Who is quitting? (July 2026)

I just quit recently. After a few years in big tech the only thing I have to show for it is a fat bank account. I don’t remember the last time I’ve learned something new or had any kind of responsibility.

I’ll be joining a startup in a few months to hopefully find the joy in my profession again with a fresh start and more skin in the game.

I was at a startup for about a decade. I really enjoyed the culture, the work was interesting and fulfilling, C-Suite were a blast to interact with, but, alas, it doesn't always work out. I learned so much about engineering, marketing, sales, interactions with outside companies; you name it.

Anyways, that shut down about two years ago. I tried my damndest to get a new job but I could never get past the initial interview --if I even got one!

I've sold my house and moved into a small apartment. I have about five more years of living expenses saved up. What'll I do after that? No idea. What am I doing now? Sitting by a river reading the day away.

I quit last year and have just been chilling and working on side projects. The reason I left was because of mandatory RTO combined with a very steep decline in the engineering culture of where I worked.

Got tired of having to talk to like five different people who barely spoke English to get anything done and the increasingly naked hostility from the c-suite about our value to the company.

My current company, even though slower than the industry, has started pushing AI-first for everything. Funny that as soon they announced it they started losing senior developers and most teams are now composed mostly of juniors + 1 senior.This on safety-critical adjacent products. Burnout and bugs and rampant. As a counter measure they are increasing salaries of the seniors but with low adherence.

I'm currently looking and I'm considering cutting my salary up to 50℅ to work for a company with a very interesting product that doesnt push AI and let us instead decide where to use it.

I'd rather lower my quality of life than put up with this bs and being forced to use a tool that I disagree so much on an ethical and moral pov. Let alone letting managera decide which tools I have to use on my engineering work

Still can't get work. I've pretty much given up working for anyone else building software. Had an offer on the table for good pay, rescinded after a credit check (gov't subcontractor, "potential insider threat" excuse; fishy happenings with primary contractor lead me to believe they had their own guy they wanted to install...)

I found a little job in education (no tech at all) that pays $22k/yr. That'll float the bills while I use my spare time to build other things. Got a couple dev boards (one SBC, one for that cheap TI component that came across HN a few days ago) to toy around with some little hardware ideas I have that maybe I could productize.

Grabbing a PD analyzer and an older M1 or M2 Mac to explore Asahi Linux and maybe start contributing in a few months.

Not long ago I had a dream about becoming a butcher, and so then I bought half a cow with a friend and after a week trying to cut it out in pieces I realised maybe I was too old to make the move... so im still a programmer.

Not quitting just yet, but the culture is super toxic lately. Managers will promise things that are not feasible, set absurd deadlines, and then let engineers take the fall if they don't meet those deadlines. When engineers come up with good ideas, managers will say it's a bad idea, but then run away with the idea and take the credit.

I wake up every day wondering if I should quiet quit or go for a clean exit.

There's always been absurdity though, right?

These are some I can think of or have witnessed since starting my dev career in 2010:

- 4GL business languages making developers redundant

- Big data

- Cloud computing

- DevOps

- LLMs

For those about to quit, I salute you.

I quit over a year ago after burnout with a little bit of savings working in devrel and technical PM. Since then I went all in on scuba diving - became an instructor, maxed out open-circuit (OC) tec diving with 100m advance trimix dives, technical stage cave diving (OC), and most recently O2ptima CM Air Diluent CCR diving. I also got B2 certified in Indonesian. After burning a hole in my pocket on diving gear and certs, I'm looking for my next fully remote devrel/dev-ed role so I can go CCR cave diving in a few years :D

I just quit. A comically inept director who screamed at people and promotions given out for obsequiousness over impact. I'm guessing the second one will be more-or-less the same everywhere but I'd rather not deal with people I don't respect in the slightest.

Im close to stopping.

Founder of a deeptech/hardware startup in a difficult sector and we are struggling to get our tech validated (latest datapoint are no improvement over the current practice). While i believe with sufficient time it can be proven and improved, that crosses into the realm of academia and not entrepeneurship.

So yeah motivation is quite low at the moment, and im not sure if to push-on or accept failure and move on.

Any advice?

Yep! I just did. I’m leaving this July.

