I quit my job earlier this year to pursue my startup idea. Gave up on it after ~5 months and have been traveling for 50% of the time because I have infinite PTO. Only learned 3 things: 1. startups are very hard. 2. TC is pointless if you don’t spend it, and you really don’t need much to travel. 3. I really hate my career choice as a software engineer. The idea of taking orders from a balding 40 y/o guy with man-boobs and having passive aggressive nerds on the autism spectrum as coworkers disgusts me now. I could tolerate it before only because of the money but now I don’t value the money, so I feel fucked because at some point I do need income again. I’ve only had 1 job that I kind of liked and it was for a very small startup, which is hard to find. I’m thinking of hitting the reset button and shooting for a junior level product role to avoid having to work with nerds as closely as I would as an engineer. RTO might just ruin everything. End angsty blog post. TC: 0 🎆
What was the startup and ehy did you drop it?
Novel adtech startup idea. Dropped it because it’s pretty impossible to break through without scale. If you mean the startup I liked, it was a no name retail tech start up. Left because of money. Ironic!
Startup is hard. I had some ideas but didn't quite my job. I hate working at Amazon for same reason. And from what I've beign reading my team isn't even that bad. But the constant anxiety is there. Manager keeping saying I need to be proactive in asking for more projects to lead. Dude,I just delivered on 3 projects working weekends and overnight to deliver for re:invent. Where on your brain did you think I was going to get the free time to work on more stuff. It's like manager has Alzheimer or something, as if they forgot reinvent was just last month and we're still recovering. You expect me to start jumping on everything as if they were business critical. I'm still recovering ❤️🩹
I had a bad experience involving deadlines right before I quit too. Still mad about it!
There must be to escape rat race. I keep thinking about this. What if you did a bootstrapped startup in a low COL country. I feel you could make it work if lets say you get it to 10k per month
What was the startup idea
Adtech idea
What kind of adtech idea?
You lost me at "passive-aggressive nerds on the autism spectrum". I get that people with autism (myself included) shouldn't defend every mistake or shitty behavior on autism but the idea that simply being autistic makes us worse coworkers is fucking ridiculous.
I feel this. Very hard. I’d say best bet is to politic your way into a senior or leadership role where you give more orders than you get. And get really good at one thing so you limit how much collaboration you need. Look into architecture or sales engineering too
I hadn’t considered sales. The people in that area are definitely more my personality type but I have no experience with sales (never made it that far with my startup idea which is a shame).
Use it to your advantage. Most sales people can talk about APIs but don’t know how they work. You’d kill it in solutions engineering/sales engineering if you can build an API and hold a conversation with eye contact 🤣