u/Jinbuja

I’m 26. I’ve bounced between retail, basic office stuff, and a short bootcamp phase. Every time I ask family/friends for career advice it turns into “engineering/CS or you’ll be broke forever.”

The problem: i don’t hate learning, but i DO hate the engineering lifestyle people are selling me. Long stretches of solo screen time + constant skill-chasing + being evaluated on puzzle-brain stuff makes me shut down. I’ve tried forcing it and i get anxious and avoidant.

I’m trying to pick based on what i can actually do every day without going nuts.

My “tolerable pains” (for lack of a better term):

• i can handle repetitive tasks if the day ends clean
• i can handle customers in short bursts, not nonstop emotional labor
• i can handle deadlines if the expectations are clear
• i cant do open-ended “teach yourself advanced math forever” energy

Stuff i’ve tried so far:

• community college classes (did fine when the class had structure)
• customer service (burned out)
• data entry/admin (boring but i was weirdly calm)
• warehouse (body hated it)

I also started writing notes on what drains me vs what i can do on autopilot based on my coached career assessment findings.

If you were me, what jobs/career lanes would you look at that aren’t “be an engineer or die”? I’m open to training/certs if it’s not a 4-year gamble.

Also: what questions should i be asking to avoid picking another dead-end job that just pays the bills and eats my brain?

The last layoff wave at my company completely scrambled people’s brains. Suddenly everybody was “open to work” and talking about going sponsor-side like it’s automatically better over there.

I was chasing that too for a while. Then I realized a lot of what was making me miserable wasn’t CRO vs sponsor. It was the kind of stress I’m bad at handling.

Some people can deal with nonstop site chaos, travel issues, last-minute closeouts, angry coordinators, all that. Other people would rather deal with internal politics and 14 meetings about one decision. I thought I wanted “less stressful,” but honestly I just wanted stress that didn’t drain me in the exact same way every day.

Same thing with firefighting vs prevention work. I’m okay when I’m fixing something urgent once in a while, but if every day feels like putting out fires, I get exhausted fast. Meanwhile I know people who would lose their minds in QA or DM because they’d rather move fast than sit in documentation all day.

I ended up going through my last couple roles and literally writing down which tasks made me avoid my laptop and which ones I’d do for hours without noticing. I had a messy notes doc, a spreadsheet, and even did the coached career test because I was trying to figure out whether I actually hated clinical research or just hated the corner of it I landed in.

And honestly, sponsor-side doesn’t even sound calmer to me anymore. Some of those teams move so slowly and have so many approval layers that I think I’d go insane after six months.

What’s the specific stress that makes you start applying elsewhere? (Travel? metrics? escalations? the 4pm “quick call”?)

Got laid off from my first job out of school before I even hit 6 months. Random HR call, “position eliminated,” access gone by the afternoon. Felt sick about it for days honestly. My brain immediately turned it into “welp, guess I fooled everyone and finally got exposed.”

The thing that weirdly helped was a friend telling me to think about it like an internship that ended early instead of some permanent stain on my life. That framing stopped me from acting like my career was already over at 23.

I’ve mostly been trying to treat the whole thing like damage control. Writing down everything I touched while I still remember it, because I already know six months from now my memory will turn into “uhhh I attended standups and opened Jira tickets.”

I was staring at my resume in Resumeworded one night and realized half my bullets sounded dead inside. Just task list garbage. Rewriting them into actual outcomes made me feel slightly less useless.

The hardest part has honestly been swallowing my ego. I had this image in my head of how my career was “supposed” to look and now I’m applying to smaller companies I never would’ve looked at before. But sitting at home obsessing over one layoff feels worse.

Still kinda embarrassed every time someone asks where I work though. That part hasn’t gone away yet.

So I'm a Senior in Advisory at a US office, and I used to roll my eyes at people who said the Big 4 lifestyle wasn't compatible with having a family. That was until I had a kid and found myself constantly juggling daycare drop-offs with late-night fire drills, all while my wife was trying to manage her own career. We tried to make it work for over a year, but the pressure was overwhelming.

The fake flexibility really started taking a toll on me. The promise of working whenever meant closing my laptop for my kid's bedtime, only to open it again at eight-thirty because a manager dropped review notes late.

On top of that, the travel roulette made it nearly impossible to arrange reliable child care, and the mental load of wondering if some VP was going to schedule a steering committee during a pediatrician appointment was exhausting. I was physically in my house, but my head was still stuck inside Teams messages.

Ended up doing some soul-searching, reviewing the firm's coaching materials, and taking the coached career assessment just to see where I stood. That exercise made it obvious that the parts of the job I actually enjoyed, like teaching junior staff and fixing broken processes, didn't require the chaos of the partner and client culture.

I tried to fix things internally first by asking for a local portfolio and setting hard boundaries on meeting times, but the resistance from some partners showed me I needed to look elsewhere. I benchmarked a few industry roles and realized I could make similar money without the unpredictable spikes in workload made leaving the firm's prestige behind a lot easier to swallow.

I gave myself a strict deadline to see if things improved, and when they didn't, I left for an internal role. Now, I work much more predictable hours and no longer have to choose between my child's evening routine and a status deck.

Curious where others landed: if you have kids (or want them), did you shape Big 4 around that, move firms, or bail to industry?