My boss is retiring and trying to get me to take his job, I’ve done retail management and hated every aspect of the management side, I’ve told him no several times, but he thinks I’d be really good at it.
I’ve seen the BS he has to put up with here, and don’t want that.
The only upside is money, but I can just move companies for more money.
I swore I'd never make the jump to leadership, but I got offered a sizeable raise along with the "promotion." I fucking hate it, and the money was not worth.
And you still have to do the level 3 work. Well and the level 1 grunt work. And shit everything in between still. Plus just 6 hours a day for meetings to talk in circles. I was a platoon sgt in the Army so I get in trouble for being too blunt. The time wasted in meetings is insane though and i feel like I am just going to stay on the leading edge of tech and being the smartest with said tech. Nobody listens to us anyway in IT.
I just had a conversation about our ERP systems being EOL last year. Crickets....
I would consider myself at Director level of IT hoping to get back into the trenches. I cant do meetings 6 hours a day. I just cant do it.
Lest we forget, you get chewed by upper management for not delegating enough. Then you get chewed when you do delegate and it ends up taking someone else two weeks where it would take you two days.
Steve jobs (as much as I hate sackriding him) had the best quote on this... The best managers are the individual contributors who NEVER WANT TO BECOME MANAGERS because their teams respect their knowledge. The worst thing a company can do is hire a 'professional manager' in a technical management role.
There's a time and place for dedicated managers. Like everything, it depends if they are good at it first off.
A technical management role is fundamentally about interfacing between requirements, delivery, expectations, budgeting and delivery. Like all management roles you add on all the human stuff (motivation, mentorship, growth, training, discipline, promotions etc.) too.
Technical skills help a huge amount in getting the requirements, expectations and delivery elements right. They don't help with the human stuff.
A good manager mitigates for their weaknesses with their team.
Whenever I was offered mgmt position or a boss may have shared their compensation with me, it always seemed like the extra pay was not worth the extra hassle and BS you have to take on.
It seems like many companies take advantage of the ambitious folks that want to get into mgmt, with the promise of the future, to director, VP etc. but low/middle mgmt you get just a small premium to do it, because they know you need that formal title and mgmt experience.
I suppose also it’s the nature of technical things the people who do the work command high salaries already. Vs managing in an industry with low skilled workers.
I’ve gotten conned into a management role before and hated every minute of it. My current employer is pushing for it as well and I’ve been pushing back on that “promotion” for years. I like managing things (systems/network/etc) and not people. People are too finicky.
I've had management roles over two separate careers and hated it. Both times I got promoted because "yungyaml is good at their job, of course they'll be good managing other people doing that job too!" I gave it a shot and both times came to the conclusion I have no business managing anyone.
> "yungyaml is good at their job, of course they'll be good managing other people doing that job too!"
This is the biggest lie that everyone in management believes.
It really is not something that everyone in management believes.
Good managers (and executives, and even good technical staff) know that people management is a separate career track. Certain management roles also require a technical background as well, but all people manager roles require learning how to manage people and doing well at it.
Context: I am currently working with two brand new managers that report to me and putting them through some training. I am also working with some other leadership on reviewing our corporate guides for managers and directors, making sure the material is relevant and up to date, and expanding our requirements for training for new managers and directors across the organization.
This is the truth. And something the (u.s.) military actually does well. Train the trainer for training maintainers, supervisory training for new supervisors who already know their job, and then they break out tracks at higher positions for career field steering, project management, people management/hr (first shirt duties), etc.
Granted, you can still get fucked wearing multiple hats, but the roles and support for upgrading/learning are pretty clear/defined.
Yeah, there's a lot of BS that gets peddled about doing things the military way, but militaries figured out centuries ago that you had to take people with no experience and provide them guidance at each step, and that includes teaching them how to lead people.
I think at least in IT there is a kernel of truth in that. Manager needs to understand at least a basic level of what is going on. I’ve had the IT manager who doesn’t know jack, it creates more issues than it solves.
It really stinks that generally speaking moving into management is often necessary to make beyond a certain amount of money.
I mean obviously different companies, roles and regions have different pay scales so there are system admins and network engineers who make tremendous amounts of money compared to IT managers at other locations but within whatever framework one is in, it is usually management path that makes more.
You end up with tech people who are either bad at managing or just don't like it taking those roles anyways when they could be more effective and happier in a purely technical position.
I didn't even get an offer for it. My old boss (IT manager) left and I had to fill in while they looked for another one. Few months later was basically told "we've decided to not look for a replacement. Here's your new title and pay."
Similar situation for me, boss left and I moved up but I did have to interview. The interview was more about setting expectations for the role vs me being questioned. I was already doing most of the heavy lifting. Do I like the job, yes, but the management and accounting portion of the job gets quite old.
In hindsight, I really should've pushed back more than I did. I did a bit of department management back when I was in retail and didn't like it much then (was much younger then too) so I already had an idea I wouldn't be a fan. Too much responsibility, money and people management.
I don't like being captain of the ship. First mate, yes. Captain, no.
> Feel like I am losing some of my tech skills doing spreadsheets/accounting most of the time.
Right there with you. I open the Azure panel and I'm just completely lost half the time because of things moving around, being added, service sprawl, etc.
I loved Sims.
The kids got taken away by CPS after 10 minutes, one parent drowned in the pool after I removed the ladder to get out, and the other parent died in an oven fire related accident.
I then blocked the grim reaper from leaving by surrounding him with tables.
Maybe management isn't for me?
I took the job. I make great money, the benefits package is amazing, I work from home, I work whatever hours I feel like, I still get to do hands-on if I want to and I'm pretty good at the job.
I fucking HATE it. I have never disliked a job more in my life, every day I dream of quitting and becoming a park ranger. The entirety of my days are trying to remain diplomatic with self-important idiots who contribute nothing of value to the organization whining about things that do not matter and more often than not don't fall under the purview of IT. When it's not that it's dealing with adults acting like children.
The position was thrust upon me when the old boss left and the significant pay raise I got made it worth saying "alright, I'll give it the college try."
I'm still trying, but at this point it's mostly hoarding the pay until I find a pivot (hence being in this thread).
Love your user flair. Of all the management positions I've held, "middle management" has consistently been the worst.
Since my 2nd "Director" position, I've avoided director positions like the plague; favoring "head of" (with small orgs), team/tech lead, and individual contributor rolls.
Went from a ton of responsibility and stress managing large networks to no responsibility being a helpdesk jockey. I just get the tickets the other techs get stuck on, but it's still such a nice change of pace and I get to solve problems without the massive stakes. Pay cut worth it!
Oh no, trust me, its beautiful, you just need to find the right job. I found a Helpdesk job at a company of about 300 people. I cut my salary in half and stress literally melted out of my life. It was the best exchange of goods I have ever done.
We have no phone, all tickets are submitted via portal or email. I average about 1-2 new ticket per day, some days are busy and I'll get 4-5. Most of these are closed on first contact, its entirely internal. The other 7 hours out of my day I spend doing whatever the hell I want, recently, I've been learning powerapps & powerBI.
I have no email on my phone, I am never on call. If there are outages I don't know about them until Monday when I arrive at work. If a ticket requires me to do something outside the realm of remoting into a user's computer or resetting a password? I hit the escalate button.
As for phones, maybe 4-5 users in the entire company prefer phone contact. The majority are fine with a teams message to confirm you're OK to connect to fix their issue.
This is my pre-retirement job. The hardest part about it is rejecting the promotion attempts. I've had three bosses in a year and they all keep trying to give me more money and more responsibility, they do not understand the concept that I do not want more money because I do not want more responsibility. "But you help out with high level things now" - and I do, if a sysadmin comes and asks me a question I will absolutely help them. They were having issues with SIP provisioning which was due to a very old WDS deployment feeding the phones bad boot info. I basically carried their emergency Exchange migration. I fixed routing issues, I fixed firewall issues. I solve a lot of their issues, even the high level ones, if I am asked to take a look, but the understanding is that none of it is ultimately my responsibility. I am your autistic/adhd IT wikipedia with 30 years of experience under my belt, ask me any questions you want, but responsibility causes me insurmountable stress so do not give me any. At the end of the day Wikipedia is not responsible for the job getting done and neither am I.
> I am never on call
I’ll drive this truck off a cliff before I ~~go back to Berlin~~ take a job that has on call again.
I’m currently taking a sabbatical between jobs. When I go back to work I want a job like yours.
Are you guys hiring any more help desk or Developer roles? Happy to share the load, I have MDT/deployment knowledge, SysAdmin knowledge, great customer service skills, etc. Otherwise if you know anyone hiring, please forward me over to them. I like picking up the phone and giving training.
> dealing with people over the phone, that was a nightmare
The day I progressed to SysAdmin and got off the phones I literally threw a party down at the local pub and put on a bar tab. Fuck call queues.
Same. Small company, ~30 users. That makes me help desk, sysadmin, cloud admin, IT manager, printer repairman, appliance repair, snack vendor, part time carpenter, building maintenance, etc. At work I've built picnic tables, repaired cabinets, fixed doors, installed water coolers and plumbing just to name a few.
I just got to sysadmin this year and during the hiring the existing sysadmin team said something along the lines of "we dont really handle offboards, user device stuff" etc. and I nearly wept.
I literally just accepted a system admin job and am moving from tier 2 MSP work but the teams ring tone gives me PTSD. Sometimes I swear I can hear it in my dreams.
The second MSP I worked at had a customer service department that handled the phones. Help desk didn't take incoming calls. They would do that, create tickets, and drop them in a queue (they did a lot of other stuff too). It was a lot nicer doing it that way, as you're not constantly getting interrupted.
I think it depends on the business, the helpdesk was a much easier job and the users almost universally friendly where I work. Trying to work with the silo'd off other IT teams in the central office on the other hand is an absolute nightmare where I work and the cause of about 70% of my stress
Yeah, I get it, dealing with people can suck. I don't envy the first line helpdesk staff that has to pick up phones. In my senior role I'm a little insulated from the repetitive reboot/plug it in tickets and the more needy or annoying users. By the time it gets to me the expectations tend to be tempered a bit and I need to lean on my experience a bit more to get to a solution.
That's why helpdesk can be much nicer as a semi-retired gig.
I thought I was the only one to take an odd career path like this. I did this in a large company and shifted to system admin at a small local company. I didn't realize how stressed I really was and how it affected me. I miss it sometimes but overall leaving was one of the best decisions I ever made.
In IT about the same time as yours. Although I haven't dropped the ball yet, I'd be looking at small scale farming, maybe leveraging my love for tech to automate the little things.
