Curious to see if people have experiences to share.
Did it at 40. Left a dead end career in IT after yet another layoff, and became a mailman. It’s really not so bad. I make just as much as I did in IT, which is a real indictment of IT, and most days I’m done by 2pm. There are some times around Christmas where I might cover extra routes for the money, in which case I’m working until 8pm. But that is completely my choice, and I get paid very well for doing it. One pay period during Christmas, I got the extra route pay plus a boot allowance which doubled my pay for those 2 weeks. That would never happen in IT. The best I could hope for after getting the 2am emergency call was that I got to work from home the next day (pre-pandemic). That’s it. No extra pay, no extra time off, because my “on-call” pay apparently covered that. And I didn’t make any more than my base pay as a mailman. This was really the best decision I’ve ever made.
I make just as much as I did in IT, which is a real indictment of IT,
That’s surprising indeed! May I ask you where you are located? (you can just give continent if you don’t to give countries)
I’m in Canada, in an area heavy with tech companies. But I was also stuck in Support. I took a Support job since a friend was working there and they offered me almost double what I was making as a QA developer, which that point was completely lost on the people I had been working for. But that was the worst decision of my life. They promised me a chance to move to C# development if I started in Support, which is a big part of why I took the job. After 5 years of broken promises, they laid me off unceremoniously. After that, it was just a string of shitty support jobs at about the same wage each time. My salary had stagnated for a decade. New developers were starting at more than I was making after 10 years. So after spending more than a year looking for a job after the last layoff, I was desperate and starting applying to everything. This job came up, and after a few more months of apply to IT and coming very close to not one but two different developer roles that both evaporated after I was told I had the second interview with the director, I decided being a mailman wasn’t so bad. I just stopped apply to IT and embraced it.
Yeah. Saw a man go from CEO of his own company to follow his dreams and become a pastry chef.
Soon after, he also became an inmate because he paid for all that with money that wasn’t his.
So, you should probably avoid spending money that isn’t yours.
I went from banking to project management to medical device manufacturing.
I did that myself, though partly it was just because I hadn’t really settled on a career to begin with. Early 30s and before was just alot of low-level BS fast food, call center, and some light manufacturing jobs, all second shift. I finished up college relatively late in the game (in my 30s) and fresh out of college got into graphic design and I guess since I’ve been doing it a decade now, it’s a “career”.
I was relatively directionless before and shirked responsibility. My only priorities were getting enough money for rent, beer, and food, with no real idea of what I wanted in life. Then suddenly I fell into a role where I was given tons of responsibility and relatively little oversight, it made me have to get somewhat self-disciplined. Add in a kid and student loans and I really needed to get serious about things.
I’m definitely happy I got into, it was a change that has paid off in spades. It’s like an actual job job with colleagues and an industry I’m part of, not just random people coming in off the street every few weeks until they fail a drug test or quit in a rage, or low-level work where I’m treated like a tool. People actually appreciate my work and sometimes I’ll see my work in public, so that’s cool.
I went from Paramedic to sous chef in my late 20’s. Then sous chef to banking to hockey arena manager in my 30’s. I couldn’t have stayed in one job. I would have gone crazy. Also live your life don’t live your work.
