Finally did. Scared about what I will be doing tomorrow night. I don’t want to end up with another hernia. Off 8 weeks recently because of it. I should have demoted myself before I came back. Scared of change I guess. Now my feet hurt. Factory job. 48 Male
As a full stack developer I switched to a different company with about 30% less pay but 50% more creative freedom.
Best decision of my life.
Money is not fucking worth it. You end up drinking it anyway to numb the pain.
The fact that more pay is not equal to the amount of skill required but the ability to endure pain is just cruel.
Holup, are you guys having creative freedom?
As a manager, I don’t like that at all. :)
I left a FE dev job that pays $30k less than the one I have now, but gave me a really manageable workload, had a small team that would’ve stayed relatively small, and I got a lot of sway in how things were done. It’s one of the few regrets I have recently.
My job now is pretty chill and manageable too, but has a lot of competing projects.
I did something similar but with ops management. Left a big corporate job to work for a small business and it’s been amazing. If I want something done differently I just propose it to ownership, scope it out and draft a plan and start implementing. Software or procedures changes take a few weeks instead of months/years (if at all with all the corporate red tape)
We’ve grown enough in the two years I’ve been here that my overall pay is higher than my corporate job and I’m working 45 hours a week instead of 60+. Also my bonus is going to be insane. 👌
I did not exactly demote myself, but I did turn down jobs with better salary and other compensations and benefits for shorter hours and remote possibility. Also helps that I switched to a lead dev role where I have a lot of input and trust, I guess.
Working conditions and time with my family are extremely valuable to me. I refuse to be an absentee father to my children. I’ll take the days off for kids shows or when they’re sick, thank you.
I just stepped down as tech lead at a startup after a REALLY good year followed by a REALLY awful six months. I left because the CEO lost a big customer and decided the lesson to take from that was that he needed to be in direct control of everything and everyone and because he jumped on the “back to the office” bandwagon (he reads all those frickin management articles from like Business Insider). I went from being the highest performing employee with the most brownie points to being miserable the second he switched up his management style. Also, the place haemorrhaged employees over the last six months. It’s now an engineering company with ZERO engineers and a whole lot of open job postings that aren’t filling for what he’s willing to pay + the credentials he expects (+ the local, rather than national, applicant pool, now that he expects everyone to be in person). He has a big government customer though, so he’ll probably keep floating for a while even if he can’t actually do anything.
I knew I was unhappy, but I didn’t realize HOW unhappy until my first day returning to freedom.
This isn’t really a demotion but more of me preventing myself from moving up. I’m a senior FE dev and have been senior for years. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to shift into a manager role with reports, but I don’t want to manage people, and I want to keep coding. I know it would net me more pay and probably more respect but I don’t give a shit. I’m trying to stave off burnout, not invite it in.
Yes, I was in management in multiple companies, mostly the service industry. I burned out after a year of Covid. I never want to be in management again. I just want to do a job or if my coding side hustle continues taking off, I’ll do that.
I agree. I’ve never been in management but I also have absolutely no desire to be a manager. Any place you work, they emphasize opportunities to move up in the company and they like to talk about a career path for you. Well what if I’d rather just develop more skills in the field I have and become even better at it for reasonable pay? But unfortunately it’s bad to say you don’t want to move up in a company. I’m not sure why though, maybe it says I’m lazy or stagnant or something? I would just rather focus my development on what I’m good at and become even better at that thing. But fuck me, right?
This, 100%. I love to learn and get better at my skills. I don’t want to waste my time hounding other people or dealing with social aspects. I want to do my job.
A lot of that is because it is believed that an employee needs to grow in order to be satisfied in their position, at the same time the only path that employers have is to move someone out of an individual contributor role into the management track once they hit a senior level.
Good employers will have upper level individual contributor track positions that are well paid, or at least have a job level where someone can stay at forever. Even then, if your boss thinks you would be a good manager you can end up forced into the position.
