I burned out bad last year and quit during the summer. As soon as I gave notice, everything became better. I spent the past year learning daytrading (not going well) and working on side projects (also not going well), yet it's not causing me the stress I felt on the job. But I'm about to start applying and trying to find work again. I fear I'm no longer cut out for software dev anymore. I need to find an easy laid-back job where I don't need to be a "leader". It was being a leader that burned me out. I don't want to decide on overall direction or use bleeding edge tech or be responsible for a project. I just want to work on well-defined CRUD.
This is essentially me, though I'm not day trading and I'm not sure how much better I feel since quitting. I am young, but I spent all of my time up until a year ago doing the best I could to understand what makes good products and how to write great software. This has made me a de facto leader in any team I've joined, including straight out of college. Now I have the work experience to be "senior" (whatever that means), but I've never had the mentorship or fact checking that I think reaching such a position requires.
I still don't feel ready to find a job, but I have no idea how I will ever hold one. Leading is so wearing, and I'm already in such a delicate mental state.
I hope you find where you want to be. For me, I think I _need_ to be where I feel I'm bringing some positive benefit to the world, and I hope that at some point I can find a way to both build good OSS and make some money doing it.
Whenever I leave tabs open in FF, it'll consume 3GB+ of memory and slow my computer to a crawl. I do the same in Chrome and it'll consume maybe 2GB RAM and it's fine. I want to use FF and support Mozilla. In fact, I lived with FF and this type of behavior for years hoping it'll get better in the next update, but it never did. FF is just not usable for me anymore. I reluctantly switched to Chrome and haven't had issues.
I wanted to support Firefox as well, and would still prefer to do nothing related to my job on a browser that may be sharing it all because some some click-through EULA gave it permission.
But I can't use it anymore, because it swaps.
My work laptop has only 8GB, soldered. One day I was shocked to find the NVME had only 50% useful life left. Digging further, FF memory demand was causing paging, on a drive that was so fast I wasn't really bothered by it. Who knows how long that had gone on....
I don't understand how displaying some text and images eats gigabytes of memory anyway. Web browsers had that capability since Netscape and we barely had megabytes to spare. We have thousandfolds more memory now and have gained... what, exactly?
Linode, and let me tell you why... I had an unimportant side project running on a Linode VPS. I left it running, almost forgot about it and wasn't checking emails associated with that account. When I did check that email account, Linode has been trying to contact me about my VPS getting compromised and it was running a bot of some sort. It was probably 4-6 months before I saw their emails. All they did was cut off network access to my VPS, so I had to use their virtual console to log in and take care of things.
I appreciated the way they took the minimal action necessary that isolated the problem, instead of just nuking my entire account, and all its data, like I read that Digital Ocean did in a similar situation, only it wasn't an unimportant side project, it was someone's entire ongoing business. I have no affiliation with Linode except being a satisfied customer, but this experience this is why Linode is my first choice, all else being equal.
> Additionally contract work allows you to change up the projects you work more easily.
How often do you change jobs as a contractor? What range of rates would you recommend targeting?
> I'd recommend to look for a contract role where you help with the maintenance of some old boring tech project.
Would you go through a recruiter to find something like this? How would you frame this to a recruiter that this is the type of job you want? You can't really just say, "I want an easy software job". Or can you? But you especially couldn't say that to the company.
> excellent developers decide they simply couldn't take the pressure and head out for something easier
Been working since late 90's with a 1.5 year break for grad school, but going through some extreme burnout right now and I totally want to do this. Don't want to try to "get away with pretending to work" at all, just want something easier with less pressure/stress.
> Check they're IT ops/dev organization; note whether they're using a third-party[2]. If you want that "back-end only job", look no further.
Can you name some specific companies to look at for this?
> My buddy took my advice and ended up getting an "Easy Corporate Job"
Which route did he go, the DBA team or the third-party IT org?
> Can you name some specific companies to look at for this?
Not any specific companies, no. I helped my friend do the job search, though. The criteria we used was "The role he was willing to take had to be in-house or majority in-house" and "Probably a support role". I also realize I wrote that wall of text way too fast because I've slightly mixed in two different peoples' stories by accident[0] one of which had nothing to do with burnout.
