When High-Paying Jobs Stop Making Sense
Why Tech Workers Are Quietly Walking Away from Six Figure Salaries
Tech Workers are Struggling
Lenny’s Newsletter just came out with a fire report.
They got survey results from 8,000 of their readers and identified the main reasons people in tech are burning out and fast.
Give it a read if you have some time!
Here’s the skinny on the Lenny’s post:
Burnout is widespread and dangerous: Nearly half of tech workers are burned out, especially in mid-size companies and mid-career roles. Burnout is tightly linked to quitting intentions and low engagement.
Optimism is slipping: While a slim majority still feel hopeful about their careers, overall sentiment has declined—except for founders and new grads, who remain upbeat.
Leadership is broken: Only 26% rate their managers as effective. Poor management is one of the strongest predictors of burnout, disengagement, and attrition.
Hybrid + small company setups work best: Hybrid workers report the most job satisfaction, and employees at small companies outperform big-company peers on nearly every well-being metric.
Why Some of Us Are Choosing to Be Underemployed on Purpose
As someone who went to college for tech, lasted three whole years in the industry, and then dipped out to do this full time, I’ve got a pretty solid bird’s eye view of how work has evolved: historically, economically, and emotionally. Especially when it comes to the current wave of people fleeing tech.
Right now, people are either exiting tech entirely or staying and burning out relentlessly. One option I don’t think gets talked about enough is underemployment.
Underemployment is when you have more “human capital” (skills, degrees, experience) than your job actually requires. Think: a software engineer becoming a barista. That person still has their engineering experience (maybe a degree, maybe a bootcamp), but they’re choosing a role that demands far less of it.
People do this for a lot of reasons—and I’ve done it too. When I left my role as a Solutions Consultant (which required a tech degree and specific experience), I took an Account Manager job that didn’t require either. That wasn’t a promotion. I intentionally stepped into a role that required less skill because I hoped it would also require less of me…and it did.
I also didn’t take a pay cut.
That’s why I call it a lazy girl job. I was still growing my income. In fact, I ended up with a bigger salary increase than what was available at my previous, more demanding job and I was doing less work.
Also, this TikTok I saw last week is super relevant:
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I was going to stitch this TikTok and respond, but I couldn’t get my answer under 7 minutes. So here we are on Substack, where I can actually unpack my thoughts!
Here’s the gist of what the TikTok said:
Tech pays well. This guy makes $200K and sees a lot of people leaving that behind to become farmers or baristas.
If you’re looking for more balance, just go on a hike before work. Keep the job. Don’t throw it away.
But this post glazes over a larger cultural shift with work today. I’ll share my own observations with you below
Why People Are Ditching Six Figure Tech Jobs for Something Real
1. Corporate work is unnatural and historically recent
Corporate America is only about 100 years old, while humans have worked with their hands for thousands.
For way more years before corporate work, we used to do seasonal, community-based work that was tangible, flexible, and aligned with real life. Today’s jobs aren’t built that way.
2. The 'Brain Economy' shifted us to white-collar work
During the Clinton era, there was a big push to globalize labor and transition the U.S. economy into white-collar jobs.
That’s what created the boom in screen-based, mentally demanding work like software engineering. It pays well, but it often feels disconnected and empty.
3. White-collar jobs blur boundaries and burn people out
Tools like Slack and Zoom erased the line between work and life.
We’re always “on,” even when we’re off the clock.
Physical labor, by contrast, gives your brain a break. It starts, it stops, and the results are clear.
4. Software developers and knowledge workers crave tangible impact
That’s why so many devs say they want to become baristas or farmers after a few years.
Not because they’re lazy, but because those jobs give you:
– A real start and stop time
– Physical movement
– Face-to-face connection
– A sense of purpose and visible contribution
5. Tech work can feel empty even with a $200K salary
Tech roles revolve around producing digital output like decks, dashboards, JIRA tickets, internal tools. These metrics don’t always feel meaningful.
Success is often measured in performance reviews, sprint velocity, ticket close rates, or stakeholder feedback.
Not impact. Not community value. Just metrics.
Over time, the six-figure salaries don’t feel worth it when the work is draining and the cost of living keeps climbing.
6. Cultural confusion fuels the desire to return to basics
People feel overwhelmed: politically, socially, emotionally.
Everyone’s telling you what to think: your employer, the media, the algorithm.
It makes sense that people want something simpler. There’s likely an evolutionary reason why hands-on work feels peaceful because we’ve done it forever.
7. Tech will always be there
Walking away doesn’t mean you’re locked out forever.
Most tech jobs act like they’re changing the world, but they’re not. They’re demanding, high-pressure, and often pretend to be more essential than they are.
Just because you once made $200K doesn’t mean that was your only shot. That’s a fear-based mindset, not reality.
8. Tech can get cult-ish, and it wears you down
You could be a basic account rep and still be expected to book club The 48 Laws of Power.
The constant socialization, the pressure to be “visionary,” the Steve Jobs worship all get old pretty fast.
Founders are encouraged to think they’re saving the world, mostly because they’re trying to raise millions from investors. That inflated self-importance seeps into everything.
9. Tech can teach you how to be an entrepreneur
So much of tech is just building, iterating, and selling a product.
Those are transferable skills. At a certain point, it makes more sense to just apply them to your own idea.
Everything I learned in tech like client management, backend systems, product dev, business ops, financial decision-making….I use in my company now.
I don’t see my 3.5 years in tech as a mistake. It was a training ground.
People on the outside might think leaving tech means throwing that time away.
But they don’t get it. It’s all connected.
There’s Also the Rise of Farming
There’s a quiet opportunity brewing in farming right now and most people working in corporate aren’t aware.
The average American farmer is nearly 60 years old and approaching retirement. As they age out of the industry, they have to decide what happens to the land. Some will sell. Some want to pass it down.
For many reasons, a lot of their kids never learned how to farm.
Over the past few decades, white-collar work offered more upward mobility, so many children of farmers left for college degrees and office jobs. Now, they either don’t have the capacity to manage a farm, never learned the skills, or simply aren’t interested in taking it on.
This generational shift has created a strange and open gap: a lot of farmland, but not enough people to take care of it.
I’ve been following House of Green on Substack, where the author shares her journey from freelance writer to hobby farmer. She writes about how she made the transition and how more of us could, too. This topic has been extremely interesting to me.
After I finish writing my book, I’ve been seriously considering hobby farming as a next chapter.
I never realized how much autonomy lives in learning how to live off the land.
There’s a deep respect that forms when you understand what it actually takes to grow food and sustain yourself. And suddenly, the idea of work feels a lot less abstract.
Tech Is Cool, Other Things are Cool Too
This isn’t a takedown of people who still work in tech.
It’s just that I’ve been inside the machine, and I know how dogmatic the industry can be.
When you're deep in it, it’s easy to adopt its worldview without realizing it. Tech culture gave me blind spots: about work, about life, about what’s even possible.
So whether you’re still in the industry and agree with Lenny’s post, or you’ve already made the leap out, or maybe today’s read gave you a new perspective, you’re not doing it wrong.
There’s no one-size-fits-all career path!
There’s just figuring out what works for you and letting that change when it needs to.