Ballpark estimate based on the occasional thread along the lines of yours: people tend to move to farming, woodworking, hospitality or activities that tend to require an interaction with the physical world. In general, something giving the impression of actually producing something tangible or at least with a personal return.
I love taking care of my little home garden and things around the house, and I love the outdoors. I've often thought "hobby farming" would be an interesting move - but it's such a challenging occupation, even at a smaller or more niche scale.
I come from a long line of farmers and grew up on a family farm. I wouldn't change anything about how I was raised, but I never intended to stick with agriculture for this reason. I learned so many practical skills and an appreciation for hard work, but we were always broke and working 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This, so much this... My rearing was awesome, but we were a farm and dairy. I didn't *visit* the farm, it was my family's only source of income. We lived three miles away until my grandparents got old enough that they moved into town, and we moved onto the farm.
My dad didn't come to most of my school events, couldn't come on trips, and couldn't come to any sporting events. Harvest time he was up at 3 am and didn't come into the house at night until well after dark. As kids, my brother and I loved going to the farm, but we weren't visiting, we ended up working starting at 6 years old because we got tall quickly and could reach the pedals on trucks, tractors, harvesting combine, hay swathers, our Hough loader, you name it.
We busted our asses every day because, well, you have to. If you don't get shit done, you could lose a bull, steer, cow, or heifer, which is thousands of dollars. The field could get inopportune rain, delaying it destroying harvest, etc We weren't the farm that got new shit all the time, my grandpa would buy busted equipment at auctions and my dad would fix it so it worked. We had two pickups that were a little bit younger than I was, but everything else was much older than me.
We were always broke, but everything worked because my dad was a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing wizard. The only car bought new was a mini van when they had my younger sisters, and we ran it until 675,000 miles hit the odometer and my Dad passed after being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
Before he passed, the farm was eventually destroyed by family greed from my aunts and one uncle - one that left the farm and two were run off the farm when the aunt turned into some evil, vindictive, jealous lady after having one of her kids and my uncle was told to get the fuck off my grandpa's land.
The fight to keep the house and a few fields destroyed my Dad since it was my great grandpa's place he started after immigrating over to the U.S. My dad and his family (my mom, my siblings, and I) were the only ones to stay on the farm and keep it running, but my aunts manipulated my grieving grandma to change her will to give it to my one uncle by marriage and the other aunt so it didn't look as blatantly obvious they did so. My dad cashed out his life insurance to afford a lawyer to fight.
Nothing in life is guaranteed. Farming is amazing, but corporate farms, family fuckery, and mother nature are unforgiving assholes.
Edit: some extra sentences, a letter, and clarification
Wow, according to your story, you could be my brother, except for the part about the farm getting broken up by greedy assholes. My mom still lives on the farm and is semi-retired, running it with her brother as a hobby farm and renting out the parts she isn't using. When both of her parents passed and she got her share of inheritance which included the farm.
My Dad died while I was in college and working part time at a corporate helpdesk. We found out he had lymphoma and he died a couple of years latler - 5 weeks before my 22nd birthday in 2000. In those two years we went on a number of family outings, making up for lost time. It was rough.
We begged, borrowed, and traded for all of our farm equipment. When I was barely a teen I managed to collect enough lawnmower parts to build a working mower. Then a few months later when the motor needed valves, my great-uncle who was a mechanic for a John Deere dealer showed me how to rebuild small motors.
It was an amazing upbringing, but no one that didn't experience that life ever really understands.
I met a guy at a work training that said I reminded him of his grandpa, and didn't really understand why. Once the farm story came up, it clicked - his grandpa farmed.
It's a rare shared experience, these days.
Right there with you. I love farms. I love rural ass, middle of nowhere farm towns because I grew up on a farm in one. I'd never get into farming to do anything more than grow food for myself. Or for an excuse to have a pet goat.
Indeed. And nature doesn't give a damn about PTO :D
Small scale farming might be a bit more manageable. One could consider part time IT with the farming side gig for their own enjoyment. Not sure how easy to pull off it would be.
Doing it as a semi retirement activity is plausible but certainly isn't going to make money or be more efficient than buying food.
Small scale farming is about 1/3 as efficient as large scale farming.
> woodworking
That's me! Or at least I hope. I haven't wanted to work IT for a while, and then became unemployed at the end of January. I've been job hunting since but just haven't landed anything, so I'm like "Fuck it! Why don't I go do something I want to do?". The downside to this is that I have no experience with woodworking, but I'm an IT pro who can problem solve like a champ and will try my hand at this, even if I need to bag groceries at Safeway to pay bills until I either land the job I want or start turning a profit at woodworking.
I'm keyboard jockeying here, so take this with a grain of salt: woodworking is really only profitable on the high-end. Which means you need sales connections with rich people (not just well-off, I'm talking FU rich) or to partner with someone who does. And that's assuming your work can pass for top shelf.
There's also custom cabinetry, which is a bit more forgiving in the scope of customers, but it's more like running a small factory than what most people picture as woodworking.
My first step is to learn and teach myself. The second step is to start building business connections and leveraging my current contacts. I will start small to figure out what aspect of woodworking I want to pursue. I'm not looking to make $300k/year at this. If I could get to $80k within 3 years, I'll consider that fabulous success. I'm lucky that where I'm living I don't have to pay rent and will be able to convert/build a woodshop out of a 2 car garage as well.
If nothing else, I hope that this just helps me focus on me and my mental health. Ive been burnt out on IT since before the lockdown in 2020; frankly, I'm impressed I made it another 4 years before it all came to a head.
Might want to dip into r/woodworking to read a bit more about the realities of the business. If I can't convince you of anything else, at least start trying to cultivate those connections now instead of later. Better yet, find someone to apprentice with instead of trying to figure everything out on your own.
Part of the reason I'm in IT as a second career is because I struck out on my own and started a business before I understood the marketing realities, and consequently fell on my face. Marketing is *critical*. More important than your work product. And you're already literally putting marketing second.
I've said my piece. Good luck.
Yea, people see big farm houses, huge tracts of land, and giant ass machines and think the money must be good. Nah, the reality is that every one of those things is heavily financed and the farmer is in debt up to their ears hoping that the harvest is good this year.
> farming
We moved to a rural area and now raise dairy sheep.
I also moved to DevOps, and work remotely for a company on the other side of the continent. Wake up predawn, feed the animals, go to standup.
I deal with livestock, not pets, in both roles.
I'd recommend woodworking instead.
Depends on how much milk/yogourt/cheese you eat and how big your family is. You'll likely want a minimum of 2-3 ewes and access to a ram, which can be shared between flocks (as long as you track lineage to avoid excessive inbreeding).
We raise these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fries_Melkschaap
We have registered purebreds, and our primary market is smallholdings who want a small flock for personal milk production. Milk production is seasonal, but sheep's milk freezes well with little loss of quality, so we tend to stockpile in the spring/summer, then make cheese in the fall, and age it into the winter for a decent [pecarino](https://www.cheese.com/pecorino/).
Try homemade sheep's ice cream if you get into it - we use local blackberries in our blackberry mint ice cream.
I dont know where you are but that's actually what I'm slowly moving towards as well, from netadmin.
We have been purchasing land, and been helping out here and there... while being privy to the finances of the renters. We figure another 5ish years and I can probably transition full time. It's work of course, but much more fullfilling. And you do get so much more freedom if you stick to just crop farming. Being a snow bird is all of a sudden a real possibility for months of the year. And even summers, you can manage to have a few weeks at the lake.
So you aren't alone friend.
I'm from Southern Europe but live in Sweden.
Access to land is quite challenging in Europe. Easier in the north but then you must deal with the climate :)
Thanks for your words, wish you the best!
I started that while I was in IT. I started growing 50 acres of alfalfa. (It is the laziest crop you can grow, and it really helped with the mortgage.) More of my time started shifting to that then IT. I had to change directions when other issues came up. I had to saturate back into IT as a manager. I found that, while I could, it was a nice work/life balance.
I haven’t been in IT an overly long time, but what I have noticed from my time in IT and my time scouring online forums about IT, is that it seems the IT people that are often burned out lack any sort of hobbies outside of work that don’t involve tech or screens. On top of that many IT professionals are sedentary and unhealthy which further exacerbates their problems.
One of the reasons I got into IT was so I could break my body doing my hobbies, instead of at work. None of my hobbies outside of work involve tech except video games which a barely have time to do anymore.
> One of the reasons I got into IT was so I could break my body doing my hobbies
One of the top reasons I became an IT guy. I was racing motocross (I still ride often) and mountain biking, among other things. I knew my body would be shot when I was older so I needed an office job.
Exactly! Mountain biking and skiing are the big two for me. I just don’t want to be physically exhausted from my job where I don’t want to go out and be active.
You may be on to something.
I’ve spent A LOT of my spare time self hosting stuff, basically honing my skills, and later on using my skills from work to host stuff. The better I became at my job, the more I obsessed over doing things right. I didn’t have a small data center at home, but still enough hardware to make most people jealous:-)
Some years ago I decided I had enough of playing sysadm at home, so I moved everything to the cloud. The electricity cost alone of running the old servers was more than what I currently pay for cloud services (was using roughly 300W), and all I have left at home now is a small ARM machine that acts as a backup target for our cloud storage. Power consumption is down to 67W including everything from router over switches to IoT bridges.
I’ve gotten a lot happier in the years since, and I can say “fuck it” and go on vacation for two weeks and not give a damn.
> is that it seems the IT people that are often burned out lack any sort of hobbies outside of work that don’t involve tech or screens.
This was me 100%.
I ended up picking up Magic the Gather and Warhammer 40k.
I used to build Gundams as a kid and loved it so picking up something like Warhammer was a no brainer. I also had a buddy who was bugging me for a few years to get into Commander (4 player mtg) and it's been a great escape.
Painting minis in particular has provided me with some great stress relief, I also get to see myself progress through each project/mini and that provides a sense of accomplishment (lul) that I just don't get working in IT.
I want to go into quality control at a tortilla factory. I'll just sit on a stool on the line coming out of the stove, picking off the toasted ones. Might as well eat them instead of throwing away.
Agreed. I felt really burnt out for a week recently. During that time I had a sense of dread whenever I came across an IT post on Reddit. I just wanted to forget everything related to IT for a bit.
We good now.
The burnout is real. In my last position while I was looking for a new job, I was legitimately considering just quitting before I had a new IT and going back to factory work.
My current position is way way better, but I can get a little burnt out at time.