To figure out the first, we started at job boards and just "went through the list looking for big companies". Often, if they outsource, the job posting will be from that company, not BigCorp, but not always. From there, at the time, it was pretty easy to confirm by just hopping on LinkedIn and looking up people who worked in similar roles at the company. If you can find a few folks listing their employer as BigCorp, in your role, and the other things match -- he applied.
He was targeting power/telecom mostly[1]. And he ended up getting offers for all but one or two of the interviews he took, which confirmed my thinking that "big companies get terrible candidates". On paper (and in real life, for that matter), my buddy was an excellent candidate and incredibly smart... just burned out. The thing of it is, last I talked to him, he is still puts in more than 40 hours (remotely, though), and he was still the team hero.
> Which route did he go, the DBA team or third-party IT org?
I haven't talked to him in about a year, but he ended up taking a gig on a sort-of DBA team (sort-of in that their responsibilities covered on-prem hardware and some DevOps work, and the job listing barely mentioned DBA work ... and it was posted as a Unix Sysadmin job[2]). He's working remotely directly for the company in that role and another who took a job at a third-party IT org (HP Enterprise or something like that), remotely (with on-prem requirements on rare occasion, etc). I know the third-party gentleman ran into some problems and, I think, is working somewhere else (similar role), now though.
[0] I do this on purpose, on occasion, because 15-or-so years ago I commented on something including an innocent story on Digg (first iteration), which turned out that I didn't have all of the information on -- and it was far less innocent than I realized -- which someone pseudonomously provided. The result was a bit of embarrassment but not much more. I took it as a warning to be more careful with stories that aren't mine.
[1] For no other reason than "I worked at a global multi-national telecom, which was a 'sort-of' tech company and we in-housed most of our IT".
[2] Just. Yeah. ... Huh?! Big corporations and job postings in IT are a whole other topic.
2.8M nut, about 50/50 in regular/retirement accounts. I'm mid 40's, married with two pre-teen kids, annual expenses of $80K, live in HCOL area (Southern California). Would you FIRE in this situation? Would you take a year long hiatus? As much as I would like to FIRE, I can't/won't, even though the "numbers" say I probably could. But seriously considering a months to year long career break/sabbatical/hiatus, because I'm extremely extremely burnt out. Has anyone here taken a gap year in their 40's/50's? Was it difficult to find another job?
Your scenario comes up a lot in FIRE forums: People lead unsustainably stressful work lives and think the only antidote is to quit. Then they decide they're not ready to quit, so they continue working the unsustainably demanding job.
The real solution is to work on refactoring your career. You need to teach yourself how to work sustainably, manage stress, and take vacations. Job won't allow it? Time to start looking for another job. Other jobs pay less? Doesn't matter, it's still more than you'd be paid if you burn out and have to quit to get relief.
Re: Gap years: You can find stories of people taking gap years and then diving right back into the workforce, but many of them are either from young people or people who have a network that can get them back into a job. If you're making a clean break and re-entering the workforce without job connections, it's going to be difficult in your 40s and 50s unless you have some very niche skills that are in demand. Hiring managers might be concerned that you're looking for a cushy semi-retirement job to keep you busy, and that you might simply retire again if the going gets tough. They'd rather hire someone whose career interests are more aligned with staying with the company. Keep this in mind with how you frame your gap year.
Pre-pandemic, I'd take 3-4 weeks a year. I've only taken a 2 weeks off this past year, mainly because there's no where to go, so I've taken the 2 weeks just for mental health.
Everything you say makes sense and I am considering all of it, especially taking a lower paying, lower stress job.
This is the first time in my rather long career when I haven't taken effectively every day I was owed. Couldn't go anywhere--or at least didn't feel comfortable doing so--and odd days here and there often ended as at least partial work days.
In a prior life, I took a few month-long trips to Nepal. No one ever complained although a few were a bit surprised I could do so.
When I was earlier in my career and was fed up at my then-current job, an older, wiser coworker of mine took me aside and advised me to leave for the right reasons. Be sure that I was running toward something new that excited me, and not just running away from something that made me unhappy. He wanted to make sure I wasn't going to just accept whatever first job came my way, or quit without any plan for the future at all.
The antidote to unsustainably stressful work is only quitting if you've thoroughly looked at what quitting really means and have decided that will truly make you happy.
Quitting might be an intentionally-short-term fix with a plan to find a better job with a healthier work/life balance. Quitting and retiring could be a long-term fix, too, but it's such a huge lifestyle change that it shouldn't be seen as simply a solution to the problem.
