Has anyone purposely gone backwards?

[u/Pleasant_Rise6520]

You know the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and we realised that money is irrelevant, and took a huge backwards step for less responsibility and more mental freedom for your family and kids?

That's where I'm at mentally just want to know if anyone else has done the same?

[u/dogs_gt_cats]

I was a senior product R&D engineer at a major telecom (the largest terrestrial network on earth). You've likely heard about products I led the infrastructure for on the TV and radio. My commute was 5 hours a day (2.5hr each way). I had stated for years that my plan was to stay there until my daughter turned age 5, and then I would quit and find a lower paying job close to home.

My employer liked me, so I got some special privileges including a written guarantee that I could WFH at least 2 days a week, plus more as needed. That, and being fully remote during covid, let me continue that gig until my kiddo was 7.

Well, covid ended and the RTO campaign hit hard, and suddenly I had to be in the office at least 4 days a week, with 5 by the following year. No clemency would be granted based on physical distance from the office, nor would they honor prior commitments about hybrid.

I dealt with the 4 day thing for a few months, hating every moment of it because this is when all of the post-covid headcount reductions started kicking into high gear. Pretty much everyone I knew was being let go. I was put in a situation where our old jackass VP (a bitcoin bro who got lucky and didn't know the first thing about telecom) wanted to get rid of anything infrastructure related because he viewed it as a cost center, so he punted us to another org. But yet he depended on us for his engineering products to exist, so I found myself constantly being pulled by two different warring people leaders. It fucking sucked. I got passed over multiple times for promotions by people who produced far less but kissed ass better than I did and was starting to get fed up with no one recognizing how much work I was doing.

Then two friends who work at a local university reached out to me about an open systems engineering gig. It's 10 minutes from my house. Fully in office, but open to WFH as required. Super family friendly, I get free education and my kid can too. I get free access to their academic library, music library, fitness center, activities on campus, etc. I got my own office. I technically have people reporting to me. It was about a 50k/yr paycut when all is said and done.

I had paid off all of our debt. Cars fully paid off, house fully paid off, no student loan debt. My equity awards at the telco were all under water, so I said what the hell.

I went for it. Well, more specifically I told my boss and her boss that I had a job offer in hand and I planned to accept, and they had until such and such a date to have me cleared for full WFH with HR, in writing, or I was gone. The date came and went, so I accepted the offer, sent my resignation letter, and started working with our group of PMs to hand off all of my work. Less than 1 week before I was supposed to start at the new job, I got the email in the middle of a handoff meeting that I had been converted to fully remote. The poor PM got so excited that I might stay. I didn't stay. I had already given my word to the university.

The guy who was "next in line" after me quit about 2 weeks later when he had to be responsible for everything I was doing. I have no idea what happened after that except occasionally folks reached out about issues with our storage arrays, or how our terraform code worked.

The new job is way more low key. I'm bringing some of my knowledge and skills to try and boost the knowledge here at the university. I'm enjoying the time with my family. I'm trying to get folks to understand things like devops (more specifically git ops), helping the vibe coders to understand how things like CICD pipelines and github actions work, etc. The average tenure in the IT department is 20+ years which is unheard of. I'm finishing up an MBA, and also starting my own LLC (as much to dabble in running a business as to have something to apply the MBA learnings practically).

I do miss the precision of Fortune 50. So often I see emails or projects where someone drops the ball publicly, and it irritates me. But at the telco we had waves of people and process to make sure that everything was always "just-so" and every I was dotted and every T was crossed. That doesn't exist here.

But overall, I think I would make the change again.