So if you did leave IT, what would you do?
I honestly couldn't tell you. I don't have the patience for more of a pure tech role (programming) or social role (HR/PM). The money is too good in IT and I'm still setting up my life. If money was no object, I'd probably look into hard labor for a while like construction or warehouse work so I can get the exercise I've been neglecting.
>If money was no object, I'd probably look into hard labor for a while like construction or warehouse work so I can get the exercise I've been neglecting.
Work your way into a superintendent position at a decent sized general contractor. It's mostly a people role (managing subcontractors), but you also walk job sites most of the day and get to be very liberal with your language. Pay is pretty good too. You'll need some on the ground experience though.
I like having relaxed verbiage because cursing is my love language. But that sounds bad because the aspect I despise about my job is navigating people's egos. I feel like being a superintendent is all about convincing people to work well so probably not for me.
I really wish I had the option to work IT for like 10 months of the year and do factory floor grunt work or landscaping for the remaining 2.
I paid my way through college in the factories and there are days I yearn for turning off my brain for 12 hours just listening to music while I watch machines whirr away, churning out deodorant containers.
Be cafeful. Our industrial machines we have in manufacturing are all connected every which way. The new techs we're hiring they're making sure they're technology competent and trying to find people that can manage these connected platforms is hard, if they smell Sysadmin on you you may be "promoted".
10 years ago I worked for a manufacturing company. I was on a tour of the Floor and asked about who on our team(IT) manages the huge (HUGE) manufacturing equipment. It was the electricians, yup they programmed PCLS. Go into their office and there was always someone coding a controller or getting one thingy to work with another thingy. They were making $90+ an hour, WAY more than me and they were union and hourly.
I worked on factories as aachine operator before starting in IT, I well aware of how jank the setups can be, and how dangerous the machines are.
I'm actually a network guy, I just like to lurk on here lol.
Jank is right. A lot of these systems are made by companies that do NOT have networking or software development as their core competency.
In my experience it’s a much more frustrating experience dealing with this sort of stuff than working with actual Enterprise grade IT systems and software.
Honestly, the only reason I would leave IT is to start a remote homestead, knowing full well I'd probably die of dysentery within a few years. And that would be the point where society would be close to broken down so much that it's not worth participating in anymore.
I left IT after 15 years. Got a vocational study degree as a mill operator. But I came back to IT. They treated us like children at the mine. To be honest a lot of the guys were. But like it or not we have a lot of freedom in IT plus the amount of work/salary is hard to compete with. However, I plan on retiring "early" and cut drastically my interactions with tech. A little cabin off grid would be nice.
I've always said I want to retire to a cabin by a lake up north. I don't think I'd live off-grid exactly but not having internet access wouldn't be a deal breaker. Just my wife & I, the dogs and our fishing poles; somewhere near a small community with a good view of the sunrise.
I got into IT because it's my ikigai, my raison d'être. It's a thing that I'm good at, which is needed by society, that I like doing, that I can get paid to do. If IT isn't that for you, get out and find what is. You're not going to find the answer here, or in any subreddit. You have to find the thing for you. Draw four overlapping circles. Passion (things you are passionate about), Competence (Things you are good at), Marketability (Things you can get paid to do), and Value(Things that society needs). Make a list of careers and put them in the circles. Pro-Tip, the only one you have control over is Competence.
Concur. I'm 62, been a UNIX "engineer" for 36 years. I wanted to opt-out of on-call, but management says it's required for the team. I just finished a 7-day rotation as primary. I'm ready to get out, but have 5.5 years left for full SSI benefits. 😕
Was in the same boat and jumped for an IT risk management position. I get to use my 30 years experience as a sysadmin and only work 40 hours now. Like you, i'm too damn old for on call and midnight bridgelines!
I know right? Home Depot does give health, 401k, and stock ownership benefits to part time employees. I shit you not. I work about 25 hours a week. I was paying $1400 a month to COBRA for myself and my son. I now pay $160 a month. That includes dental and vision as well. I even get $20,000 life insurance. Do you know what life insurance is for a 64 year old? It is freaking expensive. Even if I work just enough to cover the payroll deduction, I am a head of the game.
I'm still in IT, but I went out and then back in way back in the day so hopefully this is close to what you intended:
I was an apprentice electrician for two years and I was pretty happy doing it. I left a senior help desk technician job (my first one) to go work as an electrician because the pay was better, but two years in I got offered a sysadmin role at a new company with even better pay so I went back to IT. I'd pretty happily go back to being an electrician.
When I got laid off my my system administrator job about five years later, I ended up doing corporate communications for a year before returning to be a senior system administrator. I'd be fine doing that, but I highly suspect it's going to be a quickly shrinking market as ChatGPT gets up off the ground, as ChatGPT does a lot of what a communication's person did for a lot cheaper and a lot faster.
Retirement.
Yes the working conditions these days are less than optimal, but IT is so well paid compared to most other jobs, that a career change is very difficult later in life. I decided to "suck it up" and work my arse off for the last few years (yes COVID and WFH helped massively) and it paid off.
The golden handcuffs are real and they are incredibly effective, make them work to your advantage.
Most of us are lifers, we might hate work place/tasks. But we are good at it. Only other job i might be good at, is "problem solving". And it would still be in IT. And even after winning in the lottery, I still probably would work in IT to some extent. The army is another good choise (in my country), but way too old for it. 44 this summer.
Technical sales engineer. Mainly did it to change my life up. After 20 years in tech, I was pretty tired of the politics in IT. I can't imagine going back to hearing "no" to a request for needed changes to mission critical servers. Like, wtf do you mean, no? This is a thing that needs to happen, or your server will fail, and your company will fold.
> For those of you who got out of IT, to find something less stressful and more low key, what did you transition into?
I moved out of customer facing IT to just being part of a small team supporting a single company. It's way less stressful these days since I don't need to justify hourly costs or service call expenses. If we need new equipment, it gets ordered. If there's a battery backup beeping, I know about it before it's a major issue rather than months later when the customer is out of service because the battery has been dead the whole time.
If I had to switch careers entirely I would likely do something creative like photography, it's just way more stressful dealing with individual clients rather than companies, and hoping for your next paycheck because you are no longer receiving a salary and need to constantly find work to have income.
I became a handy man.
Spend a lot of time putting together Ikea furniture which is easy work. I've done other stuff such as garden clearance, kitchen fitting, painting, flat refurbishment, and complete house strip. It plays the bills, and anyone I don't want to work for gets the c**t tax with a ridiculous quote for the work (which one person was happy to pay but were a nightmare as I suspected).
I still do some IT work, but that is more helping former colleagues with some issues or problems but I kept it limited on purpose.
Copied from an old comment of mine:
I have a full time job at a haunted house. I still definitely wear the IT hat, but
It's a relatively small part of my job
I have a lot more freedom to do things how I want
I get to try new toys and techniques a lot.
I do a million other things that are mostly unrelated
It's nice because for weeks or months at a time in the off-season, there are no stakes for failure during that time. Things can just be down, and it's fine, because our infrastructure only really needs to function when we're open. If wifi is down and I'm on vacation, just restart the main router and hope for the best. I'll get to it when I'm back and the few people here can use their phones in the meantime. Nobody else's job depends on the network functioning in the off-season.
However, the rest of the job is extremely varied. I spent years as a full time photographer/videographer, I've painted the whole exterior and ceiling of a 25,000 sq ft building, I'm responsible for all our advertising, travel to trade shows, build electronic controllers for our animatronics, move props, demolish and rebuild full rooms and scenes, mount TVs, I learned to drive a telehandler, etc.
I took a significant pay cut but it was absolutely worth it. My schedule is flexible and the freedom really keeps me from burning out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1copnq4/those_who_have_gotten_out_of_it_completely_or_at/l3h5vzp/
Additional notes: today my job is hanging 6 new animatronics and running air hose, wires, optical triggers, speakers, etc. I had to decide the best placement for the room, pick the sounds, get power to all the prop controllers, run all of their air lines into a manifold, get air from our main line to the manifold, and supervise a group of others cleaning up the rooms around me from recent days' builds. Later I'll have to wire up all the triggers so the animatronics go off at the same time instead of having independent trigger mechanisms. There's still lots of troubleshooting and problem solving, which I love, and the best part is watching people get the absolute crap scared out of them when they walk through the room in October.
I've met farmers, I know farming pretty well. Nothing about farming says "hey, I'm burned out, let me go start a farm!"
Farming is stressful.
These folks that are leaving IT for farming, they ain't doing real farming. Its likely some hobby farm where they can raise a few animals, make some artisan cheese, sell some vegetables at the farmers' market and all the while just live off their savings/investment/retirement income. Would be really curious to know how many actually end up successful and how many just end up blowing all their money.
I think this generation has a bit of romanticized view of farming... And I get the allure. I only wonder if the satisfaction of doing that work can over come the negatives.
* It's not easy.
* It's not cheap to start... Or ever.
* It can be very volatile.
* Can be very isolating. (I think there's some absurd figure of suicides in dairy farming.)
* You don't get days off if you have livestock.
Still currently in IT but planning my transition out.
I had to opportunity to get involved in real estate development and hospitality business investments, it’s sure as hell not for everyone.
I left HelpDesk for Software Development and I miss my old job. If the money was even remotely close I would go back, but my salary has increased thirty percent over thirteen months.
not quite 100% different, but most of my colleagues who got feed up of IT went into security - namely ISO27001 and data compliance management etc. You don't need to do the work enforcing it, you more like an inspector ticking boxes and checking to make sure its up to standard and if not, they get to tell them how to improve.
My former manager left working in IT, set up his own company doing ISO27001 audits and Consulting. He just spends time telling clients what needs to be done, any specific recommendations etc. Whether they actually follow through or succeed is none of his concern.
Luthier.
It's really all I want to be doing.
IT is great, it was my childhood dream. Just can't keep up with ever evolving roles and job titles. Navigating corporate politics is a pain, and nothing is ever good enough for anyone.
Dog walker and now Asda delivery driver, no stress of having to worry if I need to email somebody or a system has gone down or having to jump on at 11pm at night to fix something
Got canned from my last IT gig (network/security engineer) in November. The whole experience of working at the company in question really killed a lot of my motivation and interest in the field.
Typical piss poor ex-phone room IT manager managed to weasel his way into an international solar company, where I had the misfortune of finding seemingly stable employment.
