Careers After Tech?

theinfobox asks: "Is anyone else burned out on tech jobs? Or, has anyone tired of the never ending hunt for tech position? I know a lot of people who have and they are now looking at other career fields. I am almost at that point myself. What career fields are you considering after leaving the tech industry?"

Comments

my experience... good then (hopefully) bad

[vsync64]

After being laid off from Wego Systems I hunted around in vain for another tech job, eventually landing in the pit of despair that is Office Depot. I just recently quit and hunted around for another 3 months, finally today (yay) getting a job at a hotel. I start out as the night desk clerk, then get promoted to night auditor. We'll see how it works out.

My advice: stay away from retail at all costs. Try something secretarial, in hospitality, or even manual labor. Anything is better than being told all day why your reservations about hard-selling extended warranties are invalid, and that if a product is carried by the company, there can't ever be anything wrong with it, etc. Keep your dignity at all costs.

Oh, and find a job with consistent shifts, if it's hourly. Nothing sucks more than noon one day, 8am the next, 3pm the next. Especially when instead of giving you the schedule the Wednesday before, like you were promised, they decide that Sunday morning is a better time.

I'm optimistic, personally... 23:00-07:00 5 nights a week, with a 2-day break, and no micromanaging bosses.

My Retirement Plan

[Zarf]

For retirement I plan on being a crotchety old geek that teaches mathematics and computer programming in a community college somewhere nice. I figure it would be good to teach night courses since I hate mornings and I would be giving real world experience and direction to kids and young adults who really need it.

If tech doesn't work out in the near term, I'm planning on trying to "retire early" and getting a teaching certificate. Most fun I ever had was teaching a College level Programming class to freshmen. I might not get the college freshmen with a certificate but maybe I could get the High School seniors?

Re:What the high flyers will be doing next

[WIAKywbfatw]

When you have billions giving away a few million is nothing.

When you have $50 billion (give or take), $100 million is only 0.2 percent of your net worth. It's like a guy who has $1000 giving away $2.

Granted, the Gates Foundation is bigger than that (according to their annual report they gave $1 billion in grants last year) but some of their reporting is misleading - a considerable proportion of their education-based aid is in the form of Microsoft software and/or has other Microsoft-related terms and conditions applied to it.

How much does a copy of Office notionally cost? $800? Well, give away 100,000 copies to education and there's $80 million already. And let's not forget Encarta, etc.

And while $1 billion dollars might sound like a lot, it's probably less than what the foundation earns in annual interest alone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that the foundation is there and that it's doing something to help fight AIDs, improve literacy, etc, it's just that I don't like their accounting practices - a copy of Office isn't as valuable as a couple of hundred TB vaccinations.