Choosing liberation over fear

Why I quit my day job in tech, and what's next!

Oct 25, 2024

Last week, I took the biggest leap of my life and quit my full-time job as a software engineer, a career I pursued for over nine years.

Whether it’s a brave or foolish thing to do, I trust that walking away from a six figure salary and structured corporate life to embrace the unknown is the current right choice for me. In today’s post, I’ll share the journey that led me to step away from my tech job and what I’ll be focusing on next.

Note: I want to acknowledge my privilege and life circumstances that enable me to make this choice. I don’t currently have caretaking responsibilities, a mortgage, or debt, and I’m able to join my husband’s health insurance. I have deliberately chosen to focus on career freedom in lieu of other life goals for now. I want to be transparent about this so you can decide if continuing to read feels helpful or relevant for you. If not, I completely understand if you choose to skip this post!

The start of my career

As a dreamy and idealistic teen, I aspired to have a creative career throughout my school years. Once I got to college, the blind confidence of my younger self faded as I became mired in shoulds—I should get a stable job with benefits, I should aim for a career with a high salary.

Upon graduating and getting a digital marketing job that wasn’t the right fit, I landed on software engineering as the perfect field for me. I liked that I could create things that people would use and value, and that it paid well. To make this early career pivot I went to a coding bootcamp on nights and weekends while working. I was able to transition into an engineering role at the same startup right after bootcamp, where I stayed for two years before working up the courage to interview elsewhere and land my first six figure role as a mid-level engineer.

I had always grown up around computers since my dad was also an engineer. Choosing engineering as my career made a lot of sense.

The next company I worked was a publicly traded education technology company that had a hundredfold more employees than the previous startup. I came across way more bureaucracy and process, but I enjoyed having more people and resources to learn from. I was growing a ton as an engineer, and feeling much more confident about my ability to code and deliver valuable work.

As I felt more self-assured in my job, I had more headspace to explore my creative passions such as writing and dancing. I built community and wrote essays and short stories. These pursuits allowed my creative voice to develop that didn’t have room to flourish in a corporate setting.

I was beginning to question if engineering was really it for me, but first I was determined to get promoted to senior. After reaching that goal, my motivation continued to drop. I started to really feel the common pitfalls of working in tech—constant reorganizations, shifting leadership priorities, and my growing anxiety from constantly checking Slack or being on-call. I hoped that maybe it was the company and I just needed a new job to reinvigorate my work.

I knew I wanted to work somewhere that had more of a creative work culture, and created a shortlist of companies to apply for my next job. I boldly told my friend who had recently left tech to pursue entrepreneurship that “the next tech company I work for will be my last.” A recruiter from Mailchimp, one of the companies on my list, serendipitously reached out and I interviewed and accepted their offer.

My desk setup during the early days of Mailchimp

My “last tech job”

I started my third engineering job in August 2020. The first few months were some of the happiest memories in my entire career. I loved my small team and the genuine connections we fostered despite the pandemic. Working on Mailchimp’s email editor was fulfilling, especially knowing my work improved a product that my friends and community used.

This joyous period came to an end when Intuit acquired the company for $12 billion. Long-timers were disappointed by the sale which didn’t come with any meaningful employee equity. Many employees, including myself, were skeptical of being associated with a financial company that engaged in deceptive practices. Morale started tanking as beloved colleagues began to leave.

Throughout the pandemic I’d been relying hard on my creative practice to rebalance myself. Both crafting and illustration were ways for me to return to center when I felt overwhelmed from all the chaos happening around me. Then in mid-2021 I got into a bad car accident that took several months to recover, while I also navigated the overwhelming change in company culture from the acquisition. It was around this time I started to seriously consider what it would take for me to leave my job.

Feeling in rough physical shape but very happy to be alive!

What am I leaving for?

While I mostly enjoyed the day to day work of software engineering, I found it really difficult to stay centered amid the politics, lack of transparency, and questionable values that are often found in large tech companies. The industry was also shifting towards AI and I had a lot of hesitations on whether I wanted to join those efforts.

But these existential reasons weren’t enough for me to leave my stable, high-paying job just yet. I craved to be sure of what I was doing next and to get there as quickly as possible. After falling in love with illustration, I focused on building my portfolio, taking classes, and sharing my work online to become a professional illustrator.

In the summer of 2022, I used all of my vacation and sick days to take five weeks off and attend an illustration course/residency. While it was an invaluable learning experience, I felt significant internal pressure to produce great work. I often found myself working all day and night, worried that I wasn’t making the most of this opportunity. By the residency's end, I was relieved to return to my job, where I could clock in and out without the pressure of constant productivity.

