Last job killed my love of IT, management beat it out of me. Wonderful company, demotivated by my manager from the first week. Couldn’t be a nicer guy, smartest tech I’ve ever met, Peter Principled his was into management.
Never been paid that much, took about every Friday off on PTO, total WFH, can’t say what my benefits cost but it wasn’t $100/mo. in total. My last job was half the pay and benefits, was so much happier. I think of that every time I read a comment about why companies need to pay more to satisfy us. Everyone should have a look at this. Had ALL that at my penultimate job, NONE at the most recent.
I feel so weird, especially at this time of life with a solid resume, interviewing for PT work at Lowe’s. Thinking I’ll be happier than a pig in shit spending 4 hours a day, just walking around helping people, doing what ever bullshit I’m asked to do. Looking to see how it goes, see if there are ways to work myself up to FT, better schedule, supervisor, whatever.
Thought about “retiring” to work in a hardware store to keep busy and fit, but not for a decade+. Excepting my credit card bills, and what my wife sends home to the Philippines, she makes enough to cover everything. Won’t take much to take the edge off.
I love hardware and tools and plants, about everything they sell. Hoping to learn a lot as well. Helping people is really satisfying to me, and I’m excellent at handling customers. LOL, I’m best with the angry ones, sometimes get them apologizing. :)
Need a sanity check, am I losing it!? Been through the worst depression of my life the past few years, hoping this will break me back into a normal state of mind.
EDIT: Got the job! Holy shit, the assistant manager is just like me! Dropped out of tech to take a minimum wage job at Lowe’s 8 years ago, now he’s at $90K. We’ve even done much of the same work in the IT space. “I did DSL for Bellsouth when it was new!” “Yep, did my time as a cable internet guy.”
Seems to be a lot of space and opportunity to move up. I’m going to knock this out the fucking park!
BONUS: Clerk at the shady gas station overhead me telling my neighbor about quitting IT and getting hired today. Guy ask me what I did in IT, gave him a run down. “Yeah. I was a web dev for 20-years, couldn’t take staring at a screen any more.”
I had a similar arc, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about going back.
I worked retail for two years post highschool. Looking at my coworkers, some of whom were in their 40s/50s and still at pretty low level positions, made me go to community college and then a four year school.
14 years later working on software (dev, highly engaged/invested PO, now PM) and I either have a more clear-eyed worldview or a my company is starting to fall apart. I’m very over our command and control leadership that’s been touting the next new framework only to continue to command and control in that framework and then claim “that framework was actually bad, this new framework is good”. The battling between teams building basically the same things, but for their niches of the world, “how I want it” coming every which was as opposed to thinking about what we should be solving, everything being the top priority, actions mattering more than results, etc. Layer in process debt that goes back to the 1950s and technical debt going back to the 1980s. I know younger companies don’t have the later two problems, but from lurking in dev related communities for years everything else seems pretty common.
At my retail job the worst I had to deal with was the occasional grouchy customer, which just meant calling a manager to deal with it if I couldn’t. We’re doing the best we can to stash away money. We’ve started doing math to say, “we might have to work longer in total, but if we were to take lower paying jobs at <age> this is what our finances would look like”.