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I actually know someone like this. He's been in software engineering since the early 2000. I recently saw a post from him that he's now a firefighter recruit.
I’ve been in tech since 2005 and I wish I had the means to bail like that. I’ve honestly considered taking a fat pay cut and going back to driving a forklift.
I know that feel. Tech jobs are so mentally exhausting that you begin to wish for a job where your brain can finally get some rest :/
I get the thousand yard stare more often as I get older. I learned that it’s my brain forcing itself to take breaks.
I started in 2006 web design & development, worked till 2019 when my company dissolved, 5 months before the pandemic.
I moved out of the city and I’m fixing rusty old cars for peanuts. It’s nice, but can still be stressful. Just in a totally different way.
It’s interesting because my dad followed a similar path and I wish I had the smarts he did. He worked as an electrical engineer and was with a company contracted by NASA. He told me how he got to work on some of the stuff in the space capsules back in the 70s/80s. Then at some point he became a full-time kitchen designer and was a carpenter. I asked him once why he left such a high-paying and interesting field. He said it was because all of the people he worked with were uptight squares and he just didn’t like it.
He passed away about 17 years ago. I wish he was still around. I could use his advice as a web dev that feels collectively burnt out and in a rut.
My friend was a pretty accomplished academic. Nothing like a mad genius or anything, but pretty excellent and capable. Wasn’t down with the rat-racey pressure to publish and oversell ideas. Left it all to go live in a small farm town. Last time we talked he seemed happy but it wasn’t the easy and smooth path of academia -> farm town, it was actually academia -> enormous existential crisis -> farm town.