Ask Lemmy

I studied physics in undergrad, and was planning to continue to graduate studies. Took me until my senior year to realize that I actually found most of the work in physics to be extremely boring, and I was actually just following the degree path out of an egoistic desire to prove how smart I was.

But now that I'd lost my path in life so close to graduating, I realized I needed to find another, fast. Luckily I'd been taking classes for a CS minor, so switched that to a major and graduated with both degrees with an additional 6 months of classes.

However, since I'd been banking on physics, I only had one summer to do a CS internship, got it at a no-name local company, and ended up in .Net development after graduation. Despite what Lemmy might say, .Net is actually not that bad - at least as a developer. The documentation is good, the tooling mostly makes sense, and corporate support is pretty responsive. But it doesn't lend itself to working on sexy, pro-social, world-changing tech. So I generally found my coworkers and company to be pretty boring and closed minded, and the work we did to be quite meaningless.

Due to the lack of social connection at the job and meaninglessness I felt about the work - in combination with the fact that I kind of felt I'd been forced into the occupation by circumstance - I suffered from a pretty consistent depression for about 5 years while working in software.

Luckily, my actual passion was the outdoors. During college, I'd taken 6 months off to hike the appalachian trail, spent my weekends going to the mountains with friends, and spent weekdays riding bicycles around town and dumpster diving - I was happy doing these things, and realized I didn't need much in the way of money or material posessions to make me happy.

So when I got my software job, I immediately started saving as much money as possible and putting it in investments. So after working for about 8 years, I was able to retire.

These days I work part time rigging concerts, do little diy projects around the house, and go rock climbing. So on the whole, I feel like it worked out well. Though now I have the itch to get back into software and prove that I could do the thing where I do something meaningful and enjoy it and make tons of money.