For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a quitter. I quit guitar lessons, and driving lessons, and the yearbook staff, and the swim team. In college, I’d drop a class at the slightest hint of inconvenience: the professor seemed too rigid, the workload seemed too intensive, the classroom seemed too far from my apartment. No problem, I’d just head to the registrar and have them swap me into something more manageable, something more my speed.

It didn’t stop in adulthood either. Once I started my career, I became the stereotypical millennial job-hopper. For me, one year at a company felt like a long time. Two years felt like an eternity. As soon as the honeymoon period was over, I’d be on the lookout for something more interesting or lucrative. I didn’t hesitate. Loyalty is just a construct. Onto bigger and better things, forever.

I recognized patterns — in people, situations, and myself — and very quickly, I would know if it was a good fit or if I should walk away.

I quit for all the reasons you’d expect. I quit out of laziness and a lack of motivation. I quit because I hated failure and I feared a challenge. Regardless, I never saw my proclivity for quitting as a bad thing. It was more like a sixth sense, a gut-feel. I recognized patterns — in people, situations, and myself — and very quickly, I would know if it was a good fit or if I should walk away. My therapist told me that I probably developed this “skill” growing up in an unstable household, and I believe her. For the most part, I’d say that trusting my gut paid off for everyone. I got myself out of bad situations, and found success my way, on my terms, on the path of least resistance. I worked smarter, not harder.

However, somewhere along the road, I became unable to trust my gut when it came to my career. The longer that I spent working in tech, the more unfulfilled, frustrated, and resentful I felt. I had become trapped in a job and industry that was no longer compatible with my values or interests. My gut told me to walk away for nearly five years, but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t. I felt that I needed to be practical. I had sunk too many years into it to simply walk away. And so I stayed in, chasing a career that seemed to be steadily, hopelessly slipping through my fingers.

Falling out of love with design

From 2014–2024, I climbed the product design corporate ladder, working in-house at startups, agencies, and tech companies across the U.S. I specialized in designing apps for work, including recruiting, content creation, ride share, shipping, and IT. Through hard work (and job-hopping) I went from a lowly junior designer to leading teams of people as a product design director. Along the way, I had achieved every milestone I had set out for myself, more or less. I made good money. And for the first several years, I enjoyed the work.

However, eventually, the design process became predictable, monotonous. Part of it came from having years of experience, with more tricks up my sleeve. High-confidence solutions came to me quickly because I had designed them once or twice or a million times before. Another button, another filter UX, another signup flow.

The banality of the design process was exacerbated by broader industry trends. As software platforms matured, UI design converged toward “minimalism” and everyone adopted the same patterns from libraries like Tailwind, shadcn, and iOS. Every app started to look and feel like the same. Rather than pivot and actually innovate, the industry shifted its gaze onto design systems, which gave every design team its own library to create and maintain, in perpetuity. One could argue that these changes made the design process more efficient, and led to apps becoming more user-friendly and accessible. I’d argue that the design process became more about following rules and best practices, and less about creativity and innovative problem-solving.

And those two reasons were why I fell in love with design in the first place, and why I pursued it as my career. Six years in, my motivation, my sense of fulfillment as a designer, was fading. It didn’t matter where I was doing the work — the product design process had become mind-numbing. I dreaded opening Figma. My gut was telling me that something was wrong, but it didn’t tell me how to fix it. All I knew was that I was not going to be doing design for the rest of my career.

Hostile Worker Environment

It was around this time that I began to flirt with the idea of becoming a people manager, mentoring junior designers on my team. Enjoying it, I spent the next few years becoming a full-time manager, and eventually a director of design. The management track gave me a whole new set of skills to hone, problems to solve, and challenges to overcome. It was a constant balancing act between empowering the folks on my team, and navigating the needs and expectations of The Business: the executives, the other departments, the OKRs, the customers, the board members, the investors, etc. And for the most part, I found it to be both challenging and fulfilling. In an ideal world, I could see myself still doing it and finding joy in it.

Alas, we do not live in an ideal world. In early 2024, I was laid off from my role as a design director, along with several people on my team. Following the trend that continues to ripple across the tech industry, I was told that the company needed to be flatter, leaner. Back on the job market, I began to look for another management position. The search would be short-lived.