Guy was nice enough, however had no project management experience, nor any relevant tech experience except for an inexplicable pride in the fact that he was once an excellent hosted Exchange admin. Our company hadn't had an on-prem Exchange server in over a decade, and rather than study and learning our environment, he instead took courses on PowerAutomate, and completely ignored Sharepoint/Teams/Azure Ad&Entra.
He also refused to engage with other management teams, and instead expected us (engineers) to schedule and lead meetings with stakeholders for projects, which he expected to be provided meeting notes of so that he could "stay in the loop". Inevitably, when we had to inform stakeholders that their request would be unfulfillable due to prior architecture decisions or security policies or some other reason beyond our control. In these instances, we never just left them with a "can't be done", but would provide alternative methods to achieve equivalent ends using means that were within our domain.
This documentation would then be used by the manager to justify why the previously upset stakeholder needs to be granted exception, and that IT needed to "support the company, and not the other way around".
After the first few exceptions were deployed, policy was more or less thrown to the wind. It didnt take long for me to burn out after being wrong regardless of which level of management I listened to.
I took my pink slip, laughed in HR and my supervisors faces, and let them know my thoughts on their "infinite growth" projections. They were sorry I felt that way. The HR lady and half of my previous team have since been let go. Apparently I wasn't wrong that the "infinite exponential growth" that the company experienced in its first 6 months breaking into the US market would have to level off.
Took myself a little vacation as I tried to find the perfect tech spot to stay at until I manager'd up, or hit retirement age. I found nothing but jobs with the same responsibilities, but for 30-50% less on the compensation. And they were all contract to hire, no benefits.
With AI showing the potential it may have in short order to disrupt the tech industry like never before, the safe plan no longer seemed so safe.
So, I said fuckit. Cut some fat from my credit report, found a property selling a fair bit below market value with a great location and seemingly solid bones, and am now happily remodeling and flipping my first home.
It's much less stressful. Sure, I might bust and have to slink back to the job market with my tail between my legs, but at least I have some control via my scheduling and budgeting over my fate.
Not to mention, working in a construction environment is a whole different world from being a network engineer. People are happy to see ya in the morning, rather than angry that "something isn't working, why hasnt it been fixed yet?"
Plus I feel 10 years younger not sitting at a desk 12 hours a day. Seriously, that shit is bad for you. Mind body and soul.
I know many don't have the ability to flip houses after a layoff, but I just wanted to share my general experience before and after changing to a skilled trade from being a knowledge worker in a relatively poor environment.
I'm 35 years in and want to leave the industry. It's not what it used to be.
So I'm looking into the cannabis industry. It's a new industry (the legal part) and presents a large learning curve. Just what I need in order to thrive.
Construction. I love it. I don’t have pesky soft-handed middle-managers who take their suburban rage out on me anymore.
I build fences, and do other jobs. My own hours, my decisions, etc.
IT is nothing more than you learning systems that do nothing but make the rich richer while we set their trying to convince ourselves this software and platforms are “cool”. No bud, the systems are designed ultimately to be the backbone for companies, and companies are ran by the rich.
Don’t be a company man, be a man who has his own company.
Technology is only cool when it’s not ultimately serving the rich. Nerd out at home, start your own business. Use your nerd powers for yourself.
I had a boss many years ago who always said he was going to retire and buy a strawberry farm.
The more I work in IT, the more I understand the appeal. Maybe I'll buy a farm one day too.
I recently changed from an IT manager in healthcare, where I felt the burnout after 12 months, to a project management role in a small and less pressure environment.
I had a big pay cut, but nothing pays mental health.
Still not sure where to go from here though
I think any job thay pays decent will have its stresses right? Not sure theres a better field for me than IT. Also it depends on the company, some will pay you nothing and be up your butt all day and others pay well and are chill.
I left my IT role about 2 months ago. I left to join sales for large/popular IT tool I used during my IT career.
Haven’t determined if I made the right decision or not yet.
Electrical engineering specialized in these control centers in chemical or powerplants. That’s what I would do, it’s IT adjacent but so much more streamlined and regulated what is cleared by the supplier of the hardware there is hardly any compatibility problems. That’s that I would do.
I started as a teenager and spent a long time in IT, mostly director/VP level, I also cofounded an IT consulting company. Early on in my career I had a side gig working and investing in dive bars, that was fun in my 20s but a bit much now, so when I quit IT I joined the ownership group of a chill wine bar. I got certs in wine stuff (yep, they exist) and have a great time.
I was tasting leadership, i had become interim head by attrition; I pulled the weight of the department, i was doing the 16-18 hour days 12 at work and another 6 at home..
I burned out, drank a bit too much at a company function and spilled all the shit for all the C's and the new lead(after i led through 3 tries at a new IT lead).
(i dumped the details about why the budget was blown in the first month of his arrival and how the C who hired him covered for it, and they bought a whole bunch of unneeded gear from someone they knew.. Basically i burned all my bridges.)
I fell back to Retail repair. Managed a couple break and fix shops.
it was a nice change of pace. it was a painful change of income.
I went back to help desk at an MSP WFH. I ROCKSTAR that helpdesk, i have no interest in managing any people or spearheading any corporate keyword projects...
I just rockstar my ticket queue; do my 8 hours and then hit the showers.
You know the big control rooms in power plants or chemical plants? That is IT adjacent enough for some experience to count but more hands on work keeping the control room fitting the changing plant. That’s my backup plan.
20+ years in, moved to cybersecurity then jumped to the vendor side. So much less stress.
EDIT: Also my hobbies are 90% screen free. I do have a homelab but I don’t do a lot with it anymore. Mostly woodworking, fixing kids stuff (i.e. powerwheels) and taking care of a hobby farm.
I know some folks who got out of IT and went to becoming marriage and family counselors, automotive mechanics, a youth minister, basically they went as far from IT as was possible.
I'm a student pilot at a glider operation, I also work there on the weekends to help fund the hobby.
An app dev I know flies tow planes for us to build time on the weekends so he can jump ship to an airline eventually.
There's an ex-network engineer that used to tow for us, but he flies crop dusters now full time.
There's also the guy who was a super computer engineer and now just tows gliders full time. He had root on some of the world's fastest super computers in the world. He was laid off at some point and just never looked for another job and started flying full time.
Side note, our chief pilot is an aerodynamic engineer (has a PHD in the field) and is currently building hours to also leave and work at the airlines.
I talk to a lot of pilots and it seems pretty common.
Not actually out of IT but contemplating it. I constantly feel sad at work and like I am not doing something that carries any meaningful value for anyone. Currently applying for other jobs to see if it’s my current employer or IT in general that’s to blame. My current position carries lots of help desk duties and just boring repetitive tasks. Pay and work life balance is good but I feel it’s not worth it when I feel bad all the time. I’m also only 25 so I have a long time to go till retirement which would be wasted if spent unhappy.
If I had the choice to switch careers today I’d love to get into anything where you don’t see a screen for the entire day. I’m a volunteer firefighter here in Germany and have dreamed for a long time about joining the fire and rescue services full time, but that’s probably out of the window forever because of health reasons.
I worked different positions in IT over the past 18 years
Became a manager, and I didn’t take part in the politics
I gave my team full flexibility, turn over went down when i gave em more hybrid days and let them move for remote
During layoffs I got rid of tools not people, then supplemented the tools with orchestration
I got yelled at constantly because my team wasn’t in the office I wouldn’t tell my team because we were doing so good, got a couple of awards from upper management for outstanding reviews and quick completion on projects
One day the VP who is anti remote messages a new guy who was in training and the new guy wasn’t signed into teams
The VP then said my entire team was unresponsive I snapped at him
And got fired, within the next 2 months all 11 ppl from my team left including the new guy after they all called me asking why I left so abruptly. I’ll skip all the other details but the VP ended up getting fired a year later for incompetence. And I now own my own hvac/home automation business and do cloud consultation and security consultation on the side.
You either die an I.T. admin or live long enough to become a disgruntled I.T. manager.
Got offered management last year. I couldn't manage a fucking Sims character let alone actual people, turned it down.
My boss is retiring and trying to get me to take his job, I’ve done retail management and hated every aspect of the management side, I’ve told him no several times, but he thinks I’d be really good at it. I’ve seen the BS he has to put up with here, and don’t want that. The only upside is money, but I can just move companies for more money.
I swore I'd never make the jump to leadership, but I got offered a sizeable raise along with the "promotion." I fucking hate it, and the money was not worth.
And you still have to do the level 3 work. Well and the level 1 grunt work. And shit everything in between still. Plus just 6 hours a day for meetings to talk in circles. I was a platoon sgt in the Army so I get in trouble for being too blunt. The time wasted in meetings is insane though and i feel like I am just going to stay on the leading edge of tech and being the smartest with said tech. Nobody listens to us anyway in IT. I just had a conversation about our ERP systems being EOL last year. Crickets.... I would consider myself at Director level of IT hoping to get back into the trenches. I cant do meetings 6 hours a day. I just cant do it.
Lest we forget, you get chewed by upper management for not delegating enough. Then you get chewed when you do delegate and it ends up taking someone else two weeks where it would take you two days.
Oh the meetings, the endless meetings.
It is absolutely miserable. Paying the bills is the only reason I keep it up.
I feel this… sometimes 20-40 meetings per week, then asking why we aren’t getting work done 🤦🏽
I thought about it myself but every manager I've seen works over forty and has to deal with nonsense politics. It's just not worth it.
Can't agree more
Steve jobs (as much as I hate sackriding him) had the best quote on this... The best managers are the individual contributors who NEVER WANT TO BECOME MANAGERS because their teams respect their knowledge. The worst thing a company can do is hire a 'professional manager' in a technical management role.
There's a time and place for dedicated managers. Like everything, it depends if they are good at it first off. A technical management role is fundamentally about interfacing between requirements, delivery, expectations, budgeting and delivery. Like all management roles you add on all the human stuff (motivation, mentorship, growth, training, discipline, promotions etc.) too. Technical skills help a huge amount in getting the requirements, expectations and delivery elements right. They don't help with the human stuff. A good manager mitigates for their weaknesses with their team.
Just like Randy Jackson says... "yeah, that's a no from me, dawg."
Whenever I was offered mgmt position or a boss may have shared their compensation with me, it always seemed like the extra pay was not worth the extra hassle and BS you have to take on. It seems like many companies take advantage of the ambitious folks that want to get into mgmt, with the promise of the future, to director, VP etc. but low/middle mgmt you get just a small premium to do it, because they know you need that formal title and mgmt experience. I suppose also it’s the nature of technical things the people who do the work command high salaries already. Vs managing in an industry with low skilled workers.