Worked on a welding line at a factory, fairly boring, repetitive work, but I was somewhat good at it and got promoted to a line lead. I fucking hated that position though. My coworkers who I had worked with saw it as an opportunity to slack off because someone they knew was a higher-up, while the actual higher-ups were assholes who had no respect for the workers and talked about them like they were trash, just no respect. I felt like I was caught between opposing groups and I didn’t want to turn into the sort of person that devalued my fellow workers, so I stepped down from my position.
I was was not liked by management after that and got suspended for welding scrapped parts that were… scrap, they were unusable (these are for car seats, you do not want scrap parts in car seats, they always get trashed). To relieve the boredom one night while a machine welder was down, I welded some small scrap parts together, MIG welding is actually kind of fun sometimes. My replacement line lead apparently reported the welded “sculpture” I made (nothing identifiable or offensive) and they said that I was destroying company property and suspended me. I was already in the process of transitioning to college, so I just never went back and it was the best decision I ever made in my life.
Got into graphic design, found a well-paying job right after graduation and I’m making way more than I ever would’ve had I stayed, plus I get to work from home, NEVER would’ve gotten that from a factory job (for obvious reasons I guess).
I stared in a software dev role and when our little company got bought up, got dropped into managing people. Went from having one equal colleague to leading a team of 14.
That was about 2 years ago and I’ve been wanting to switch back to a non-management role since. The problem is, I have this extreme pressure inside to please everybody, so I still do my work well. My team loves me and my boss thinks I‘m just incredibly talented as a manager. Why don‘t I just quit? Because that would conflict with my desperate need for everybody to be happy with me so I haven’t built up the courage. I tell myself that even if I suffer from all the stress and responsibility, at least my team has a leader that gives a shit.
I didn’t but a former supervisor of mine did. He was a good leader and manager.
My company gives a discount on health insurance if you have a yearly physical and answer a survey. They bring in a company, setup in a large room, you make an appointment, go to the room they do a physical and you get a discount the next year.
One year my appointment was right after my boss. They drew blood, tested it and the nurse said “that can’t be right”, she did it a second time the called over another nurse. Second nurse said “that’s not possible, you must of done something wrong” and did a third test. After that they call over the doctor who wanted to retest but they said they already tested him 3 times. HR was brought in and he was basically told to go to a doctor the next day and not to return to work till he was seen by a doctor.
He went to the doctor and when he came back to work asked to be removed from supervisor and put on the line as a regular worker.
His doctor basically told him the stress from the job was killing him, he could either have the job or keep living. He choose life and asked to be demoted.
I do have to ask out of curiosity, how does high levels of stress effect a blood sample in such a way that multiple nurses would be freaked out? I can’t imagine being in that position, I’d be pissing myself.
High blood pressure seems likely, or maybe signs of inflammation like an immune response
The nurses didn’t say out loud for privacy reasons and I didn’t ask him.
Technically yes. Switched from software dev to QA at a different company. Worse pay, worse commute, 0 regrets. My current company asked me if I would want to work as a dev instead, nope, can’t pay me enough to do that again.
Was an AVP in a bank moved to a different company to work as a software consultant with a 10% hike. I would be earning more than what I’m earning if I had stayed, but I’m happy now.
The company I worked for had installed software that tracks keyboard and mouse movements, it considers I’m idle if I don’t touch them for 180 seconds. Sometimes I lose more than 50% of the time because of attending meetings, it would report I was unproductive.
It always gave me a feeling like someone constantly standing behind my back and watching.
I usually work fast and complete things well in advance and spend time in the thought process of solving problems and enhancing existing process. Though I delivered more than what was expected from me, I was feeling insecure by someone gauging my performance by the amount of time I spent on computers.
My friend just did. She says she’s at a feeling of peace. I told her she’s trading work stress for financial stress, but that’s something she’s okay with. She just did so, so I’ll have to see how it actually plays out.
She can reduce bills and spending
Yeah just like cure her sickness and don’t eat
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I’m in the process of doing so now
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