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

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.

The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies:

- Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)

- Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer

- Computer People Know What's Best

Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle).

I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up.

What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.

I think there's a dividing line in society between those who understand systems and those who don't. The systems people look at the non-systems people as stupid; the non-systems people look at the systems people as evil.

What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally.

As an example, I can think of one politician (edit: not trump) who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.

Not sure whether you’re talking about the Orange Man, but calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell given the damage his tariffs, defunding, and other nonsense are causing.

You have a man who was not part of the elite establishment and yet has managed to get wealthy by breaking the law and avoid getting caught, then managed to become president against all odds, twice.

Sure, he came from wealth, but plenty of other people came from even more wealth and had way more political connections and failed to become presidents.

Hate him all you want, but if achieving all that is not a form of intelligence and system knowledge, I don't know what is.

That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.

Q: If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate? Wouldn't that make them stupider than the Donald for such an obvious oversight of the electorate?

>That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.

Managing to become president twice is insuficient evidence?