I learned quickly that the landscape for tech jobs had changed significantly post-pandemic. Aside from an abysmal job market, job postings seemed to adopt a demanding, almost antagonistic tone. Only “dedicated team players” were encouraged to apply. Salaries and benefits had become anemic. There was no longer any mention of work-life balance. And a new stipulation for management roles: You must be comfortable working as a player-coach. In other words, you had to do the jobs of two people — work full-time as a people manager, while also delivering work as an IC. The dynamic between companies and workers had clearly changed. And yet, I relented. I updated my resume and my portfolio. I applied and began taking interviews. But as I met with companies, and learned more about their versions of The Business, it became clear that the dynamic was here to stay.

If you’ve worked in tech in the last five years, you know what I’m talking about. Workers were forced to return to the office. Workers were expected to be available outside of normal work hours. Workers were pressured to put all energy towards efficiency and delivering “value”. Simply doing our jobs was no longer good enough. Our bosses wanted 2x or 3x or 10x contributors. And we would do it all under the precarious, ever-looming threat of being laid off unceremoniously over a Zoom call.

Capitalism reared its ugly head, and the masks came off, revealing the leaders of tech for what they really were: a bunch of greedy, heartless fucking nerds.

These things left a bitter taste in my mouth. Call me naive or nostalgic, but the vibes in the tech industry seemed so much better 10-15 years ago. Companies adopted mantras like “mission-driven” and “human-centric” and “don’t be evil.” Marketing-speak aside, amongst employees, it felt like there was a palpable sense of optimism and good intent. We worked hard, but in return, companies rewarded us with good pay, meaningful benefits, and a baseline level of trust, respect, and dignity.

Somewhere along the way, the vibes had clearly shifted. Capitalism reared its ugly head, and the masks came off, revealing the leaders of tech for what they really were: a bunch of greedy, heartless fucking nerds. They stopped pretending to care about human sentiments like empathy and accountability and humanity. They adopted an outwardly hostile attitude toward tech workers and unions. They cozied up to MAGA and went on podcasts to openly postulate about their autocratic fantasies. They peddled nonsense like memecoins, and NFTS, and the metaverse, just so that they could create the illusion of value. They became addicted to growth, at whatever the cost. It didn’t matter that a technology was useless, or immoral, or illegal — they just needed to see “number go up”.

As a leftist and a tech worker, this put me in a pretty tough spot. The prospect of getting another job in tech started to feel slimy, like getting a job in fossil fuels or Big Pharma. I narrowed my search, only applying to companies that aligned with my values. This made my job prospects much harder than I expected. As it turns out, New York City has no shortage of overtly capitalistic and/or exploitative tech companies. And if a place did happen to align with my values, its leaders would be inevitably backed by a fascism-curious VC firm, or advised by some tech oligarch, or invested in some evil shit like drones or surveillance.

It was hard enough trying to find a management job in 2024, but finding one and maintaining my integrity? Forget about it. After a few months I stopped interviewing and went back to the drawing board. Looking back, I probably should have just walked away at this point. I told myself that staying in tech was the practical choice. I had spent a decade building a career; why would I walk away from it? But the truth is, I was scared. I had no idea what I would do instead, and the prospect of starting over in my 30s was terrifying. So I decided to stick it out. If I wanted to stay in tech without selling my soul, I’d have to try something else.

Engineering a career pivot

Giving up on my managerial dreams, I decided to pivot into design freelancing between 2024–2026. Working as a freelancer insulated me from the bureaucracy of most orgs, and gave me a sense of autonomy from the broader industry. Sure, I was doing design again, and I found the work completely mind-numbing, but it paid the bills. I had choice over the clients that I worked with. But in my heart, I knew that this was a stopgap. I didn’t want to design anymore.

So, I took advantage of my flexible schedule to pursue another long-time interest, and a potential new career path: design engineering. I had dabbled in code for most of my life, mostly building little side projects. But in 2025, I finally achieved my dream of building and launching an app to the App Store. I even took on a few design engineering freelance gigs — crafting designs for apps and websites, and then building them in code. The work seemed to scratch that itch of creativity and problem-solving, and it started to feel like the next step in my tech career. The industry might have been a hellscape, but maybe I could get some fulfillment from my work again. Maybe I had a few more good years in me.

Eventually, the tumultuous nature of freelancing grew tiring. Clients were flaky. I was tired of making pictures of software in Figma. I just wanted to build them. I was ready to pursue design engineering in a full-time capacity.

