do this). I was thinking about buying some nice land, setting up an aquaponics farm, and just running some solar farms/generators.

No fret from me if you want to do it all by hand, but there really ought to be a middle ground between living as if it was the 1800s and working 8-10 hours day at a desk.

It very much depends on what you want to grow/raise and how you want to manage it. If your goal is to feed your family, you can pretty easily do that with a few hours of good work in a day when its all setup.

We don't do absolutely everything by hand, but we definitely avoided many of the modern approaches. We have 13 cows, 9 chickens and 20 chicks that just hatched, and a small garden (~3500 sq ft).

There's always certain jobs that take all day or multiple days, like cutting our fields (~50 acres), planting/harvesting, and butchering a pig was a huge undertaking given that we've never done anything like it before. On average, I'd say we put it 6-8 hours a day split between two people, with the occasional days of both working 8-10 hours each.

If you can relax requirement #3 then stand up comedy comes close.

p.s : professional stand up comic here, been trying to quit my day job for 14 years :-)

Psychologist? Without being ageist :-) I think later in life once you been around the block and got some scars is a good time to be one (of course the formal training and education is 99%) but experience means something. As a bonus you can eventually earn what you were as a developer (probably more in Australia where I am if you are location flexible, for example happy to fill a position somewhere remote)

I think this meets your requirements. It is in danger of AI replacement though. Which would be sad. But reckon there is 20 years of red tape to cut before we get there.

But if you don’t want to talk to people and be on a schedule then carpentry might be a good one. The sort where you make things as oppose to fix architraves in old houses.

AI plus machinery could make “home made” looking stuff but cheapos will keep going to ikea and there will still be a market.

If I didn’t need to make much money and just stay occupied probably do walking tours for free in untouristy places (think the “boring” countryside between cities that ain’t in any guidebooks) or just for a bit of cash walk people’s dogs at the park.

Robots may eventually do these things but to a dog a robot won’t smell like a human so they are the last to be fooled. I imagine in 2050 everyone will have a dog (bred to be small and generally dosile and easy to train) to sniff people for bot detection.

I think if most disgruntled devs put honest thought into it like you did, they would reach the same conclusion, I certainly did, esp with a family.

I have also started to try getting more aggressive with investments

ditto

> I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.

In my experience tolerating managers and people who don't really care about software is the much more exhausting part of software development.

I started a side business making custom craft cocktails for events (mostly weddings). It's a stressful job, but mixology is a passion of mine and so it doesn't feel nearly as much like work as my 9-5. I'm still in the early stages and learning a ton as I go, but I'm hoping to streamline my processes and raise my prices/margins enough to make about $80 per hour, which would be enough to allow me to go part-time with software engineering and give me much more free time overall while still earning enough to cover costs and save.

Those generally aren't good jobs. In particular they tend to pay poorly and destroy your body.

Happy for you that you have a decently monetizable passion!

Not necessarily. A lot of contractors are on call at a moments notice, work crazy hours, and take home all sorts of health related problems.

Also, woodworking (furniture, cabinetry, etc.).

> Aircraft mechanic.

I have family in this field; not only is the pay not great (for the skill level) but there is a layer of stress (and liability) that gets added to jobs where one mistake can mean death for someone else. I wouldn't jump into it without being sure that stress wouldn't affect me.

I guess I forgot to mention that I actually _was_ an aircraft mechanic, although that was in the military which I suspect has next to nothing in common civilian aircraft maintenance. The work itself was fine, if pretty tedious most of the time. I left the service to chase a career in tech which was probably the right call. Although there are days where I wonder what it would have been like to retire with a government pension 5 years ago...

Yeah, I'd hazard a guess that the life/death tradeoff, the error-management process, and individual liability work very differently for military vs civilian roles.

@redbell If you do go into a profession having to do with "charity" - what is more often referred to as non-profit (or not-for-profit) - please go in with open eyes. I don't want to dissuade you from looking into such careers; simply research things as one might be expected to do whenever looking at a new job/career. I spent 1 year at a well-known non-profit (similar tech leader job to what i've had in corporate world), and it was quite annoying from the perspective that it was the same (or worse!) bureacracy as compared to the corporate world, but with less pay. On the other hand, there were 2 medium-sized projects that i participated (and some portions led) in which have been the absolute best, most fulfilling thing i have ever done professionally in my almost 30 year career. While most of the co-workers were nice and had genuine desire to help their fellow humans, everything else about non-profit work (except for those 2 amazing projects!) was the same crap as corporate work (but again, less pay)! Again, i'm not saying you should not pursue a career in non-profit; simply do your due diligence in research. Goodness knows, we need non-profits to be more effective! Cheers!

Many pay well with good benefits if you have a good union. Yes physical labor is hard on your body, but in your 20s and 30s you can probably handle it just fine. You just need to move into a foreman/management position before you get too old.

I was thinking a good union shop job. Yeah independent guys working for themselves is a different story.