It's a good question for your financial advisor assuming you have one.
One of their jobs is crunching the numbers to answer the exact question you're asking.
We recently went through this with our financial advisor. We're the same age, only have one kid, east coast HCOL area, live well below our means, very similar savings as you.
Rough answer was we could do a normal retirement in our early 50s if we could get closer to $6M nest egg with an assumption of spending a bit higher than your current expenses in retirement.
FI/RE seems to be financial advising minus the personalized advice and the regulations and plus the silly social media influencer/huckster side of things with a side dose of "retire well below your normal standard of living" to retire early.
One of the tricks for me to balance things is realizing the startup game is too rigged.. it's way easier to make solid/reliable returns working at high performing public companies that award equity. I've been through quite a few exits, but as time has gone on each exit was worse and worse because the founders and investors get more and more of the pie. And working at the public companies tends to be way more life/work balance.
> we could do a normal retirement in our early 50s if we could get closer to $6M nest egg
Assuming you're going to live from 50 until 80, that's $200k/year spending assuming your investments/retirement funds just keep up with inflation. Maybe I'm missing something?
No, don't have a financial advisor, but considering one now. Before I burnt out, I was also planning to early retire around 50, when my nest egg should be at least $5M. Thanks for your insights. What kind of financial advisor did you use? Fee-only CFP/CFA?
As others have pointed out, try to get a financial advisor who can look at your situation and give you some objective advice.
But also understand that you're probably not going to make the best decisions about this from the perspective of extreme burnout.
First step might be to talk to your boss about your workload and see if there are some changes that can be made to make you happy again. If that doesn't pan out, maybe think about finding a new job. Even if you choose not to, just going through the process of seeing what's out there will give you some valuable perspective.
I don't have much idea as to how difficult it'd be to find another job in your 40s/50s if you take an extended break from work for a while, but my intuition is that it'd be harder than simply switching jobs now. An alternative might be to find a new job now, but negotiate a start date that is a month or two out from your planned last day at your current job. This won't work at some employers, but many will be fine with it.
On the other hand, consider that $2.8M at $80k/yr is 35 years of expenses. Your expenses will almost certainly grow over time, but even if they triple, that's still over 10 years of runway. If you wanted to take a year off, but then had trouble finding a job right away, you'd have no problem (financially) taking 6 months (or 12 or more) finding your next job. Hell, you could train for an entirely new field and work your way up from an entry level position to something mid-range in that time.
Thanks for your reply. It really encapsulates all the best advice I've gotten from all places.
> But also understand that you're probably not going to make the best decisions about this from the perspective of extreme burnout.
I'm (overly) aware that my burnt out state may not lead to the best decisions. That's why I'm stepping cautiously and not making any rash changes.
> First step might be to talk to your boss about your workload and see if there are some changes that can be made to make you happy again.
I'm currently in talks with management to see what can be done. It's not really the workload, but the type of work I'm doing that's been the problem. But because I'm burnt out and diminished, the normal workload which is not normally a problem is becoming one. But I also fear I'm just too burnt out to remain working here in any capacity.
I'm gearing myself up to find another job, to avoid having to job hunt while unemployed in my 40s, and hopefully be able to take a month or two before starting. Job hunting/interviewing is hard in the best of circumstances; it's doubly so in my current burnt out state.
> [Long runway, can retrain in another field]
Also under consideration. Front-runner is GIS. Always had an interest doing geo-analysis/maps.
> But I also fear I'm just too burnt out to remain working here in any capacity.
That's a key (unfortunate) insight. Sometimes the only way to fix burnout is to step back and just not do what you were doing for a while, sometimes a long while. Employers usually won't be ok with that, though :(
And yeah, totally get that interviewing while being burned out is really hard too.
Best of luck to you. I really hope you manage to figure things out. The important thing is that you know there's a problem, and you're taking steps to try to fix it. Even if that process is not easy, things will get better.
If you have that much in the bank and you're worried about how a gap year will affect your future, then I'm royally screwed.
I want to take some time off, but I've got significantly less to fall back on. I wish I didn't earn so little for so long. It feels like by the time I catch up I'll be regular retirement age anyway.
Realistically you can't retire, not with two pre-teen kids.
But you can take a comfortable number of years off though and it is very nice to do that. Decompress, spend tons of time with those pre-teen kids while they still are that age.
