I want to leave tech: what do I do?

原始链接: https://write.as/conjure-utopia/lets-say-youre-working-in-tech-and-you-have-a-technical-role-youre-a

Feeling disillusioned with your tech career? You're not alone. Many tech workers yearn for more meaningful work, feeling unfulfilled by corporate goals or ethically conflicted by their creations. Luckily, there are alternatives to consider that can make use of your skills in a more positive way. Consider transitioning to the public sector, which often offers more stability and a chance to work on projects that impact millions. Tech co-ops provide worker-ownership, allowing for more autonomy and control over projects and revenue. Explore tech NGOs, which address critical social issues like environmentalism, human rights, and workers' rights, and desperately need technical expertise. Unions and political parties also require tech professionals to build and maintain infrastructure. If you enjoy teaching, explore opportunities in high schools, universities, online platforms, or create your own courses. Finally, consider becoming a "techno-political hustler," connecting various groups and projects motivated by ethical and social concerns, using your skills to advise, manage, and build for others. It's never too late to find a path that aligns with your values and skills.

This Hacker News thread discusses an article about leaving the tech industry, but commenters argue it's more about finding fulfilling work than abandoning tech altogether. Many feel trapped by high salaries in "big tech," doing ethically questionable work. Alternatives like public sector jobs, co-operatives, and NGOs are suggested, but skeptics point out these have their own problems, like bureaucracy and political agendas. Sacrificing income for more meaningful work is a recurring theme, with some suggesting downsizing lifestyle and reskilling. Others highlight the difficulty of replacing a high tech salary while maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, especially in expensive areas. Some find purpose within tech by working for companies with tangible products or in academia. Ultimately, the thread explores the tension between financial security, ethical concerns, and finding satisfying work, acknowledging that solutions often require compromise and lifestyle adjustments.

原文

Let’s say you’re working in tech and you have a technical role: you’re a programmer, a graphic or UI/UX designer, a sysadmin, maybe even a product manager.

Let’s say you want to leave, change career, and do something more meaningful with your skills. Your motivations may vary: you feel the tech industry produces nothing of value, or maybe you have the legitimate suspicion that what you build helps bomb innocent people somewhere. You might want to leave because of the individualistic culture that still haunts the industry, or you’re simply tired of playing along with the collective delusion that so-called “AI” can replace workers, make decisions, or create something new. Maybe you just dropped a tab of acid and realized you don’t want to have regrets on your deathbed: “What if I regret having worked too much? What if creating value for the stakeholders is not the ultimate purpose of life?”

Regardless, this article will try to help you find a way out.

Each person is different, each situation is different: some of you might have more skills, some less. Some of you might have saved mone,y and some of you might have people they need to provide for. Some of you might be younger and prone to radical changes, some of you might have decades of shitty tech jobs in their CV. Some of you might live in the center of San Francisco. Some of you might live in the countryside with a bad connection. Some of you might live in a war zone. Some of you might even live in Milan, the worst place on Earth. I pray for you.

I will try to make as few assumptions as possible:

I assume you’re a technical worker
I assume you want to keep using your skills instead of becoming a farmer, because the soil is low, and your back is already having problems
I assume you’re looking for something either more stable, more sustainable, more meaningfu,l or with a more positive impact on the world.

What we are going to cover are just some of the many fields, niches, and career paths that can make use of the skills more common in the tech industry. Finding the right path for you is something you have to work on on your own. What I can help you with is giving you the pointers I didn’t have when I was leaving the industry some years ago, and sharing the knowledge about the many organizations that need tech workers but are often invisible from within the tech industry.

Let’s start.

Working for a public institution

While in some countries there might be a prejudice against the public sector and the software it produces, more often than not, the public sector offers more relaxed environments and more meaningful problems to work on. The software for public services often impacts millions of people in critical aspects of their lives.

This is probably the softest transition you can have: while the goals and the logic behind the development of public technology differ from the corporate or startup environment, most practices and tools are the same.

Be mindful that some public institutions are infiltrated by consultancy companies like Accenture, KPMG, or Deloitte, which usually produce subpar technology at a higher cost. Even if you don’t work directly for them, their presence tends to contaminate and pervert the whole institution. In some countries, this is the norm, and you will have to find little islands of peace in a sea of bad PowerPoint presentations. In other countries, consultancy companies are less present, and it will be easier to find virtuous public technology.

Joining a tech co-operative

If you’re tired of managers and you thought tech workers would do perfectly fine by themselves, maybe you want to start or join a tech co-op.

In a co-op, the workers are the owners, which means they can decide how to work, what projects to take, how to distribute the revenues, and so on. It allows for a lot more freedom, but it comes with more responsibilities. It’s not for everybody: from school, university, and the traditional workplace, we learn to receive tasks, execute them, and get a pat on our head. The only alternative is becoming an entrepreneur, taking risks, exploiting others, and usually stressing about a lot of things. What goes on in a co-op is a third thing that most of us rarely experience, and so the transition might take some time.

Most tech co-ops do consultancy, because you don’t need much to start: your own laptop, a decent client, and some bureaucracy sorted out. If you want to develop your own product, this might be trickier because you need investments, and you have to learn how to navigate fundraising or the cooperative financing system of your country. There are plenty of successful examples, though, such as Loomio.

