@SemiRetiredEngineer

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Software engineer, burned out, quit my job, now I'm wondering what to do.
Bloghttps://www.semiretiredengineer.com
Pretty much quit my software career and retired

In July 2021, I quit my job for about a year due to burn out. I found another job in Sep 2022. It was a senior firmware engineer position, fully remote. They shipped me a laptop, jtag emulator and the target device, which was about the size of a thick …

Semi-Retired Engineer
Stories from software trenches 1

One of the worst projects I've ever worked on was a classified project at a large defense contractor. The project team consisted of a software lead, a hardware lead, a software engineer (me) and a hardware engineer. The team leads made the team so dysfunctional. The software lead was a …

Semi-Retired Engineer

You weren't created to:

• Be unhappy
• Work a 9-5 until death
• Live paycheck to paycheck
• Ask permission for 2 a week vacation each year
• Sit at a job you hate 40 hours a week for 50 years

Break free.

Career Advice: The company you work for is NOT your family and you don't owe your job anything beyond the work that you're being paid to do.

Prioritize your own growth and well-being over misplaced loyalty. Companies are not families, they're businesses, it's a business relationship and their goal is to make as much money as they can. If they can make more money by laying you off, they will.

If you ever have an opportunity to better yourself, never feel guilty about taking it.

Good employees don't quit jobs, they quit:

• Low pay
• Bad bosses
• Office politics
• Toxic workplaces
• Micro-management
• Feeling undervalued
• Lack of opportunities
• Zero work-life balance

It's 100% okay to leave jobs that no longer serve you.

Remember, it's important to be happy where you work. You spend a lot of time there.

Officially semi-retired, again

My semi-retired status is official again. After working remotely full-time for a little more than a year, I was laid off. It came as a surprise, but I felt mostly relief and joy. No more meetings, no more deadlines! Since my layoff almost 4 months ago, I've just been puttering …

Semi-Retired Engineer
Job Hunting, Part 3

(Click here for Part 1 and Part 2) All in all, I applied to about 20 jobs. Half of them never responded. I think that's par for the course. Then half of the remaining turned out to not really be fully remote jobs, though they were advertised as such. They …

Semi-Retired Engineer
Job Hunting, Part 2

Once I started submitting resumes to job postings I found interesting, recruiters started contacting me in droves. I never used a recruiter to find a job before. I always applied directly with a company or had someone refer me. But I always had fulltime jobs and never tried contracting. For …

Semi-Retired Engineer
Job Hunting, Part 1

I knew for my next position I wanted a fully remote job. The only good thing to come out of the pandemic is the prevalence and acceptance of remote working. With that in mind, I applied only to fully remote jobs. I have been specializing in embedded software for much …

Semi-Retired Engineer
@[email protected] Agreed. I am half the worker I used to be, with no desire to be how I used to be.