Not just my job, but the entire industry I’m in. I get paid really well, and I like some of the fine details, but overall I don’t like it. My skill-set isn’t very transferable either.
Not just my job, but the entire industry I’m in. I get paid really well, and I like some of the fine details, but overall I don’t like it. My skill-set isn’t very transferable either.
Well, since you get paid well, can you make a plan to suck it up for a while, live frugally, invest, make a plan to move into something else, and start working on that?
Maybe just “eat the shit” for a few years knowing it’s part of a bigger plan?
This is something I feel we do a poor job explaining to kids - your options range from doing something you love to doing something you hate, and also making a lot to making a little.
Those two scales aren’t necessarily related They can be, often are.
A question I wish had been posed to me before college: “If you had a choice to work a job you hate for ten years, but when done you were set for life, would you do it?”
I’d put that idea at one end of the spectrum, with everything else a mix of love/hate, convenience/inconvenience, stability/instability, etc, etc.
Basically my plan. I’m bending over and taking it from corporate America until I have enough to do something more fulfilling. Shit sucks, but my family makes it worth it. Work to live, never live to work. As long as I get time with my family and friends I’ll be okay
I might not mind it as much if I was physically closer to my family, but I’m over 600 miles so its a 12 hours trip to see them. they live 2.5 hours from the closest major airport so flying commercial is not faster.
I’ve sucked it up for 10 years, and I have enough in savings for several years. The work itself is fine, its more of the context of the work. If its not something new to me it feels like busywork and I don’t really see the point. I’m really not sure what I want to do. I have a personal project I’m working on, that I think I could make money, but I don’t know if after I’m done with the interesting technical challenges if I want to see it through. There are several jobs that on the surface seem to agree with me, but I don’t know if the reality would work out. I could more easily suck it up if I at least felt fulfilled, or that I did something positive, but I don’t get that feeling.
Just curious, what are the things holding you back from making changes to your current work situation and/or skillset?
Skill sets take years, you get pigeonholed pretty fast. Major changes to skill sets take years and can cost a bit of money. Pretty much the only companies that would want my skill set are companies that I wouldn’t want to work for.
You already have a skillset that you can transform into something else, and you seems to have a lot of money stowed away, so you can take a risk to transform that skillset. Push come to shove, you can simply go back to your current domain.
But transforming a skillset is indeed hard.
Its not that its hard, it just takes time and money. And the last thing I want is to invest time into another thing I end up hating. For now, I have a website I’m trying to build.
I understand the feeling. Are you tired of the field overall or just the hardware part of it?
I did QA for 5 years, which I’m grateful for but sucks a bunch. I tried to do pure software dev, it’s not for me. Then I came back to firmware, but since I wasn’t in the game for almost 7 years, I had to re-learn and live with the imposter syndrome for a while. I kinda kept coding during these years, but I had to convince others I could code.
Not sure where I am going with this. I understand how you feel, and I hope you’ll find something that is better for you.
Feeling stuck is not fun.