I took about 3 years off in my 40s when my child was starting elementary school. Spent all my afternoons playing with the kid and all mornings (school time) working on my personal projects at home. Highly recommended!
With 2.8M while you can't retire forever, you also won't have any urgency to find a new job so you can be picky when you start looking, like I was. Finding a new job can be difficult if you're desperate for it, but with no urgency you can hold out for a great job.
> Realistically you can't retire, not with two pre-teen kids.
Yeah, I think I realize this deep down, and part of why I don't want to.
> I took about 3 years off in my 40s
How did your job search go when you decided to go back to work? What was your last job before taking a break and what was the new job that you found? Were they similar or completely different? Did you have any trouble with a 3-year gap? You obviously didn't have any major issues, like not finding a job. But were you questioned a lot about the gap? Sorry so many questions, but I'm intensely interested in how it went for you because I might be doing the same.
If I do take a year off, I figure I could explain it partly with the pandemic, and wanting to take care of my kids (not untrue).
I know my savings allow me a long runway and if I take a career break, I'm sure I could figure something out during that time. But still, actually stepping off that cliff is nerve-wracking, for me at least.
I had way less savings (but enough to live comfortably at least 5 years and maybe another 5 penny-pinching if I had to) and it wasn't stressful.
I suggest setting up a solo consulting business up front. I didn't think of doing that, did it in the third year and only after someone contacted me asking for some consulting help. I did then have a couple clients for consulting but I only worked a couple hours a week and not every month so it was minimal-to-none at best. But it did give me a legitimate entry in the resume as consulting business owner. Maybe that helped.
I was very worried about the gap but it was a non-issue. Most places didn't ask at all. The few that did, I told them I wanted to be a stay-at-home-dad for a while and spend time with the kid (true) and everyone was "wow, very cool!"
(I'm in Silicon Valley, culture might be different elsewhere.)
It's hard to say how long it took me to find a new job because I didn't exactly look for one. After setting up the consulting gig I started thinking it would be great to find enough consulting work to fill about 20hrs/wk and just keep doing that. So I started reading my linkedin messages instead of ignoring them. I'd respond to the recruiters saying I'm not looking for a full time role but I'd be open to part-time consulting for their project. No takers, I wish companies were more open to part-time help. One of those recruiters ended up being more persistent and convinced me to go in for interviews even though I didn't want a FT role. Ended up liking the team so took the offer. I was at a principal engineer/architect level before and after.
I obviously don't know your situation but given your high savings and the age of the kids, it's a great opportunity to spend time with them now.
Another approach to FIRE that I think is actually more fulfilling is to gradually reduce working hours until "retired".
For example, explore a position that lets you work 4 days a week and take Mondays or Fridays off. Later, switch to part time or contracting 6 months on 6 months off.
I don't personally think gap years will be very fulfilling unless it's something like a whole family 1 year vacation where you all go and live someplace.
I would absolutely love to find a software position with 24-32 hour week, but I have not heard of such a thing, short of going out on your own and freelancing. No employer I know of (in software field, I don't want to go work retail) would consider allowing employees to work part time.
I have considered contracting or even freelancing too, but I've been a W2 worker my entire career. I'd have to look into how to do this.
They exist - I work for Indeed and there's a 4 day week option that started being offered last year in response to covid and has now become an official policy. The problem is that companies that do it don't tend to advertise it I guess.
For EU citizens, The Netherlands is totally a country where 32 hours per week is possible. The pay is also a lot lower ;-) Though, compared to a 40 hour work week, you only take a 20% pay cut (and probably get passed up on promotions, so there is an opportunity cost).
Work climate is much different here in the manic U.S. I'd gladly take the 20% pay cut and be passed over for promotions. I actively decline promotion to team lead/management anyway. Whatever extra benefits there are in pay/title is not worth the stress.
You can spend $80k a year for 35 years and keep your investment in any vehicle that just barely keeps up with inflation. If that nut achieves just 3% annual gain over inflation, you'll still have the same nut in 35 years...
Can you explain the "can't" part of early retirement? The "won't" is of course your decision and no one else's. But why do you say "can't"?
I fully admit the "can't" is mostly in my head. Need to work up the courage to do so, due to many reasons. Societal (what a bum!), family (what kind of role model would I be for kids?) and just fear of running out of money due to black swan event. I wouldn't say my fear is completely irrational, but it's not all rational either.