Things were stable for a while until the company announced a return to office two days a week. Being on a distributed team, I resented having to go to an office where almost none of my coworkers were. The longer hybrid work went on, the lonelier I felt going in, barely recognizing or speaking to anyone. Around this time work pressures ramped up and I was careening towards burnout. And though I had began working as a freelance illustrator, my personal practice was mostly deprived of joy and I was unsure of whether I could cobble together enough gigs to make a career.

After recognizing the decline in my mental health, I returned to therapy in spring 2023 and set a firm date to quit my job the following year. Having a quit date was crucial for detaching my identity from work, and I began planning my finances to create a sustainable runway for my next chapter.

My Notion page, created in April 2023. I ended up leaving October 2024

Working up the courage to leave

In the year leading up to my decision, I constantly wrestled with the choice to quit my job. Despite financial planning, the idea of willingly choosing uncertainty and risk conflicted with my immigrant family upbringing. I wondered if I could just keep going—I now knew how to manage my work without burning out, and though the politics was exhausting I still enjoyed coding.

As I began reflecting on who I wanted to be outside of my corporate job, I realized I was treating my art practice like a goal I needed to reach in order to give myself the freedom I deeply desired. In my mind, I could only give myself permission to walk away from money and security if I already had a “successful” art career. Yet the pressure of needing that to be true was destroying my internal motivation to make art. And without a solid art practice, working for a company that did not share my values was killing my spirit.

I realized I needed to step away from this punishing hamster wheel I had constructed for myself. I wanted to unlearn attaching my self-worth to my productivity. I wanted to choose my integrity over money and status. I was deeply jaded and wanted to feel hope and liberation again. The decision to leave ended up being intuitive rather than logical, something that was tough for my engineer self to accept.

As my quit date approached, many of my colleagues were laid off and more reorgs and changes were on the horizon. Stability is never guaranteed at a corporate job, and I realized it was a logical step to choose to leave and develop my own agility and resilience.

Though I would miss my coworkers, coding work, and regular paychecks, I determined that it was finally time to give notice. After saying lots of goodbyes and having a final lunch with my NYC teammates, I turned in my things and walked out of the office last Friday for the last time.

Goodbye, badge that unlocks free snacks and seltzer

What’s next?

As I started telling people in my life about my plans to quit my job, many asked if I am now going to pursue art full-time. The short answer is yes! The long answer is that I’m first and foremost committing to healing my relationship with art and cultivating a healthy practice. I will be sharing more of myself and my work, and I aim to teach and be in service to other artists navigating their own creative journey.

I would love to be able to generate enough self-employed income to cover my expenses, but recognize that this comes with lots of pressure and difficulty. If there comes a point where this pressure harms my practice and I can’t find a way out, then I am more than willing to get another full-time job. If I have to choose, I would much rather cultivate a fulfilling art practice than chase the ambition of becoming a full-time artist.

Aside from art, I have also started a 200 hour yoga teacher training! I have been practicing yoga for eleven years and am super excited to dive deeply, not only in the anatomy and postures but also the history and philosophy. It feels humbling to be a student again and to be immersed in a new local community of kind and curious humans. I’m curious how my spiritual practice will integrate with my artistic one, and would love to integrate yoga and meditation into future offerings to regulate our nervous system and invite in creativity.

I am planning to dedicate a minimum of one year to this sabbatical/self-employed artist life, after which I’ll reevaluate and see what next step feels right. I am open to getting another engineering job or picking up coding projects, but it won’t be my focus for now.

Final thoughts

I’m proud of taking this leap, by far the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Quitting allowed me to shift my focus from what if? to what now? Although I spent so many hours overthinking my decision, it ultimately strengthened my confidence. I digested a range of advice from others, whether it was to quit immediately, wait until I was making enough revenue from my art, or wait to be laid off so I could collect severance. Hearing this advice fueled my doubts, but ultimately reaffirmed my choice to trust my intuition and embrace a new chapter.

I’m so relieved and excited to finally be able to share this decision with you readers, and I want to thank you for coming along and for showing me that what I have to share can reach and inspire others. Through all the ups and downs of art and life, I have been able to ground in the practice of writing this newsletter weekly and sharing my reflections and learnings.

I also want to thank the many brave corporate job quitters before me who have inspired me with their stories, some of which I’ve linked below. I am grateful for my sister who chose the self-employed life several years ago for showing me that the uncharted path is difficult but definitely possible. And thank you to my husband for encouraging me despite the financial impact. The older one gets the less career decisions are made in silos (which is why lots of “quitting my job” tales seem to be from twenty somethings), so I want to acknowledge the family support needed to make a risky choice.

If you have any specific questions on quitting my job, planning for a career shift, or leaving tech, please email me or leave them in the comments and I’d be happy to answer them in a future post! I am incredibly grateful you’re here, and I look forward to sharing this next chapter with you 💛