Why I quit my six figure software job
In mid-2021, I stepped away from my high paying software development job.
My parents thought I was crazy. “Nico“, they told me, “why would you leave a job like this? You worked so hard to get it. You only work forty hours a week. You’re not out working the fields or standing on your feet all day. Many people dream of this!”
“Mom, Dad, I was unhappy there.”
~ I was unhappy there.~
What a silly thought. But it’s the core truth: I was unhappy with what I did and who I had become.
In this blog post, I’d like to express the core reasons why I was unhappy at, and ultimately left, my six-figure job.
I left…
… because what I was working on didn’t resonate with me.
A little background: I worked within the Monetization organization of my previous company. The north star of our organization was to develop revenue-generating features within our core product to make our content creators and company money (emphasis on the latter).
As you might guess, our core metric centered around money.
As you might guess, this was a shit metric to be judged by.
Admittedly, there were a lot of other factors I was individually judged on as a software developer – technical complexity, scope of influence, and the like.
But at the macro-level it was all about the money to measure your impact. And as you grow in your career, you start to become more privy to these macro-level expectations.
As a result, I developed a deep disinterest with my work.
A little rant:
- A teacher teaches the next generation of children. They have a tangible, positive impact on society.
- A construction worker builds a home for a family or a bridge for a town. They have a tangible, positive impact on society.
- Your local coffee shop offers a meaningful space for work and conversation. They have a tangible, positive impact on society.
… and here I was enabling people with poor spending habits the ability to spend ridiculous amounts of money on virtual goods.
At the end of the day, my work was very unfulfilling.
… because I wasn’t excelling in the environment I was in.
This was a slow burn problem that crept up on me. At a certain point in my career, I had hit a wall with the throughput of my work where I was doing ok, but I wasn’t excelling.
As a student in college, I worked my ass off. But while the classes were difficult, I managed to stay on top of the curriculum. It was a virtuous cycle; I put the effort in and the results were immediate and positive, thus pushing me to continue to put the effort in, thus resulting in results that were immediate and positive, and so on.
As a junior developer, I had the same virtuous cycle. My management handed me appropriately-leveled tasks that I excelled in completing. I received feedback that was immediate and positive (both in reviews and compensation). Ultimately, this lead me to a fast track to promotion. This virtuous cycle continued for many years through the breadth of my career.
I grew into a senior developer with great prospects, but as the work became more challenging and ambiguous, my throughput tampered out. The impact of my work became less immediate and more fuzzy. Somewhere along the way I lost the virtuous cycle. And it filled me with dread.
Moreover, I watched as some of my peers continued to excel, grow in their careers, and get promoted. And it filled me with contempt.
After much reflection, I arrived to two major realizations:
- my company had matured dramatically in the past four years. There was a new work culture that was dramatically different from when I first started.
- I had hit the “natural limits” of my ability as a software developer in this new environment.
In order to continuing growing in this environment, I would have to either:
- flare my existing abilities (effortful)
- mold myself into a different kind of developer (unnatural)
The first point seems pretty self-explanatory. But I already put in a solid forty hours each week. I didn’t want to commit more to work at the expense of my personal life.
The second warrants more explanation. The company I worked for had established a new set of tenants that served as the basis for how employees were judged. There were about ten of them, and exemplifying these tenants were vitally important to your growth and success.
It was easy enough for me to meet many of the qualities of a high-performing senior developer under this new rubric, but some of them didn’t come to me as easily. And it wasn’t because I was lazy or incapable of growth, but because it meant adhering to a work philosophy that felt unnatural to who I was.
For example, I excelled wearing multiple hats, iterating quickly, and getting shit done, but not an environment that required navigating heavy bureaucracy, office politics, and cumbersome processes.
The result of all this was I stopped receiving glowing reviews, which hurt my encouragement to work hard. I slumped into being an ok developer in the eyes of this new environment.
I ultimately came to the conclusion that I was graded against a rubric I didn’t believe in. My company wanted to grow me, but they wanted to grow me in a specific way that matched what they needed and not what I wanted. I felt like an unnatural fit in this environment.
This resulted in me hitting a plateau in my professional growth that caused me much unhappiness.
… because I wanted a different environment.
