u/mobile_85

One thing I’ve started to question about the American version of success is how easily it can turn into isolation.

I worked in tech and made very good money. On paper, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

In reality, my life revolved around a laptop.

Work from the apartment. Work out alone. Spend the day on Zoom calls with people scattered across different cities and regions. Go into an office where your coworkers are friendly enough, but most relationships are still fundamentally corporate and transactional. Then go home and do it again.

You can spend eight hours talking to people and still feel like you haven’t actually been around anyone.

That’s the part I find strange. You can achieve the career, salary, apartment, car and all the markers of success, while your actual day-to-day existence becomes increasingly atomized.

I was making more money than I ever expected to make, but at times it felt like I had traded a large part of normal human community for a paycheck.

I wonder how many people have built a life that looks successful from the outside and privately think: Is this really it?

I moved from Ireland to Chicago a few years ago, and America has been both more impressive and more difficult than I expected.

Salaries are higher, there is more choice, and it feels possible to reinvent yourself. But life also seems less secure. Healthcare, housing and stability depend heavily on maintaining a good income. Losing a job can quickly affect everything.

America can also feel strangely isolating. People are friendly, but building lasting friendships and community seems harder. Chicago has millions of people, yet it can sometimes feel quieter and more disconnected than Dublin.

I do not regret moving, but I am not sure life here is automatically better. It feels bigger and more intense, with greater rewards but less room for things to go wrong.

Has anyone else who moved here felt the same?

One thing that surprised me after moving here from Dublin is how Chicago can have millions of people and still feel strangely quiet.

In Dublin, if the city is busy, the city centre feels busy. In Chicago, you can be in Lincoln Park, Old Town or downtown and think nothing is happening, while tens of thousands of people are at a Cubs game, street festival, concert, lakefront event or somewhere on the South or West Side.

It feels like Chicago’s energy is spread across dozens of neighborhoods rather than concentrated in one centre.

Do longtime Chicagoans feel the same way?

I spent roughly 13 years working in tech, including eight years at one major company. The salary was good and, on paper, I had built a successful career. But over time, the pressure, constant screen time, internal politics and inability to mentally switch off wore me down.

After leaving, I spent months trying to get back into the industry. I applied constantly, prepared heavily and completed more interviews than I can count. I reached hiring-manager and final rounds several times but never landed the offer.

Recently, I accepted a part-time retail position and started doing live events and brand work. The money is obviously nowhere close to what I earned before, but something unexpected happened: I started feeling more like myself.

I’m interacting with people, moving around and doing work that actually ends when the shift ends. I might be physically tired afterward, but I’m not sitting at home thinking about escalations, performance metrics or tomorrow’s meetings.

Part of me still feels like returning to tech would prove that I haven’t failed. Another part is wondering why I’m fighting so hard to recover a career and lifestyle that made me deeply unhappy.

Maybe this is only a temporary reset. Maybe it becomes a completely different direction. I don’t know yet.

Has anyone else spent months trying to return to their old career, only to realize that being locked out might have pushed them toward a life that suited them better?

For years, nearly every stressful professional experience in my life arrived through the same object: my laptop.

Management calls. Customer escalations. Negative feedback. Performance reviews. Emails that ruined the rest of my day. Later, it became job applications, interview preparation and rejection after rejection.

Eventually, opening my laptop stopped feeling neutral. Even when nothing was happening, I felt resistance and anxiety. It was as if my brain had learned that this device was where bad news arrived and where I was expected to defend my value.

After leaving my job, there were periods when I barely wanted to open it. That made searching for another job even harder because the entire process required returning to the object I had begun associating with stress and failure.

Recently, I started doing retail and event work. It can be physically tiring, but the psychological difference is significant. I interact with people, move around and finish the shift. There isn’t a screen sitting in my apartment afterward, silently representing unfinished work or another rejection.

I know the laptop itself isn’t the problem. It became a container for years of accumulated stress. I’m only now realizing how deeply my work environment shaped my relationship with technology.

Has anyone else experienced this after burnout? Did your relationship with computers eventually become normal again, or did you need to change the type of work you did?

I recently started picking up event work around Chicago—brand activations, product sampling, and concert staffing.

So far, I’ve enjoyed it more than expected. The work is social, active and varied, and once the shift ends, it’s actually over. Some jobs pay around $20 an hour, while brand ambassador and promotional work can reach $30–$35 an hour.

I’m starting a separate part-time retail job soon, and I’m considering using event work to supplement my hours. Ideally, I’d like to build relationships with several reliable agencies and pick up shifts around my main schedule.

For people who have worked Chicago events:

• Does the work remain reasonably consistent during winter?
• Which types of events or venues are most dependable?
• Can reliable workers eventually move into team-lead or event-manager positions?
• Are there particular agencies worth joining—or avoiding?
• What monthly income is realistically achievable without treating it as a full-time job?

