Ask HN: I want to leave tech: what do I do?

This article is not a "I want to leave tech" article. It is an "I want to have more ownership of the nature of my work" article.

Practically every recommendation is also a tech job, its just not "big tech" where you have very little real decision making power.

Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package.

Glad this was the top comment. It is extremely easy to "leave tech" (or, as you point out, leave "big tech") - you just have to accept that you will most likely make substantially less money and that your "standard of living" will have to adjust accordingly.

I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay.

But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.

What do you do with kids when you want to downsize? Give them away?