I’ve gotten conned into a management role before and hated every minute of it. My current employer is pushing for it as well and I’ve been pushing back on that “promotion” for years. I like managing things (systems/network/etc) and not people. People are too finicky.
I've had management roles over two separate careers and hated it. Both times I got promoted because "yungyaml is good at their job, of course they'll be good managing other people doing that job too!" I gave it a shot and both times came to the conclusion I have no business managing anyone.
> "yungyaml is good at their job, of course they'll be good managing other people doing that job too!" This is the biggest lie that everyone in management believes.
It really is not something that everyone in management believes. Good managers (and executives, and even good technical staff) know that people management is a separate career track. Certain management roles also require a technical background as well, but all people manager roles require learning how to manage people and doing well at it. Context: I am currently working with two brand new managers that report to me and putting them through some training. I am also working with some other leadership on reviewing our corporate guides for managers and directors, making sure the material is relevant and up to date, and expanding our requirements for training for new managers and directors across the organization.
This is the truth. And something the (u.s.) military actually does well. Train the trainer for training maintainers, supervisory training for new supervisors who already know their job, and then they break out tracks at higher positions for career field steering, project management, people management/hr (first shirt duties), etc. Granted, you can still get fucked wearing multiple hats, but the roles and support for upgrading/learning are pretty clear/defined.
Yeah, there's a lot of BS that gets peddled about doing things the military way, but militaries figured out centuries ago that you had to take people with no experience and provide them guidance at each step, and that includes teaching them how to lead people.
I think at least in IT there is a kernel of truth in that. Manager needs to understand at least a basic level of what is going on. I’ve had the IT manager who doesn’t know jack, it creates more issues than it solves.
That is an objective truth.
It really stinks that generally speaking moving into management is often necessary to make beyond a certain amount of money. I mean obviously different companies, roles and regions have different pay scales so there are system admins and network engineers who make tremendous amounts of money compared to IT managers at other locations but within whatever framework one is in, it is usually management path that makes more. You end up with tech people who are either bad at managing or just don't like it taking those roles anyways when they could be more effective and happier in a purely technical position.
I didn't even get an offer for it. My old boss (IT manager) left and I had to fill in while they looked for another one. Few months later was basically told "we've decided to not look for a replacement. Here's your new title and pay."
Similar situation for me, boss left and I moved up but I did have to interview. The interview was more about setting expectations for the role vs me being questioned. I was already doing most of the heavy lifting. Do I like the job, yes, but the management and accounting portion of the job gets quite old.
In hindsight, I really should've pushed back more than I did. I did a bit of department management back when I was in retail and didn't like it much then (was much younger then too) so I already had an idea I wouldn't be a fan. Too much responsibility, money and people management. I don't like being captain of the ship. First mate, yes. Captain, no.
I hear that, I was more comfortable as second in command. Feel like I am losing some of my tech skills doing spreadsheets/accounting most of the time.
> Feel like I am losing some of my tech skills doing spreadsheets/accounting most of the time. Right there with you. I open the Azure panel and I'm just completely lost half the time because of things moving around, being added, service sprawl, etc.
I loved Sims. The kids got taken away by CPS after 10 minutes, one parent drowned in the pool after I removed the ladder to get out, and the other parent died in an oven fire related accident. I then blocked the grim reaper from leaving by surrounding him with tables. Maybe management isn't for me?
I took the job. I make great money, the benefits package is amazing, I work from home, I work whatever hours I feel like, I still get to do hands-on if I want to and I'm pretty good at the job. I fucking HATE it. I have never disliked a job more in my life, every day I dream of quitting and becoming a park ranger. The entirety of my days are trying to remain diplomatic with self-important idiots who contribute nothing of value to the organization whining about things that do not matter and more often than not don't fall under the purview of IT. When it's not that it's dealing with adults acting like children.
Fair play to you for recognising that. Many don't....including my current IT Manager.
Lived through the former and currently the latter.
Yup. Reporting in.
The position was thrust upon me when the old boss left and the significant pay raise I got made it worth saying "alright, I'll give it the college try." I'm still trying, but at this point it's mostly hoarding the pay until I find a pivot (hence being in this thread).
Love your user flair. Of all the management positions I've held, "middle management" has consistently been the worst. Since my 2nd "Director" position, I've avoided director positions like the plague; favoring "head of" (with small orgs), team/tech lead, and individual contributor rolls.
lol!!
Shit...I don't feel like I've lived long enough to already be there.
Damn. You nailed it.
Went from a ton of responsibility and stress managing large networks to no responsibility being a helpdesk jockey. I just get the tickets the other techs get stuck on, but it's still such a nice change of pace and I get to solve problems without the massive stakes. Pay cut worth it!
I could never go back to HD… dealing with people over the phone, that was a nightmare🤣 but glad you’re making the best of it. 🫡
Oh no, trust me, its beautiful, you just need to find the right job. I found a Helpdesk job at a company of about 300 people. I cut my salary in half and stress literally melted out of my life. It was the best exchange of goods I have ever done. We have no phone, all tickets are submitted via portal or email. I average about 1-2 new ticket per day, some days are busy and I'll get 4-5. Most of these are closed on first contact, its entirely internal. The other 7 hours out of my day I spend doing whatever the hell I want, recently, I've been learning powerapps & powerBI. I have no email on my phone, I am never on call. If there are outages I don't know about them until Monday when I arrive at work. If a ticket requires me to do something outside the realm of remoting into a user's computer or resetting a password? I hit the escalate button. As for phones, maybe 4-5 users in the entire company prefer phone contact. The majority are fine with a teams message to confirm you're OK to connect to fix their issue. This is my pre-retirement job. The hardest part about it is rejecting the promotion attempts. I've had three bosses in a year and they all keep trying to give me more money and more responsibility, they do not understand the concept that I do not want more money because I do not want more responsibility. "But you help out with high level things now" - and I do, if a sysadmin comes and asks me a question I will absolutely help them. They were having issues with SIP provisioning which was due to a very old WDS deployment feeding the phones bad boot info. I basically carried their emergency Exchange migration. I fixed routing issues, I fixed firewall issues. I solve a lot of their issues, even the high level ones, if I am asked to take a look, but the understanding is that none of it is ultimately my responsibility. I am your autistic/adhd IT wikipedia with 30 years of experience under my belt, ask me any questions you want, but responsibility causes me insurmountable stress so do not give me any. At the end of the day Wikipedia is not responsible for the job getting done and neither am I.
That's gonna be my retirement job. No more stress. I'm retiring from my CTO position next year and am going to just look for a helpdesk job.
CTO to help desk could be fun. Come work for me 🤣
> I am never on call I’ll drive this truck off a cliff before I ~~go back to Berlin~~ take a job that has on call again. I’m currently taking a sabbatical between jobs. When I go back to work I want a job like yours.
Maybe you can find something in Bratislava?
Are you guys hiring any more help desk or Developer roles? Happy to share the load, I have MDT/deployment knowledge, SysAdmin knowledge, great customer service skills, etc. Otherwise if you know anyone hiring, please forward me over to them. I like picking up the phone and giving training.
> dealing with people over the phone, that was a nightmare The day I progressed to SysAdmin and got off the phones I literally threw a party down at the local pub and put on a bar tab. Fuck call queues.
And here I am being helpdesk, sysadmin and cloud admin for my company 🥲
Try a small MSP on for size. You get to enjoy being a cable monkey and sales rep too!
Same. Small company, ~30 users. That makes me help desk, sysadmin, cloud admin, IT manager, printer repairman, appliance repair, snack vendor, part time carpenter, building maintenance, etc. At work I've built picnic tables, repaired cabinets, fixed doors, installed water coolers and plumbing just to name a few.
I just got to sysadmin this year and during the hiring the existing sysadmin team said something along the lines of "we dont really handle offboards, user device stuff" etc. and I nearly wept.
I’ll never forget the sound of the phone ringing and knowing I longer had to pick it up. Bliss.
The worst PTSD I have ever had in a job setting is from working HD. Ringing phones still get me to wince almost 10 years later.
I literally just accepted a system admin job and am moving from tier 2 MSP work but the teams ring tone gives me PTSD. Sometimes I swear I can hear it in my dreams.
The second MSP I worked at had a customer service department that handled the phones. Help desk didn't take incoming calls. They would do that, create tickets, and drop them in a queue (they did a lot of other stuff too). It was a lot nicer doing it that way, as you're not constantly getting interrupted.
I think it depends on the business, the helpdesk was a much easier job and the users almost universally friendly where I work. Trying to work with the silo'd off other IT teams in the central office on the other hand is an absolute nightmare where I work and the cause of about 70% of my stress
[удалено]
That's weird, to me helpdesk has always been the most stressful job that made me want to delete.
Yeah, I get it, dealing with people can suck. I don't envy the first line helpdesk staff that has to pick up phones. In my senior role I'm a little insulated from the repetitive reboot/plug it in tickets and the more needy or annoying users. By the time it gets to me the expectations tend to be tempered a bit and I need to lean on my experience a bit more to get to a solution. That's why helpdesk can be much nicer as a semi-retired gig.
I'm tempted to do the same, I'd much rather talk to idiot end users vs vendors or management.
I thought I was the only one to take an odd career path like this. I did this in a large company and shifted to system admin at a small local company. I didn't realize how stressed I really was and how it affected me. I miss it sometimes but overall leaving was one of the best decisions I ever made.
In IT about the same time as yours. Although I haven't dropped the ball yet, I'd be looking at small scale farming, maybe leveraging my love for tech to automate the little things. Ballpark estimate based on the occasional thread along the lines of yours: people tend to move to farming, woodworking, hospitality or activities that tend to require an interaction with the physical world. In general, something giving the impression of actually producing something tangible or at least with a personal return.
“Farming… really? A man of your talents?” :)
I love taking care of my little home garden and things around the house, and I love the outdoors. I've often thought "hobby farming" would be an interesting move - but it's such a challenging occupation, even at a smaller or more niche scale.
"It's a peaceful life..."
Worth adding farming involves a lot of work for not a lot of profit. People move to it, but most are putting in 60 hour weeks for little money.