Your environment rubs off on you. Much like what you eat affects your wellbeing, so to can the environment you surround yourself with. After a while, I realized that I was at my limit with what I could stomach in the tech environment in many ways. Let me explain.
Health & Lifestyle
I remember the first week I started working I looked around at my peers and asked myself: “what health problems do I need to worry about?”. There were a few that jumped out to me: bad posture, weight, eye strain – all related to a sedentary life in front of a computer. But there were a few more problems lurking beneath: sun deficiency, stress eating, and caffeine overconsumption.
A lot of developers offset this with a “min-max” lifestyle, where they stay really active and productive outside of work to offset the inactiveness of their job. This felt like a poor way to live my life. Youtuber KRAZAM has an amazing video satirizing this mentality.
I concluded that humans were not designed to sit in front of a computer and this job would slowly deteriorate my health if I didn’t change something.
The West Coast Tech Bubble
The west coast tech bubble is real.
I think a large part of this is due to the “sameness” of software developers in big tech. Slightly nerdy, probably into video games, smart but a little socially awkward. Attire consists of t-shirt, jeans, and hoodie every day. With this group of people you talk about the same things day in and day out at lunch.
Don’t get me wrong, I probably match a lot of these descriptions. And it’s not an assault on anyone in particular. But I disliked being surrounded by it. every. day. It wore on me.
I wanted to be more well-rounded in my interests and relationships. I wanted to meet people from more diverse backgrounds.
Entitlement
In the US, if you land an entry level software development gig, you are most likely in the top 5% of income earners in the US. That’s such a crazy statistic to me. What an incredible privilege: great job prospects, steady income, top of the line perks and benefits, good work-life balance. Good software developers are in such a demand right now that companies are throwing everything they can at them to attract talent.
This breeds a certain amount of entitlement amongst software devs in the industry, especially in big tech.
Much like my rant with teachers and construction workers above, on a moral level it just didn’t sit right with me. I don’t really add that much value to society, yet society values me so much. Teachers can hardly pay for their class supplies while I’m doing code reviews from my couch at well over $100 an hour. It’s mind boggling.
Since the sky’s the limit in the tech world, many software developers keep wanting more and more. You’re already a top earner with top benefits, yet you’re disappointed that your new offer only offered to increase your salary by $40k? That alone is the median salary in the US!
I concluded that there exists a certain entitlement in the tech industry that I needed to step away from. It was suffocating. I needed to come back to earth.
… because I could.
This was probably the most compelling reason for me to quit my job. I had no family to support. No mortgage with my name on it. No debt. My biggest finances in life were my rent and my car. I had worked for six years straight, lived a very modest life, and been smart with my money.
Simply put, I knew if I closed my laptop and walked out the door I was in a life position where… I could.
But I was ensnared by the golden handcuffs of tech and bewitched by the sirens of upper management. I was told I was in the thick of my career and stepping away now would hurt my chances at “that promotion lurking in the future”. My friends were all steadily in their careers and here I was thinking of leaving it all. What would they think? What would my parents think?
This was a supremely difficult mental hurdle for me to conquer.
Here’s what broke me out of it:
I might not get another chance to do this again.
I was 28 years old. I was at an all-time obligation low. I was healthy. I was financially stable. If there was ever a time to quit my job and explore a different life, now was it.
And after six years I knew I owed it to myself to do it.
So what now?
It’s taken me about two months, on and off, to write this post. Much longer than I had expected.
I don’t have any profound thoughts to share yet, other than I’ve been really happy leaving my job and spending my time how I want to. Mostly I have been traveling and exploring a more down-to-earth lifestyle. I feel more alive in the past months than I have in years.
I’ve been reading a lot; mostly self-help literature on finding meaning in work and life. They’ve helped me understand and cope with my decision to leave work, as well as better understand what it is I am searching for.
As I’m making the last edits here, I’m sitting in the dining room of a beautiful craftsman home in rural California owned by a lovely elderly couple I am volunteering for. It’s quite a unique and awesome experience I’ve found myself in. My next blog post will go in depth in this.
I’m hoping this post will resonate with some individual out there. To those individuals, I’d like to direct to you a poignant thought from the venerable Uncle Iroh:
Until next time.