To anyone reading this: don’t be afraid to make the move. It’s your life. It can feel scary before you do it, but once you finally quit, it’s not scary anymore.

I'm thinking about it every day

I quit about a year ago...

I did a crazy experiment: Built and shipped 25 projects in 25 weeks.

Several of those projects made it to the top of HN here. One went viral and ended up in TechCrunch and many other big-name sites: https://channelsurfer.tv

I wasn't _trying_ to make money. I just wanted to build a bunch of cool shit, rekindle my love for building websites, make the web more fun, and maybe figure out what I wanted to do next.

Now I'm trying to focus on making money. I'm kind of out of money, so I'll likely need to do some freelance work for a while.

Soon I'm going to release something to help others do the same thing. Ship high-quality stuff quicker.

quitted on 6/30. Was working for 5 years as PO in autonomous driving. teams changed 3 times, France to US/Mexico/Europe to India. Each time start almost from scratch. Now cooking for family and boot strapping 2 startups.

I quit last September and have been doing sporadic freelancing and intensely working on personal projects.

It was already clear to me last summer that the agentic stuff was kind of the final nail in the coffin of a "normal" software dev shop. All the routine of typical SCRUM-based etc activity was degrading even further from ritual and theater into a pointless charade or comedy, or as you say, absurdity.

Unfortunately I still need to make money. I've done a couple freelance gigs. Some is less absurd than others. I'm sporadically interviewing to go full time again but I'm being extremely picky.

Throwaway. Software person here. Quitting current job in a few weeks.

1. Leadership, culture, and (development) process changes; I've been looking casually for over a year and finally got something.

2. New company, same role, but should be much more amenable and stable.

I was working at an AI startup, and I saw our CTO lie in a demo to potential customers. I know that startups sometimes have a "fake it till you make it" mindset, but the guy straight up used a product from another company, presented it as our company's product, and faked numbers. I saw him completely misrepresent the capabilities of our product several times. Unethical and most likely illegal, I felt super disappointed, but I didn't immediately quit.

I quit later, as it became increasingly clear to me that this guy knew nothing about technology, didn't care, but also had a fragile ego where he had to present himself to the company as being in charge, even though he was the worst person for the role. To top it all off, it also dawned on me over time that we basically had an absentee CEO who was working only ~15 hours a week at most. Then when I quit I found out there was a third co-founder who owned a huge stake of the company and I did not even know existed while I worked there.

When I first interviewed, the CTO seemed like a nice and friendly guy, I didn't immediately see red flags. This was my first startup experience. I'll try to research things better if I decide to join one again. I might also just not join unless I can myself be a co-founder. Fuck reporting to incompetent twats.

Currently taking a sabbatical. I decided to take the summer off. I'm working on personal projects. Lucky enough to have good savings from a previous job so I can afford to do this. I'm planning to take gradual steps towards returning to work near the end of the summer.

Already did. Hated working with AI. Will try to start a business one day where I can code how I like it.

Currently not doing anything IT related. Just went on a bike ride.

You mean Ask HN: Who wants to be fired?

I'm not quitting, but AI has completely changed my priorities.

Building software has become dramatically easier over the last year. The hard part is no longer creating products—it's getting people to discover and trust them.

I spend far more time thinking about distribution today than implementation. That's a shift I didn't expect.

What an utterly privileged life we lead when we can just decide to quit our jobs because things are getting too “absurd”.

Think about it all the time. Can’t stand how AI has made everyone at a company a pretend expert at everything and discussions are now just everyone’s AI responding back and forth to one other, and nobody seems to notice or care.

Leaving at the end of the month; first time quitting (not jumping ships) in my career. It's a scary move.

I will be taking a short break and polishing some of my OSS projects.

I'm actually excited about the future of software right now. Currently interested in the field of applied AI/automation/robotics though I have zero credentials. If you're looking for a T-shaped engineer with strong UI and UX experience, let's talk :)

What a great and timely question! :) I quit a week ago to take a year-long sabbatical.

> 1. What pushed you to do it?

The pursuit of curiosity, for the most part. That's what makes quitting a lot harder when you have a good job and nothing to complain about: you feel like you're making a huge mistake on a whim. Doubly so when you consider the state of the job market at this time.