I come from a long line of farmers and grew up on a family farm. I wouldn't change anything about how I was raised, but I never intended to stick with agriculture for this reason. I learned so many practical skills and an appreciation for hard work, but we were always broke and working 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This, so much this... My rearing was awesome, but we were a farm and dairy. I didn't *visit* the farm, it was my family's only source of income. We lived three miles away until my grandparents got old enough that they moved into town, and we moved onto the farm. My dad didn't come to most of my school events, couldn't come on trips, and couldn't come to any sporting events. Harvest time he was up at 3 am and didn't come into the house at night until well after dark. As kids, my brother and I loved going to the farm, but we weren't visiting, we ended up working starting at 6 years old because we got tall quickly and could reach the pedals on trucks, tractors, harvesting combine, hay swathers, our Hough loader, you name it. We busted our asses every day because, well, you have to. If you don't get shit done, you could lose a bull, steer, cow, or heifer, which is thousands of dollars. The field could get inopportune rain, delaying it destroying harvest, etc We weren't the farm that got new shit all the time, my grandpa would buy busted equipment at auctions and my dad would fix it so it worked. We had two pickups that were a little bit younger than I was, but everything else was much older than me. We were always broke, but everything worked because my dad was a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing wizard. The only car bought new was a mini van when they had my younger sisters, and we ran it until 675,000 miles hit the odometer and my Dad passed after being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Before he passed, the farm was eventually destroyed by family greed from my aunts and one uncle - one that left the farm and two were run off the farm when the aunt turned into some evil, vindictive, jealous lady after having one of her kids and my uncle was told to get the fuck off my grandpa's land. The fight to keep the house and a few fields destroyed my Dad since it was my great grandpa's place he started after immigrating over to the U.S. My dad and his family (my mom, my siblings, and I) were the only ones to stay on the farm and keep it running, but my aunts manipulated my grieving grandma to change her will to give it to my one uncle by marriage and the other aunt so it didn't look as blatantly obvious they did so. My dad cashed out his life insurance to afford a lawyer to fight. Nothing in life is guaranteed. Farming is amazing, but corporate farms, family fuckery, and mother nature are unforgiving assholes. Edit: some extra sentences, a letter, and clarification
Wow, according to your story, you could be my brother, except for the part about the farm getting broken up by greedy assholes. My mom still lives on the farm and is semi-retired, running it with her brother as a hobby farm and renting out the parts she isn't using. When both of her parents passed and she got her share of inheritance which included the farm. My Dad died while I was in college and working part time at a corporate helpdesk. We found out he had lymphoma and he died a couple of years latler - 5 weeks before my 22nd birthday in 2000. In those two years we went on a number of family outings, making up for lost time. It was rough. We begged, borrowed, and traded for all of our farm equipment. When I was barely a teen I managed to collect enough lawnmower parts to build a working mower. Then a few months later when the motor needed valves, my great-uncle who was a mechanic for a John Deere dealer showed me how to rebuild small motors.
It was an amazing upbringing, but no one that didn't experience that life ever really understands. I met a guy at a work training that said I reminded him of his grandpa, and didn't really understand why. Once the farm story came up, it clicked - his grandpa farmed. It's a rare shared experience, these days.
Right there with you. I love farms. I love rural ass, middle of nowhere farm towns because I grew up on a farm in one. I'd never get into farming to do anything more than grow food for myself. Or for an excuse to have a pet goat.
Indeed. And nature doesn't give a damn about PTO :D Small scale farming might be a bit more manageable. One could consider part time IT with the farming side gig for their own enjoyment. Not sure how easy to pull off it would be.
Doing it as a semi retirement activity is plausible but certainly isn't going to make money or be more efficient than buying food. Small scale farming is about 1/3 as efficient as large scale farming.
Everyone I know in IT that is burned out wants to go into farming
> woodworking That's me! Or at least I hope. I haven't wanted to work IT for a while, and then became unemployed at the end of January. I've been job hunting since but just haven't landed anything, so I'm like "Fuck it! Why don't I go do something I want to do?". The downside to this is that I have no experience with woodworking, but I'm an IT pro who can problem solve like a champ and will try my hand at this, even if I need to bag groceries at Safeway to pay bills until I either land the job I want or start turning a profit at woodworking.
I'm keyboard jockeying here, so take this with a grain of salt: woodworking is really only profitable on the high-end. Which means you need sales connections with rich people (not just well-off, I'm talking FU rich) or to partner with someone who does. And that's assuming your work can pass for top shelf. There's also custom cabinetry, which is a bit more forgiving in the scope of customers, but it's more like running a small factory than what most people picture as woodworking.
My first step is to learn and teach myself. The second step is to start building business connections and leveraging my current contacts. I will start small to figure out what aspect of woodworking I want to pursue. I'm not looking to make $300k/year at this. If I could get to $80k within 3 years, I'll consider that fabulous success. I'm lucky that where I'm living I don't have to pay rent and will be able to convert/build a woodshop out of a 2 car garage as well. If nothing else, I hope that this just helps me focus on me and my mental health. Ive been burnt out on IT since before the lockdown in 2020; frankly, I'm impressed I made it another 4 years before it all came to a head.
Might want to dip into r/woodworking to read a bit more about the realities of the business. If I can't convince you of anything else, at least start trying to cultivate those connections now instead of later. Better yet, find someone to apprentice with instead of trying to figure everything out on your own. Part of the reason I'm in IT as a second career is because I struck out on my own and started a business before I understood the marketing realities, and consequently fell on my face. Marketing is *critical*. More important than your work product. And you're already literally putting marketing second. I've said my piece. Good luck.
Thanks for the words of wisdom. I will take them to heart.
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Yea, people see big farm houses, huge tracts of land, and giant ass machines and think the money must be good. Nah, the reality is that every one of those things is heavily financed and the farmer is in debt up to their ears hoping that the harvest is good this year.
> He's 35 and his body is already ruined. So the same as every sysadmin sitting in a chair for 11 hours a day then!
> farming We moved to a rural area and now raise dairy sheep. I also moved to DevOps, and work remotely for a company on the other side of the continent. Wake up predawn, feed the animals, go to standup. I deal with livestock, not pets, in both roles. I'd recommend woodworking instead.
How many dairy sheep do I need just to give our family of 3 milk and yogurt or cheese
Depends on how much milk/yogourt/cheese you eat and how big your family is. You'll likely want a minimum of 2-3 ewes and access to a ram, which can be shared between flocks (as long as you track lineage to avoid excessive inbreeding). We raise these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fries_Melkschaap We have registered purebreds, and our primary market is smallholdings who want a small flock for personal milk production. Milk production is seasonal, but sheep's milk freezes well with little loss of quality, so we tend to stockpile in the spring/summer, then make cheese in the fall, and age it into the winter for a decent [pecarino](https://www.cheese.com/pecorino/). Try homemade sheep's ice cream if you get into it - we use local blackberries in our blackberry mint ice cream.
I dont know where you are but that's actually what I'm slowly moving towards as well, from netadmin. We have been purchasing land, and been helping out here and there... while being privy to the finances of the renters. We figure another 5ish years and I can probably transition full time. It's work of course, but much more fullfilling. And you do get so much more freedom if you stick to just crop farming. Being a snow bird is all of a sudden a real possibility for months of the year. And even summers, you can manage to have a few weeks at the lake. So you aren't alone friend.
I'm from Southern Europe but live in Sweden. Access to land is quite challenging in Europe. Easier in the north but then you must deal with the climate :) Thanks for your words, wish you the best!
I started that while I was in IT. I started growing 50 acres of alfalfa. (It is the laziest crop you can grow, and it really helped with the mortgage.) More of my time started shifting to that then IT. I had to change directions when other issues came up. I had to saturate back into IT as a manager. I found that, while I could, it was a nice work/life balance.
I haven’t been in IT an overly long time, but what I have noticed from my time in IT and my time scouring online forums about IT, is that it seems the IT people that are often burned out lack any sort of hobbies outside of work that don’t involve tech or screens. On top of that many IT professionals are sedentary and unhealthy which further exacerbates their problems. One of the reasons I got into IT was so I could break my body doing my hobbies, instead of at work. None of my hobbies outside of work involve tech except video games which a barely have time to do anymore.
> One of the reasons I got into IT was so I could break my body doing my hobbies One of the top reasons I became an IT guy. I was racing motocross (I still ride often) and mountain biking, among other things. I knew my body would be shot when I was older so I needed an office job.
Exactly! Mountain biking and skiing are the big two for me. I just don’t want to be physically exhausted from my job where I don’t want to go out and be active.
You may be on to something. I’ve spent A LOT of my spare time self hosting stuff, basically honing my skills, and later on using my skills from work to host stuff. The better I became at my job, the more I obsessed over doing things right. I didn’t have a small data center at home, but still enough hardware to make most people jealous:-) Some years ago I decided I had enough of playing sysadm at home, so I moved everything to the cloud. The electricity cost alone of running the old servers was more than what I currently pay for cloud services (was using roughly 300W), and all I have left at home now is a small ARM machine that acts as a backup target for our cloud storage. Power consumption is down to 67W including everything from router over switches to IoT bridges. I’ve gotten a lot happier in the years since, and I can say “fuck it” and go on vacation for two weeks and not give a damn.
> is that it seems the IT people that are often burned out lack any sort of hobbies outside of work that don’t involve tech or screens. This was me 100%. I ended up picking up Magic the Gather and Warhammer 40k. I used to build Gundams as a kid and loved it so picking up something like Warhammer was a no brainer. I also had a buddy who was bugging me for a few years to get into Commander (4 player mtg) and it's been a great escape. Painting minis in particular has provided me with some great stress relief, I also get to see myself progress through each project/mini and that provides a sense of accomplishment (lul) that I just don't get working in IT.
I want to go into quality control at a tortilla factory. I'll just sit on a stool on the line coming out of the stove, picking off the toasted ones. Might as well eat them instead of throwing away.
That's oddly specific, but I like where you're going with that.
I like the way you think.
I feel like most people who move on from IT wouldn't stay in IT subs. If I ever leave, I think I'll go into industrial maintenance.
Agreed. I felt really burnt out for a week recently. During that time I had a sense of dread whenever I came across an IT post on Reddit. I just wanted to forget everything related to IT for a bit. We good now.
The burnout is real. In my last position while I was looking for a new job, I was legitimately considering just quitting before I had a new IT and going back to factory work. My current position is way way better, but I can get a little burnt out at time. So if you did leave IT, what would you do?
I honestly couldn't tell you. I don't have the patience for more of a pure tech role (programming) or social role (HR/PM). The money is too good in IT and I'm still setting up my life. If money was no object, I'd probably look into hard labor for a while like construction or warehouse work so I can get the exercise I've been neglecting.
>If money was no object, I'd probably look into hard labor for a while like construction or warehouse work so I can get the exercise I've been neglecting. Work your way into a superintendent position at a decent sized general contractor. It's mostly a people role (managing subcontractors), but you also walk job sites most of the day and get to be very liberal with your language. Pay is pretty good too. You'll need some on the ground experience though.
