> I have an interview next week for a coffee engineer role which pays around a third of what I currently earn and would involve being on the road four out of five days.
The most poignant tip I can give you: Do not jump straight into drastic career changes as a solution.
You sound dissatisfied with your job or recent jobs, but you’re projecting that dissatisfaction on to the entire career. It is a mistake to assume that all software engineering jobs are going to be as equally uninspiring as your current one. You’ve notified a job that is so completely different from your current work that you assume it must be better, but I assure you it comes with many downsides you haven’t learned about yet. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence because you’re less familiar with it.
I’ve done a lot of career mentoring. Frequently, people come to the mentoring program dissatisfied with their current job and under the belief that they’ll be happier if they abandon it all and do something different. My sample size is small, but for what it’s worth I’ve only seen this work out once: The person hated software from the start, had only gotten into software because they thought it would pay well, and they weren’t able to keep up with basic software tasks. Basically, they chose the wrong job for the wrong reasons and couldn’t do it.
For everyone else, drastic changes usually result in some hard-learned lessons that they miss their old career and the money that came with it.
Taking 1/3 the pay to travel 4/5 the time might sound refreshing to someone who is tired of sitting at a computer right now, but I doubt you’ll be excited about it after 1000 days of grinding through travel delays, missing events at home, layovers, and a retirement account that isn’t growing any more.
Pick a less disruptive and less permanent way to change up your life first. Do manual labor on the weekends. Volunteer somewhere. Take an extended vacation. Landscape your yard. Help your elderly neighbors clean up their yard. Anything to start adding some variety to your life without detailing your career to try it.
I left this out of the OP because I didn't want to to be too verbose but this decision is a long time coming for me.
In the last two years I've started volunteering, I repair and sell coffee machines as a hobby and I row and play rugby three to five times a week.
I've really considered this deeply and I think I'm like the example you gave - I was never suited for the world of offices. I was good at school but hated that, and good at university and I hated that too. Then I just got jobs in the highest paying fields I could find and went from there.
I think you give good advice but I can't help thinking that life is short and if I had a heart attack and was being wheeled into A&E, I would think that I was fucking moron for having spent so many days sat behind a PC.
The most poignant tip I can give you: Do not jump straight into drastic career changes as a solution.
You sound dissatisfied with your job or recent jobs, but you’re projecting that dissatisfaction on to the entire career. It is a mistake to assume that all software engineering jobs are going to be as equally uninspiring as your current one. You’ve notified a job that is so completely different from your current work that you assume it must be better, but I assure you it comes with many downsides you haven’t learned about yet. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence because you’re less familiar with it.
I’ve done a lot of career mentoring. Frequently, people come to the mentoring program dissatisfied with their current job and under the belief that they’ll be happier if they abandon it all and do something different. My sample size is small, but for what it’s worth I’ve only seen this work out once: The person hated software from the start, had only gotten into software because they thought it would pay well, and they weren’t able to keep up with basic software tasks. Basically, they chose the wrong job for the wrong reasons and couldn’t do it.
For everyone else, drastic changes usually result in some hard-learned lessons that they miss their old career and the money that came with it.
Taking 1/3 the pay to travel 4/5 the time might sound refreshing to someone who is tired of sitting at a computer right now, but I doubt you’ll be excited about it after 1000 days of grinding through travel delays, missing events at home, layovers, and a retirement account that isn’t growing any more.
Pick a less disruptive and less permanent way to change up your life first. Do manual labor on the weekends. Volunteer somewhere. Take an extended vacation. Landscape your yard. Help your elderly neighbors clean up their yard. Anything to start adding some variety to your life without detailing your career to try it.