[c-fe]

> I live for the weekends

Why are you not trying to find some part-time positions, and then maybe decrease your SWE work to 20 hours per week and try out other things in the remaining time? I think this could be a good fit for your situation, and possibly be a transition to see if you really want another work or if not without completely leaving the field.

[whatthedangheck]

At this point in my career everyone wants to hire me at the equivalent of what would be L5/L6 at Google and at that level they all want me full time and want me to "mentor" people and be a leader. It's part of the problem of me doing really well at interviewing. I can solve your leetcode problems, design a distributed system, and tell you everything about how your operating system works down to the level of hardware interrupts so I pass these interviews left and right but I don't have the drive or passion to be a "leader" in this field.... Maybe this is the root of my burnout actually.

edit How can I even find a part time job at this point? I have executive recruiters sometimes even trying to get me to be a CTO. Everything points in the direction of companies wanting more of my time not less.

[wnolens]

> How can I even find a part time job at this point? > Everything points in the direction of companies wanting more of my time not less.

You'd have to look for smaller companies without the clout to pick up FANG engineers. They desperately need folks, and can be negotiated with.

I've had two part time gigs. One was a food delivery app startup, but not as big as uber eats. They had a real patchwork of an engineering team, few contractors, few full timers. I just told them 20h/wk is my maximum and declined their requests for me to work more. They needed me, and hiring is very hard.

Another was a tiny payroll software company. Another small contender in a larger market. But they had their niche, and some real old software built almost entirely by one contractor at a time over the course of two decades. Moved at a real slow pace. Paid me $130/h if I remember correctly.

However.. since you sound like me in every other way (FANG, distributed systems, tech lead level), know that the work in smaller places like I describe is boring. It's cleaning up old cruft, shoehorning features in with no budget to rewrite any existing code, working with terrible tooling and documentation.. All good if you can turn off the part of you that wants to write sexy code and build beautiful novel systems. I lasted about 1.5y. But got to travel the US, play music, date, have serious side projects.. a good life for a while.

[vanilla-almond]

You mentioned in another post how rewarding it was for you to support a friend and how much more meaningful it felt (contrasted to your joyless office job).

You have a lot of expertise in your field, would becoming a freelancer trainer or coach be an option? For example, running short (1-5 days) on-site courses at different companies. I can imagine it might be rewarding to impart you expertise to the attendees - the feeling of satisfaction of helping others. Best of luck whatever you decide.