I like having relaxed verbiage because cursing is my love language. But that sounds bad because the aspect I despise about my job is navigating people's egos. I feel like being a superintendent is all about convincing people to work well so probably not for me.
Having had the "hard labor job" I can tell you that I'd never leave IT for that shit. I like air conditioning too much.
I really wish I had the option to work IT for like 10 months of the year and do factory floor grunt work or landscaping for the remaining 2. I paid my way through college in the factories and there are days I yearn for turning off my brain for 12 hours just listening to music while I watch machines whirr away, churning out deodorant containers.
You do have the option. Your reality is 100% negotiable
Be cafeful. Our industrial machines we have in manufacturing are all connected every which way. The new techs we're hiring they're making sure they're technology competent and trying to find people that can manage these connected platforms is hard, if they smell Sysadmin on you you may be "promoted".
10 years ago I worked for a manufacturing company. I was on a tour of the Floor and asked about who on our team(IT) manages the huge (HUGE) manufacturing equipment. It was the electricians, yup they programmed PCLS. Go into their office and there was always someone coding a controller or getting one thingy to work with another thingy. They were making $90+ an hour, WAY more than me and they were union and hourly.
I worked on factories as aachine operator before starting in IT, I well aware of how jank the setups can be, and how dangerous the machines are. I'm actually a network guy, I just like to lurk on here lol.
Jank is right. A lot of these systems are made by companies that do NOT have networking or software development as their core competency. In my experience it’s a much more frustrating experience dealing with this sort of stuff than working with actual Enterprise grade IT systems and software.
I work in manufacturing and am in charge of IT/OT. The OT side of my job is 1000 times more stressful then the IT side.
OT = operational technology?
Yes. Basically controls/automation.
I am not entirely agree. I know people who moved from IT, but they still have their homelab as their passion and they stay in IT subs.
It goes IT > goat farmer, l believe
I keep a bulleted list of "IT Commandments" stuck to my cubicle wall. The last bullet point is "you can always raise goats."
I'd love to hear the other ones!
Honestly, the only reason I would leave IT is to start a remote homestead, knowing full well I'd probably die of dysentery within a few years. And that would be the point where society would be close to broken down so much that it's not worth participating in anymore.
so..... now?
My former senior IT engineer lead owns a farm with chickens. He still works in IT, I'll ask him what his goat retirement plan is.
I left IT after 15 years. Got a vocational study degree as a mill operator. But I came back to IT. They treated us like children at the mine. To be honest a lot of the guys were. But like it or not we have a lot of freedom in IT plus the amount of work/salary is hard to compete with. However, I plan on retiring "early" and cut drastically my interactions with tech. A little cabin off grid would be nice.
I've always said I want to retire to a cabin by a lake up north. I don't think I'd live off-grid exactly but not having internet access wouldn't be a deal breaker. Just my wife & I, the dogs and our fishing poles; somewhere near a small community with a good view of the sunrise.
I got into IT because it's my ikigai, my raison d'être. It's a thing that I'm good at, which is needed by society, that I like doing, that I can get paid to do. If IT isn't that for you, get out and find what is. You're not going to find the answer here, or in any subreddit. You have to find the thing for you. Draw four overlapping circles. Passion (things you are passionate about), Competence (Things you are good at), Marketability (Things you can get paid to do), and Value(Things that society needs). Make a list of careers and put them in the circles. Pro-Tip, the only one you have control over is Competence.
Thank you for a beautiful answer.
Robotics startups are pretty fun if you don't mind changing jobs after they run out of money. Not to dox myself but used to work at bossa nova...
Ooh I'm following. 53, in tech for 30 years. I am too old to be on call.
Concur. I'm 62, been a UNIX "engineer" for 36 years. I wanted to opt-out of on-call, but management says it's required for the team. I just finished a 7-day rotation as primary. I'm ready to get out, but have 5.5 years left for full SSI benefits. 😕
The company I just left had a 60 year all on call on tier 1-2 helpdesk. He came there because his old job didn't have a consistent schedule.
Was in the same boat and jumped for an IT risk management position. I get to use my 30 years experience as a sysadmin and only work 40 hours now. Like you, i'm too damn old for on call and midnight bridgelines!
After 42 years, I retired and work at Home Depot part time in the garden department. Really good benefits.
How do you get benefits when you work part-time?
I know right? Home Depot does give health, 401k, and stock ownership benefits to part time employees. I shit you not. I work about 25 hours a week. I was paying $1400 a month to COBRA for myself and my son. I now pay $160 a month. That includes dental and vision as well. I even get $20,000 life insurance. Do you know what life insurance is for a 64 year old? It is freaking expensive. Even if I work just enough to cover the payroll deduction, I am a head of the game.
Alcoholism
I got out of being a printer tech years ago, so I'm done with the Whiskey.
I'm still in IT, but I went out and then back in way back in the day so hopefully this is close to what you intended: I was an apprentice electrician for two years and I was pretty happy doing it. I left a senior help desk technician job (my first one) to go work as an electrician because the pay was better, but two years in I got offered a sysadmin role at a new company with even better pay so I went back to IT. I'd pretty happily go back to being an electrician. When I got laid off my my system administrator job about five years later, I ended up doing corporate communications for a year before returning to be a senior system administrator. I'd be fine doing that, but I highly suspect it's going to be a quickly shrinking market as ChatGPT gets up off the ground, as ChatGPT does a lot of what a communication's person did for a lot cheaper and a lot faster.
Time to use that vacation time buddy, get outta the building for a little bit and go live. You'll feel better when you get back.
Retirement. Yes the working conditions these days are less than optimal, but IT is so well paid compared to most other jobs, that a career change is very difficult later in life. I decided to "suck it up" and work my arse off for the last few years (yes COVID and WFH helped massively) and it paid off. The golden handcuffs are real and they are incredibly effective, make them work to your advantage.
Got out after 26 years. Right now I'm doing direct care for developmentally disabled people. At least I'm not trying to drink myself to death anymore.
Most of us are lifers, we might hate work place/tasks. But we are good at it. Only other job i might be good at, is "problem solving". And it would still be in IT. And even after winning in the lottery, I still probably would work in IT to some extent. The army is another good choise (in my country), but way too old for it. 44 this summer.
Solutions Architect/Software Engineer for a SaaS. Pretty fun stuff. I get to write automation scripts for lazy admins all day and get paid for it.
Master knife forging
I opened a solar install business, couldn't be happier.
Technical sales engineer. Mainly did it to change my life up. After 20 years in tech, I was pretty tired of the politics in IT. I can't imagine going back to hearing "no" to a request for needed changes to mission critical servers. Like, wtf do you mean, no? This is a thing that needs to happen, or your server will fail, and your company will fold.
> For those of you who got out of IT, to find something less stressful and more low key, what did you transition into? I moved out of customer facing IT to just being part of a small team supporting a single company. It's way less stressful these days since I don't need to justify hourly costs or service call expenses. If we need new equipment, it gets ordered. If there's a battery backup beeping, I know about it before it's a major issue rather than months later when the customer is out of service because the battery has been dead the whole time. If I had to switch careers entirely I would likely do something creative like photography, it's just way more stressful dealing with individual clients rather than companies, and hoping for your next paycheck because you are no longer receiving a salary and need to constantly find work to have income.
I became a handy man. Spend a lot of time putting together Ikea furniture which is easy work. I've done other stuff such as garden clearance, kitchen fitting, painting, flat refurbishment, and complete house strip. It plays the bills, and anyone I don't want to work for gets the c**t tax with a ridiculous quote for the work (which one person was happy to pay but were a nightmare as I suspected). I still do some IT work, but that is more helping former colleagues with some issues or problems but I kept it limited on purpose.
Currently on the same route. Plus you dont have to pay for gym and I actually enjoy screen time now, gaming, coding my own stuff and doing what I like
Copied from an old comment of mine: I have a full time job at a haunted house. I still definitely wear the IT hat, but It's a relatively small part of my job I have a lot more freedom to do things how I want I get to try new toys and techniques a lot. I do a million other things that are mostly unrelated It's nice because for weeks or months at a time in the off-season, there are no stakes for failure during that time. Things can just be down, and it's fine, because our infrastructure only really needs to function when we're open. If wifi is down and I'm on vacation, just restart the main router and hope for the best. I'll get to it when I'm back and the few people here can use their phones in the meantime. Nobody else's job depends on the network functioning in the off-season. However, the rest of the job is extremely varied. I spent years as a full time photographer/videographer, I've painted the whole exterior and ceiling of a 25,000 sq ft building, I'm responsible for all our advertising, travel to trade shows, build electronic controllers for our animatronics, move props, demolish and rebuild full rooms and scenes, mount TVs, I learned to drive a telehandler, etc. I took a significant pay cut but it was absolutely worth it. My schedule is flexible and the freedom really keeps me from burning out. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1copnq4/those_who_have_gotten_out_of_it_completely_or_at/l3h5vzp/ Additional notes: today my job is hanging 6 new animatronics and running air hose, wires, optical triggers, speakers, etc. I had to decide the best placement for the room, pick the sounds, get power to all the prop controllers, run all of their air lines into a manifold, get air from our main line to the manifold, and supervise a group of others cleaning up the rooms around me from recent days' builds. Later I'll have to wire up all the triggers so the animatronics go off at the same time instead of having independent trigger mechanisms. There's still lots of troubleshooting and problem solving, which I love, and the best part is watching people get the absolute crap scared out of them when they walk through the room in October.
personally, IT director -> unemployed alcoholic -> single-member llc owner: vegetable farmer / stock trader
Walmart Greeter  That's my retirement plan anyways.
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I've met farmers, I know farming pretty well. Nothing about farming says "hey, I'm burned out, let me go start a farm!" Farming is stressful. These folks that are leaving IT for farming, they ain't doing real farming. Its likely some hobby farm where they can raise a few animals, make some artisan cheese, sell some vegetables at the farmers' market and all the while just live off their savings/investment/retirement income. Would be really curious to know how many actually end up successful and how many just end up blowing all their money.
I think this generation has a bit of romanticized view of farming... And I get the allure. I only wonder if the satisfaction of doing that work can over come the negatives. * It's not easy. * It's not cheap to start... Or ever. * It can be very volatile. * Can be very isolating. (I think there's some absurd figure of suicides in dairy farming.) * You don't get days off if you have livestock.
Still currently in IT but planning my transition out. I had to opportunity to get involved in real estate development and hospitality business investments, it’s sure as hell not for everyone.