Speaking of bureaucracy, this is often the main fear for those who want to start something new. For co-ops, one good compromise is the so-called “autonomous working groups” or “freelance co-operatives”, which are basically cooperatives that will hire you, handle contracts, issue invoices for you, handle the bureaucracy, and collect credit. Also, for the state, you’re an employee, so you will be entitled to the same welfare and workers’ protections.

You can do this to work as a freelancer, or you can do this with a bunch of friends and colleagues, presenting yourself as a cooperative to the clients. In Europe, Smart is a good option for starting.

Joining a tech NGO

While you might have heard of tech jobs in the public sector and tech co-ops are becoming more and more trendy, there’s a huge niche of tech NGOs that is hardly visible from the outside but holds a lot of interesting and meaningful jobs for tech workers.

What are we talking about exactly? There’s a big ecosystem of non-profits, associations, NGOs, private research groups, and other organizations that deal with the most diverse set of topics: environmentalism, civil rights, workers’ rights, accountability of tech companies, human rights violations, education, healthcare, investigative journalism, and so on. More often than not, they need technical people: they deal with data, they offer services through digital channels, they need custom internal tools, or sometimes they develop their own open-source technology as part of their mission.

I feel it still sounds too abstract. Let me bring a couple of examples from my job history.

The first is my work in AI Forensics. I was hired as a data engineer because the organization needed to scrape data, first on social media and then on chatbots, store it, and analyze it. One concrete project I worked on involved generating thousands of questions from templates to be submitted to Bing Copilot in order to investigate how many mistakes it made about electoral information during the Swiss Elections in 2023. Spoiler: a lot. The system involved a browser automation pipeline to submit the questions and collect the answers, a Notion setup for researchers to review and label the questions and the answers, and a parametric templating system.

Another example, in which I’m still involved: Reversing.Works. What we do is to investigate mobile apps of platform workers, such as food delivery workers, to prove privacy violations and workers’ rights violations. The technical evidence we collect is then used as the basis for legal actions. Our resident hacker with a black hoodie typing really fast on his green-on-black console, before joining us, had a job in IT security and reused his skills to intercept the traffic from different apps and build a toolkit to enable workers to do the same.

Each NGO is different, and its technical needs are all different. It’s hard to talk about them in general terms, but a lot of them seem to struggle to find technical people. There are specific job boards that collect these kind of jobs, but a good way to enter this space is through targeted networking. Reach out, go to dedicated events, build relationships over time until a job offer materializes.

Working for a union or a party

Some people don’t want to leave the industry because they want to stay and improve the working conditions where they are. For example, by unionizing their workplace, an increasingly common occurrence. Nonetheless, not all workplaces can be unionized, and not everybody is the right person to start a unionization process. If you feel guilty about leaving the tech industry and NGO is not your vibe, working for the tech department of your union or your party might be a good option.

Each large-scale organization needs a tech infrastructure: parties and unions are no exception. Some of them even engage in developing their own software, for example, for direct democracy experiments, or for specific services. They often have their own job boards.

Becoming a mentor or a teacher

Some people just enjoy teaching others. I do it too sometimes. Teaching, in the right environment, is just great. Despite the waves of layoffs and deskilling going on in the tech sector in the West, education on programming, design, and other technical aspects is still in high demand.

You have several different options here: high schools, universities, online platforms such as CodeMentor, or you can even set up your own courses through dedicated platforms. Bootcamps are also an option, but they tend to offer worse conditions, and most likely you will participate in an exploitative system towards the students. Research well before taking a job in this space.

Becoming a techno-political hustler

This is not a real job. Not yet. It’s a term I use to describe some people who left the tech industry long ago and are now entangled in a bunch of different projects, spaces, and organizations connected to tech, but motivated by political, social, or ethical considerations. I feel I’m slowly maneuvering myself into a similar position, but I wouldn’t say it’s something you can directly jump into after leaving a corporate job.

But what does a techno-political hustler do? It’s fundamentally a connector, a spider with a big web touching different groups, spaces, and people, sensing what they need and providing information on how to get it. It’s usually a person with domain expertise in different fields, a broad understanding of different technologies, and the right network for fundraising. A hustler might help you review your funding application, participate in a strategy session, sit on the board of your NGO, build prototypes, help you map a specific industry, suggest the right tool or organization for a certain job. A techno-political hustler is fundamentally a mix of an entrepreneur, a socialite, and a technologist, but building projects for others to carry forward.

But how does a hustler make money? Well, it depends. Being involved in so many things, they can always spot first chances to be included in the projects either as advisors/consultants, project managers, grant managers, or as a technical person. It’s about making things happen in a way to make space for your contribution.

I hope this overview offered you a glimpse on a different path for your future. Imagination alone is never sufficient to create change, but it’s always necessary. Ultimately though, finding your space of agency is your own responsibility: nobody can do it for you. Improving your life starts by leaving the tracks that have been put in front of you since your birth and go on your own way.

It’s never too late to find your way. It’s never too early to start. If not now, when?