[anticorporate]

I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.

I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.

There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.

My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.

[ryandrake]

> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.

Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.

[BLKNSLVR]

Sounds as if you think you have no agency in this.

[shimman]

You realize as a worker you're allowed to demand better working conditions right?

[serf]

which is why unionization and labor groups exist... because a worker demanding things does jack shit by itself.

[ryandrake]

Sure, I'll get right on that.

[materielle]

You’re being sarcastic, but I think you’d be surprised at how often you can say no to managers or even VPs and the c-suite and … have nothing happen to you.

I didn’t realize this until I was 32.

Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.

But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.

And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.

[lkey]

If workers making far less than you, with far more to lose, can organize in their workplace, then you can too. Open up signal, talk to your coworkers, and find some solidarity. Now is far better than never, and you might feel less alienated at the end of it.

[999900000999]

> but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America

I actually think it’s easier to cut back vs chasing some magic high networth before retirement.

The average salary in Costa Rica is only 1200$ a month. Meaning if you live an average life there you might be able to retire with 240k. Assuming 6% yields per year.

[anticorporate]

Agreed. I'm quite content living a rather simple lifestyle, owning very few new things, doing almost of the maintenance on my belongings myself. The "magic number" was really more about giving myself permission than anything else.

The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.

Living that cheaply does require adopting the lifestyle. But cooking at home or eating a casado from the local soda instead of a US-style restaurant meal sounds preferable to me anyway.

[999900000999]

Sorry about your family’s experience with the Healthcare Industrial Complex.

It’s really designed to drain every last dime.

As bleak as it sounds I made sure to take a long vacation last year at the spur of the moment. Tomorrow isn’t promised and you might save for a retirement that you never see.

I hope to do this every time I’m laid off or otherwise with an abundance of free time

[Loughla]

Like all things, there's a balance between spending everything now and planning for the future.

I always tell my kids that they won't inherit much cash, but they're having a great time with all of the vacations and fun equipment we have.

We will have enough money to retire and live for 30-35 years at most, frugally, and 15-20 if we really go nuts. I'll be dead waaaaayyyy before that, so it'll be up to my spouse to piss away the cash.

[999900000999]

I agree.

After seeing how fast my family wasted the proceeds of an estate that took 60 years to build, I don't think leaving a large amount of money is a great idea.

A certain someone just didn't want to work, and while that's fine if you invest the money and move to Vietnam, it won't sustain you if you want to stay in America.

I'm sure your spouse would rather party with you today vs having no you and a lot of money. Can you retire today ?

[lbrito]

Don't wanna spoil your dream, but have you actually lived in Latin America? Cost of living might not be what you think. I also have the feeling that foreigners don't really understand the crime situation. Of course, its a big regions with some variation.

[anticorporate]

I've not lived there but I've spent significant time in a handful of places there. I think a lot of people have cost-of-living shock because they try to live a US lifestyle in a place where import costs vastly outweigh any savings on local goods.

My reason for wanting to move comes more from culture and place than cost of living. That said, I do expect my cost of living to be lower, because my cost of living is artificially high where I live today; I could probably cut it in half by moving domestically in the same state.

Crime is a legitimate concern, but it's highly variable across the vast expanse of Latin America. There are very safe places to live across the region, but you need to do your research.

[lbrito]

Re: cost of living, I'm thinking more about things like housing and utilities.

Where I live (BC), power costs around CAD 0.085/kWh. In my home state in Brazil, the cost is CAD 0.25/kWh - 3 times higher. Natural gas is 20 times more expensive, although you'll only be using it for cooking. Basically any consumer good is as expensive or more expensive. Inflation is higher, credit is much more expensive. Housing is significantly cheaper than in large US/CA metros, but isn't exactly cheap: a nice apartment in my city rents goes for about 1500 CAD.

Like you said, its a big region. I don't know much about the rest of Latin America, but from the conversations I've had with people from other countries, they say yeah, we're on the same boat. Crime is also increasingly metastasizing as a problem in previously safer regions (Uruguay, Argentina, Equador).

[anticorporate]

This is exactly the kind of calculus I hope everyone does. For example, I can't say I'm jealous of much else about the cost of living in BC, but my electricity rates in North Carolina are more than double yours, much closer to Brazil's. Everywhere's a little different. My biggest expenses (taxes, housing, and health care) will probably go down in most of the places I'd consider moving to, but some things (like transportation, and consumer goods as you mention) I would expect to go up, especially since I spend less in those categories than most people I know to begin with.

[999900000999]

I was trying to match the parent comment. Much of Asia would probably cheaper and safer.

I did spend significant time in Asia and I found myself actually more comfortable than in the US. People just leave each other alone.

[reconnecting]

> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it

This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.

However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.

[Barbing]

You got this!

[moralestapia]

>I had been used to six figure salaries

Great post but this is what it reduces to.

99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work.

This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.

[feedyourhead]

> now at a community-owned grocery co-op

I find that space really interesting. Do you by any chance have a blog, or would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with it?

Also, any advice on research or reading materials? :) Thank you!

[anticorporate]

Folks who do what I do don't seem to have much of an online water cooler, aside from some National Co-op Grocer forums which are restricted access. Do check out ncg.coop though.

That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.

[archagon]

I'd love to read a blog (or even sporadic social media posts on Mastodon/Bsky/etc.) about this kind of stuff.

[Otterly99]

Sounds like you found peace. Good for you brother/sister.

What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.

[anticorporate]

Most grocery co-ops these days are staffed almost entirely with normal W-2 employees, the one standout exception being Park Slope in NYC which requires you to work a shift in the store to be able to shop there. The other ~170 co-op grocers in the US don't use this model, and in fact, don't require you to be a member to shop there at all. The co-op I work at is a little different in that it's a hybrid model, jointly owned by shoppers and workers, whereas most grocery co-ops are exclusively shopper-owned.

I run a lot of administrative functions that don't fit neatly elsewhere: POS, web, marketing, member services, community outreach, pricing, purchasing, product selection, vendor management, etc., but because I came from a tech background I also was gifted a lot of digital transformation and operations projects, which is fine because I enjoy that kind of work too. I've got a two pizza team helping me, although one would need to be vegetarian and the other gluten free. :) Ours is a fairly large co-op, with four retail locations and a wholesale operation. The median number of retail locations for food co-ops is generally one, so in many ways we behave more like a chain than most co-ops (although still small enough that locations run pretty independently).

[HugoTea]

That's lovely