I’m not expecting it to replace a corporate salary. I’m mainly trying to understand whether it can become a dependable side income rather than a few random summer shifts.

After eight years at Salesforce and roughly 13 years in technology overall, I’ve decided to stop interviewing for tech roles.

Over the past year, I’ve completed dozens of interviews. I’ve spent countless hours preparing, tailoring résumés, researching companies, building presentations, completing technical exercises, and progressing through multiple rounds—sometimes reaching the final stage—only to be rejected or ghosted.

Eventually, the process starts to affect how you see yourself. Experience that was valuable a few years ago suddenly seems worthless. Every interview feels like another opportunity to be scrutinized, compared, and told you’re missing some narrowly defined requirement. The constant need to prove your value to employers who often show very little respect for your time has become completely draining.

I’ve now been offered a part-time position in Apple retail, and that’s what I’m going to do for the time being.

It’s obviously a major change financially and professionally, but I’m genuinely looking forward to working with people face-to-face, learning something different, and finishing a shift without another interview hanging over me. I may return to tech eventually, but right now I need distance from a labor market that has repeatedly made experienced and capable people feel disposable.

This isn’t the outcome I expected after building a long career in technology, but continuing to force myself through the same demoralizing process no longer feels productive. For now, I’m stepping away, taking the Apple opportunity, and giving myself room to figure out what comes next.

I’ve been searching for close to a year, and I’m genuinely struggling to understand this market.

I have about 13 years of enterprise technology experience: five years at SAP and eight years at Salesforce in Technical Account Management and Customer Success. I’ve supported major enterprise customers, handled escalations, led executive reviews, worked through complex technical issues, and helped retain multimillion-dollar relationships.

I’ve applied through job boards, contacted people directly, worked my network, tailored resumes, prepared heavily for interviews, and reached multiple final rounds. I’m not claiming I’ve performed perfectly in every interview, but I’ve had several processes where the conversations went extremely well, only to be told they selected someone whose background was a slightly closer match.

That is what I don’t understand. Companies say they want experienced people who can learn, communicate, manage customers, and operate in complex environments. But the actual hiring standard seems to be someone who has already performed the exact same role, with the exact same product, in the exact same industry.

How do people ever move between industries or grow into adjacent roles under that standard?

I remember people entering technology in Ireland from finance, architecture, general business, and completely unrelated backgrounds. Yet in Chicago, someone with more than a decade of relevant tech experience can apparently still be considered too much of a “risk.”

For people involved in hiring here: who is actually getting these jobs? Are companies genuinely finding perfect candidates, are most positions being filled internally or through referrals, or are some of these roles simply never being filled?

I’m interested in honest answers from recruiters, hiring managers, and other experienced candidates. I’m not looking for generic advice about tailoring my resume or networking more. I’ve already been doing all of that.

I’m curious if anyone else has experienced something similar.

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I'm 40 years old and have spent roughly 13 years in enterprise software.

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- ~5 years as an SAP CRM consultant

- ~8 years at Salesforce as a Technical Account Manager / Customer Success Manager

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Most recently I worked with large enterprise customers. My role focused on customer success, technical account management, stakeholder management, escalations, adoption, renewals, and translating technical issues into business outcomes.

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In mid-2025, after eight years at Salesforce, I left. It wasn't a layoff. I was burned out, stressed, and felt like I needed a reset after a long run in big tech. Several interviews over the past year have captured me describing it as an inflection point in my career where I wanted to step back and reassess what I wanted next.

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I took some time off, played a lot of tennis, focused on my health, did some networking, and then returned to the job market in late 2025.

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Since then, I've had dozens of interviews and reached multiple hiring manager, panel, and final-round stages. I've interviewed for Customer Success Manager, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Engineer, Customer Success Engineer, and related roles.

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What surprises me is that I genuinely feel I'm interviewing better today than I ever have.

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I've recorded interviews, reviewed transcripts, practiced stories, refined answers, studied companies, built presentations, and invested hundreds of hours improving my communication. I can point to specific examples where my interview performance today is significantly stronger than it was 6–12 months ago.

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Yet I still don't have an offer.

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Part of me wonders whether I'm:

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- Caught in a very difficult market

- Being viewed as overqualified for some roles

- Being viewed as underqualified for more technical roles

- Competing against an unusually strong pool of candidates

- Or simply experiencing a lot of bad luck

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I'm financially okay for now, but the process has been mentally exhausting.

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For hiring managers, recruiters, or anyone who has gone through a long search:

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What stands out to you about this story?

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What would your honest assessment be?

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And has anyone else experienced getting deep into interview processes repeatedly without converting them into an offer?