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.

This is the most important comment I've read in a while. It has become really easy to feel trapped in software as a trade even though I love working on software as much or more than ever in the details of the work. I'm fortunate that my current gig doesn't involve doing anything that I find directly objectionable in a Hippocratic Oath sense (though some might, its trading stuff which I long ago decided is about a 1.01 out of Meta on a scale of 1 to OpenAI).

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.

Insightful comment.

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.

Having systems thinking is a bit like being Cassandra: doomed to know the future yet doomed never to be believed.

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.