So, in early 2026, I made the decision to return to the in-house world, accepting an offer as a design engineer at a medium-sized tech startup. I was hesitant about joining any organization, but of all the companies I had spoken with over the last several years, this one had the least problematic version of The Business that I had seen. They had a successful product, they treated their employees with dignity, they didn’t push arbitrary metrics, their leadership team was down-to-earth, their investors didn’t seem outwardly evil. (It’s worth noting that I still continue to believe these things.)

On paper, this was the best possible opportunity for me to jumpstart my career, in a vocation I was interested in. However, just two months after my start date, I gave notice of my resignation. It would be the last time I worked in tech.

AI took (all the fun out of) my job

As it turned out, the fulfillment that I felt as I pivoted into engineering — all of the creativity and problem-solving I felt when writing code — was becoming less attainable. And I had LLMs to thank for it. Claude, Cursor, and a host of other AI-assisted engineering tools had been growing in popularity for years. But by 2026, these tools had become so prevalent, so proficient at producing code, that the days of “hand-crafting” interfaces as a design engineer were pretty much over.

The reality was that the day-to-day job of a design engineer became typing requirements into a chatbot, checking that the LLM built the thing properly, and if not, explaining how to fix it. As the weeks went on, I found that I was spending less and less time actually writing code in my IDE, and more and more time in Claude threads and Github PRs. As Claude wrote more of my code, I felt the last inkling of my motivation slipping away. I didn’t feel particularly creative. I didn’t feel like I was learning or becoming a better engineer. Most days, I didn’t feel like I was thinking at all.

Obviously, there’s more to design engineering than simply writing code. Aspects like frontend architecture, design systems strategy, creating mocks in Figma, etc. are all part of the job. I also acknowledge that writing code by hand, especially for more senior devs, can feel cumbersome and repetitive. I know plenty of folks who’d be happy to never open an IDE again. But for me, the things I loved most about design engineering were found in the act of writing code: in the experimentation, in the learning, in trying things and figuring out problems for myself. Prompting a bot to spit out an interface offered me none of that.

Sure, I could have resisted. I could have given Claude the middle finger and coded things the old-fashioned way. But at this company, and in the industry at large, vibe-coding had become the new normal, almost overnight. It seemed like every other day, there was a new agent, or model, or workflow to adopt. The sentiment was that if you didn’t keep up, if you weren’t using these tools every day, you were falling behind. And to be honest, I couldn’t argue with it. Using Claude to write code enabled me to work much faster. I could build more features. I could fix more bugs.

At last, the writing was on the wall. The days of writing code by hand, in the way that was creative and fulfilling, were over. The LLMs were here, and they were only getting better.

That gut-feel, the one that told me to quit so many times throughout my life, had returned, clearer than ever. My time as a tech worker was over. I had tried so many pathways, so many companies. But alas, this thing and I were incompatible. There was nothing else that a career in tech could offer me. It was time for me to trust my gut. It was finally time for me to walk away.

A bit of gratitude and regret

I quit my last tech job three months ago. The relief that followed was exquisite, and immediate. Despite the fact that I pretty much had nothing else lined up — which is a story for another post — walking away from tech was the absolute best decision I could have made for myself. I put my LinkedIn in hibernation mode. I deleted Figma and stopped using AI. I no longer ruminate on the atrocities of tech industry and my place in it.

Instead, I spend my days reading, writing, thinking. I’m slowing down and spending more time with people I care about. I’m staying healthy. I’m touching grass.

For years, I had struggled to reconcile the things that were important to me with my career in tech. For years, I had been asking myself the same question: Is all of this worth it? Is this paycheck worth the stress, the lack of fulfillment, the hostility, the resentment, the inner conflict, the self-loathing, etc. that came with it? Finally, I had my answer: it was not.

I’ll end with some gratitude and a little regret. I’m grateful for every coworker that made my journey in tech more fun and interesting. I’m grateful for every cool boss who took a chance on me and supported me along the way. I’m grateful for the paychecks that I earned from the labor I provided. I’m grateful for my family and friends and therapists, who listened to me complain and second-guess myself on end. Finally, I acknowledge that this entire decision comes from a place of extreme privilege, and I’m grateful to be in such a fortunate position to be able to walk away from a career at all.

My only regret was that I hadn’t done so sooner.