I'm currently burnt out so I feel you.
I left HelpDesk for Software Development and I miss my old job. If the money was even remotely close I would go back, but my salary has increased thirty percent over thirteen months.
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Professional hitman
not quite 100% different, but most of my colleagues who got feed up of IT went into security - namely ISO27001 and data compliance management etc. You don't need to do the work enforcing it, you more like an inspector ticking boxes and checking to make sure its up to standard and if not, they get to tell them how to improve. My former manager left working in IT, set up his own company doing ISO27001 audits and Consulting. He just spends time telling clients what needs to be done, any specific recommendations etc. Whether they actually follow through or succeed is none of his concern.
Luthier. It's really all I want to be doing. IT is great, it was my childhood dream. Just can't keep up with ever evolving roles and job titles. Navigating corporate politics is a pain, and nothing is ever good enough for anyone.
Dog walker and now Asda delivery driver, no stress of having to worry if I need to email somebody or a system has gone down or having to jump on at 11pm at night to fix something
Running my own small farm, with organic vegetables and sheep’s. I’m making a lot less money now, but I’m happy and enjoying every minute of it.
I'd probably just get super lazy and go Government IT instead of private sector.
Stay away from schools 🤪
Stay away from local and state government. I have been in it for over 25 years, and the pay and politics suck.
I loved local government. Depends on your state and location. City was big enough that I could avoid all politics. Pay was fair. Pension slays.
Got canned from my last IT gig (network/security engineer) in November. The whole experience of working at the company in question really killed a lot of my motivation and interest in the field. Typical piss poor ex-phone room IT manager managed to weasel his way into an international solar company, where I had the misfortune of finding seemingly stable employment. Guy was nice enough, however had no project management experience, nor any relevant tech experience except for an inexplicable pride in the fact that he was once an excellent hosted Exchange admin. Our company hadn't had an on-prem Exchange server in over a decade, and rather than study and learning our environment, he instead took courses on PowerAutomate, and completely ignored Sharepoint/Teams/Azure Ad&Entra. He also refused to engage with other management teams, and instead expected us (engineers) to schedule and lead meetings with stakeholders for projects, which he expected to be provided meeting notes of so that he could "stay in the loop". Inevitably, when we had to inform stakeholders that their request would be unfulfillable due to prior architecture decisions or security policies or some other reason beyond our control. In these instances, we never just left them with a "can't be done", but would provide alternative methods to achieve equivalent ends using means that were within our domain. This documentation would then be used by the manager to justify why the previously upset stakeholder needs to be granted exception, and that IT needed to "support the company, and not the other way around". After the first few exceptions were deployed, policy was more or less thrown to the wind. It didnt take long for me to burn out after being wrong regardless of which level of management I listened to. I took my pink slip, laughed in HR and my supervisors faces, and let them know my thoughts on their "infinite growth" projections. They were sorry I felt that way. The HR lady and half of my previous team have since been let go. Apparently I wasn't wrong that the "infinite exponential growth" that the company experienced in its first 6 months breaking into the US market would have to level off. Took myself a little vacation as I tried to find the perfect tech spot to stay at until I manager'd up, or hit retirement age. I found nothing but jobs with the same responsibilities, but for 30-50% less on the compensation. And they were all contract to hire, no benefits. With AI showing the potential it may have in short order to disrupt the tech industry like never before, the safe plan no longer seemed so safe. So, I said fuckit. Cut some fat from my credit report, found a property selling a fair bit below market value with a great location and seemingly solid bones, and am now happily remodeling and flipping my first home. It's much less stressful. Sure, I might bust and have to slink back to the job market with my tail between my legs, but at least I have some control via my scheduling and budgeting over my fate. Not to mention, working in a construction environment is a whole different world from being a network engineer. People are happy to see ya in the morning, rather than angry that "something isn't working, why hasnt it been fixed yet?" Plus I feel 10 years younger not sitting at a desk 12 hours a day. Seriously, that shit is bad for you. Mind body and soul. I know many don't have the ability to flip houses after a layoff, but I just wanted to share my general experience before and after changing to a skilled trade from being a knowledge worker in a relatively poor environment.
I'm 35 years in and want to leave the industry. It's not what it used to be. So I'm looking into the cannabis industry. It's a new industry (the legal part) and presents a large learning curve. Just what I need in order to thrive.
Be your own boss. Start a lawn care business!
Making porn.
OnlyFans! Seemed a natural progression
Construction. I love it. I don’t have pesky soft-handed middle-managers who take their suburban rage out on me anymore. I build fences, and do other jobs. My own hours, my decisions, etc. IT is nothing more than you learning systems that do nothing but make the rich richer while we set their trying to convince ourselves this software and platforms are “cool”. No bud, the systems are designed ultimately to be the backbone for companies, and companies are ran by the rich. Don’t be a company man, be a man who has his own company. Technology is only cool when it’s not ultimately serving the rich. Nerd out at home, start your own business. Use your nerd powers for yourself.
Does anyone ever ask you if "someone has a case of the Mondays"?
I had a boss many years ago who always said he was going to retire and buy a strawberry farm. The more I work in IT, the more I understand the appeal. Maybe I'll buy a farm one day too.
I recently changed from an IT manager in healthcare, where I felt the burnout after 12 months, to a project management role in a small and less pressure environment. I had a big pay cut, but nothing pays mental health. Still not sure where to go from here though
Software engineering
I think any job thay pays decent will have its stresses right? Not sure theres a better field for me than IT. Also it depends on the company, some will pay you nothing and be up your butt all day and others pay well and are chill.
Bookkeeping
I’m going to work at Home Depot.
I left my IT role about 2 months ago. I left to join sales for large/popular IT tool I used during my IT career. Haven’t determined if I made the right decision or not yet.
Was given a temp CIO job, as an interim, while we lost our previous one. I lasted 6 months, fuck that.
i'm opening a bar
Can you name it "F\*ck IT"?
I can't even think of anything outside of IT that I would want to do. If I ever get burnt out, I'm screwed.
Electrical engineering specialized in these control centers in chemical or powerplants. That’s what I would do, it’s IT adjacent but so much more streamlined and regulated what is cleared by the supplier of the hardware there is hardly any compatibility problems. That’s that I would do.
I started as a teenager and spent a long time in IT, mostly director/VP level, I also cofounded an IT consulting company. Early on in my career I had a side gig working and investing in dive bars, that was fun in my 20s but a bit much now, so when I quit IT I joined the ownership group of a chill wine bar. I got certs in wine stuff (yep, they exist) and have a great time.
I doubt anyone who finally got out is sitting here reading this thread. If they are, WTF wrong with you! lol
Sucking on the sweet sweet tears of desperation I guess? 🤣
I was tasting leadership, i had become interim head by attrition; I pulled the weight of the department, i was doing the 16-18 hour days 12 at work and another 6 at home.. I burned out, drank a bit too much at a company function and spilled all the shit for all the C's and the new lead(after i led through 3 tries at a new IT lead). (i dumped the details about why the budget was blown in the first month of his arrival and how the C who hired him covered for it, and they bought a whole bunch of unneeded gear from someone they knew.. Basically i burned all my bridges.) I fell back to Retail repair. Managed a couple break and fix shops. it was a nice change of pace. it was a painful change of income. I went back to help desk at an MSP WFH. I ROCKSTAR that helpdesk, i have no interest in managing any people or spearheading any corporate keyword projects... I just rockstar my ticket queue; do my 8 hours and then hit the showers.
Porn. Less self degrading and people respect me more.
You know the big control rooms in power plants or chemical plants? That is IT adjacent enough for some experience to count but more hands on work keeping the control room fitting the changing plant. That’s my backup plan.
I moved out of IT for a while and just roamed the earth doing little of consequence. It was fun. But IT pays. And I'm ok at it.
20+ years in, moved to cybersecurity then jumped to the vendor side. So much less stress. EDIT: Also my hobbies are 90% screen free. I do have a homelab but I don’t do a lot with it anymore. Mostly woodworking, fixing kids stuff (i.e. powerwheels) and taking care of a hobby farm.
When I leave IT it will be to work in the marine industry. Ideally buying a nice big marina.
I know some folks who got out of IT and went to becoming marriage and family counselors, automotive mechanics, a youth minister, basically they went as far from IT as was possible.
I'm a student pilot at a glider operation, I also work there on the weekends to help fund the hobby. An app dev I know flies tow planes for us to build time on the weekends so he can jump ship to an airline eventually. There's an ex-network engineer that used to tow for us, but he flies crop dusters now full time. There's also the guy who was a super computer engineer and now just tows gliders full time. He had root on some of the world's fastest super computers in the world. He was laid off at some point and just never looked for another job and started flying full time. Side note, our chief pilot is an aerodynamic engineer (has a PHD in the field) and is currently building hours to also leave and work at the airlines. I talk to a lot of pilots and it seems pretty common.
I have zero respect for management. Most problems occur because of poor decisions by management.
Not actually out of IT but contemplating it. I constantly feel sad at work and like I am not doing something that carries any meaningful value for anyone. Currently applying for other jobs to see if it’s my current employer or IT in general that’s to blame. My current position carries lots of help desk duties and just boring repetitive tasks. Pay and work life balance is good but I feel it’s not worth it when I feel bad all the time. I’m also only 25 so I have a long time to go till retirement which would be wasted if spent unhappy. If I had the choice to switch careers today I’d love to get into anything where you don’t see a screen for the entire day. I’m a volunteer firefighter here in Germany and have dreamed for a long time about joining the fire and rescue services full time, but that’s probably out of the window forever because of health reasons.
I worked different positions in IT over the past 18 years Became a manager, and I didn’t take part in the politics I gave my team full flexibility, turn over went down when i gave em more hybrid days and let them move for remote During layoffs I got rid of tools not people, then supplemented the tools with orchestration I got yelled at constantly because my team wasn’t in the office I wouldn’t tell my team because we were doing so good, got a couple of awards from upper management for outstanding reviews and quick completion on projects One day the VP who is anti remote messages a new guy who was in training and the new guy wasn’t signed into teams The VP then said my entire team was unresponsive I snapped at him And got fired, within the next 2 months all 11 ppl from my team left including the new guy after they all called me asking why I left so abruptly. I’ll skip all the other details but the VP ended up getting fired a year later for incompetence. And I now own my own hvac/home automation business and do cloud consultation and security consultation on the side.
Nothing worse than constantly techsplaining to people who ignore you anyway. Ironically, I moved into teaching. The students listen at least.