That said, we don't live to work; we work to live. It's a lot of risk and uncertainty, but you should remember that while some unknown bad things can happen in the future, unknown good things can happen too! [1] When you own your time, you increase your luck surface considerably: you have more opportunities to travel, to wander, to play, to meet new people, to tinker, to discover.

So I've been thinking and reading about this a lot. The final push came from two books I read: "The Pathless Path" by Paul Millerd [2] and "The Inner Compass" by Lawrence Yeo [3]. I can't recommend them enough.

> 2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)

I have a huge Steam backlog to beat... :) Besides that, I'll be studying computer science and maths. Programming language theory, compilers, and functional programming are particularly close to my heart.

But, most importantly, enjoying life!

[1] https://moretothat.com/take-the-leap/

[2] https://pathlesspath.com/

[3] https://compass.moretothat.com/

Me, in my fantasies.

Sadly I'm tightly mortgaged and in a very high cost of living area in the US.

My plan is to move to Europe so I can cut my cost of living in half, not stress over health care, and eat real food instead of fake American chemicals. Need a few more years ..

I'm thinking of quitting in January and moving to New Zealand (already have a visa) for a year then Ireland for a year.

Im definitely afraid of the state of the industry after 2 years of contracting work and breaking back in at my current salary (160k) since my goal is to retire early. The opportunity cost of a life well lived vs preparing myself to live a better life in 20+ years is a really difficult decision to make

I’ve applied for several jobs outside of tech or only tech-adjacent. I’m not happy to give up significant income and benefits, but you don’t get everything you want.

What AI-first means for companies who are not actually AI companies is elevating staff with the right degree of _partiinost_ around AI and using vendor AI products to show how many Jira issues have been closed in pursuit of the latest exciting and important new transformation.

I quit after almost five years at Stripe. Loved my team and manager but the product culture at the company were steadily going downhill and I wasn't building much. Honestly couldn't tell you what I was doing day to day but i was still sitting at my computer for 8 hours and feeling pretty unfulfilled. The direction of the company was also confusing and I kept getting pulled into its forays (its doing well but trying to get deeper into crypto). The tooling was also breaking a lot and became haphazard.

Trying to do something on my own now, maybe I'll reassess in the fall and ask for my job back or start looking around if this doesn't work. Its not really a "break" because I'm working a lot (maybe more than before) but I figured this is my window to try. Somewhat hoping big tech will always be there but if not i can make do with whatever I get as long its doesn't have a toxic culture.

quit last year, bikepacked for a fee month in europe, and now after a toy project got hn-ed in december, built a real saas that pays the bills. pretty grateful to hn.

i quit after realising how ineffective it is to support a founder who stopped focusing on the product.

Quit about a month ago after working at my last place for two years. It was a decent job before the agent psychosis became widespread, from that moment everyone in the company went insane and the pressure to use "advanced agentic engineering" became unbearable. Also, most engineers in the company supported and were enthusiastic about that trend, so I was in a minority.

I don't have much savings on me, but I'd rather go frugal and downshift than be producing slop for a living.

I think about quitting every single day. I have too many little responsibilities running around the house in order to pull it off. Layoffs impacting us big time. Brain drain. Off shoring. 7,000 line PRs. 12 hour shift coverage. Project count tripling. Not sure how long I’ll make it before I have heart issues and become one of those late 40s guys who keels over and is forgotten by the company in 6 weeks. Stressful.

Quitting is a bad move. You should just quiet quit and start acting and don't take anything too seriously. Probably all your colleagues feel the same way anyway. Everyone is just hustling and bullshitting at this point. Everyone is laser focused on how to maximize their lock-in factor whilst putting in as little effort as possible. Because it's what works.

You can't avoid the bullshit unfortunately. Whatever company you join, it will be the same thing. If the company REALLY provided value, they would have gone bankrupt. There's no avoiding the bullshit. You must embrace it.

I quit because our product had become little more than a funnel directing people to gambling sites, and everyday working on it felt gross.

I’m working on my passion project, a mobility focused fitness app (bendy.fit), and searching for work that doesn’t feel morally repugnant!