I have worked in many companies over the years. In the past few years, I changed jobs in pursuit of higher salary, more dividends, and a better platform. I also kept trying to work in different directions, building teams, and then giving up. In the past year, I have been working on my own business, and during my entire entrepreneurial cycle, three development classmates have been preparing to change careers. In fact, I was very angry at first and felt that being a deserter was pure fw.
Later, I was thinking about why they gave up on this matter and asked them why they changed careers. There are two most essential triggers: tiredness, and lack of hope (it is true that entrepreneurial teams can see a person’s True Color).
Tired and work status
Let’s talk about the dangers of “tiredness” first. Long-term high load will directly drain three things: attention, resilience, and sensitivity to the future. Your attention is chopped up, and you can only deal with the trivial matters in front of you; your resilience is reduced, and even on weekends you only "regenerate blood", and you have no extra energy to try; your sensitivity to the future is blunted, and you can only passively accept external changes when they come.
In this kind of fatigue, people are most likely to slip back into "work state". Because it is certain, predictable, and the pressure is more controllable - but the price is that the three elements of professional resilience are systematically weakened:
- Shrinking options: Being trapped in existing positions and rhythms, skills and connections are narrowed, and external bargaining power is reduced. - Resilience is further reduced: Continuous fatigue leaves you with no window for trial and error and upgrades. Once the organization changes, it will be slower to get back on track. - Single cash flow: relying only on wages, without buffers and backup plans. The more you dare not move, the harder it will be to turn around.
So when I say "working status", I don't refer to the work itself, but to a mode of pure exchange with life: I need money, so I give my time to you, that's all. It's okay in the short term, but in the long term it can lead to very bad habits.
If you have returned to this state, don't force yourself to do it. First, restore your underlying recovery power: fix your sleep, fix your physical fitness, reduce invalid input, and recover your attention budget.
Tired core perception
So I think the core perception of people's "tiredness" is whether they "like it" or not.
Let’s get back to the topic at this point. If you don’t like it, just change careers as soon as possible, because it’s too easy to get tired of your current tasks and slip into the “work status” area. I feel like there is no way to make up for this kind of tiredness with sleep and energy management.
Only if you like it is it worth treating the difficulties as a long slope. Ask yourself:
1. Are you willing to take coding or technical mainline as a long-term life path? 2. How much risk are you willing to take in order to continue writing code? (For example, will you continue to invest when your salary is delayed/not paid?) 3. During non-working hours, do you think about relevant issues spontaneously and enjoy it?
In fact, there is no need to ask more, the answer is already in everyone’s mind.
If I am not even satisfied with these basic elements, I think it would be better to change careers as soon as possible. Why waste time torturing myself?
No hope in sight
Back to the second trigger mentioned at the beginning: lack of hope. It's usually not "you're not trying hard enough" but a structural issue at the path level:
- Career stratification is obvious: most people in the market are "talents" (who can get things done), but the proportion of "talents" who can continuously amplify value at critical nodes is very low. Now I think I may have a bad idea: "People without characteristics are only suitable for talents, and training is actually meaningless" (but it may just be that you don't have the characteristics of this industry). - Path risks are concentrated: The technical path has narrow promotion channels in many companies and is highly dependent on the organization. A business contraction or structural adjustment will wipe out the potential energy accumulated over the years. - Clear ceiling: After the same position is involuted, the increase often comes from "sedentary longer and faster delivery" rather than "better leverage". When you see that you are still in the same exchange three years later, you naturally feel hopeless. - Feedback delay is too long: Doing the right thing may take a long time to take effect. During this period, there is a lack of positive feedback, and concentration and confidence are slowly worn away.
So instead of “hard-working” on the original path, it’s better to do two actions as soon as possible:
1. Reduce dimensionality and stabilize cash flow: Find a job that is highly replaceable and predictable, and first recover your resilience and attention. 2. Establish options laterally: In the amateur or short-term period, try levers that can bring compound interest - such as content and distribution, vertical domain knowledge assets, repeatable service productization, and micro-payment verification. The goal is to gradually change the structure of "only relying on time to exchange money" to "partially relying on assets/systems to exchange money".
When you have options and buffers, hope will naturally flow back; otherwise, the harder you work, the deeper you will be bound to the same low-leverage track.
End
It doesn't matter if you go slowly, the key is not to be "tied" to a single path. When you keep the three things of resilience, options and cash flow, whether you change careers or continue to work in technology, you will be more resilient and sustainable.
Finally, understand "career change" as a "reconstruction" of the life system:
- Reconstruct boundaries: clarify what should be cut and what should be held for the long term; focus resources on the parts that can compound interest. - Reconstruct dependencies: Reduce strong dependence on a single organization/position and add replaceable and transferable common capabilities and assets. - Reconstruct the interface: Design a new input-output cycle for yourself (learning → output → distribution → feedback) to make positive feedback shorter and more visible.
Changing careers is not about escaping, but about obtaining better maintainability and scalability. Of course it is best not to change the route, and it is okay to complete the "reconstruction" on the original route; but when the structural constraints cannot be alleviated, decisively changing the route is the most responsible engineering practice for oneself.