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When I bought my house, I asked the home inspector if he did any general contracting. He said he used to, but disliked the pressure and responsibility. He enjoys doing home inspections because they are discrete units of work:

  • he sets his own schedule
  • an inspection takes a predictable amount of time
  • he writes up his report within a day of an inspection

What kind of similar shift in career could a software engineer make? As far as I know, there is no such thing as a full-time "code inspector", and answering questions on StackOverflow doesn't pay. I found this article about Knowledge Piecework but it does not have many specific examples.

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5 Answers

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You could consider a position as a software tester. This would be a lot less pressure/responsibility then developing software but the pay would also be less as well. You would even have the option to test games which would be a lot of fun.

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 IME there isn't much less pressure on software testers - if anything, you end up working to tighter deadlines in a lot of places as pre-release testing is often tacked on as an afterthought and you absolutely have to get the release out by a certain arbitrary date. – Timo Geusch Mar 3 at 6:50
Plus 1 to Timo. I have work in both Dvelopment and QA. QA gets paid les and works much harder. In QA you have to fix other people's code and meet their deadlines while doing your own work as well. – BLAKE Mar 4 at 3:14
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Teaching is an option, if you have a good grasp of it and you like teaching.

Depending on where you live and your education, some high schools take people with 4 year university degrees to teach courses.

Teaching at a community college/university requires no teaching certificate or teaching degree, so that's a definite possibility.

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You could develop software that gets sold online and at places like Regnow.com. Or develop apps for Iphones and Ipads and Google Android.

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Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo has these developer boot camps that kind of fit with the home inspection points in terms of there being his own schedule and knows how long they will take. However, there is still the getting of people signed up that would be a pressure point on this. There are also possible software consultants that come in on a contract basis that do get to set their own schedule to some extent, but I'm not sure how well that works out in the end.

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QA is a dangerous direction to move in, since the pressure is as high as in software development, but you will generally have much less control over your destiny. IE: Developers are under pressure to deliver functionality on time, but if they overshoot QA often pays the price in a shortened testing cycle.

The path to freedom and less pressure is usually found by screening your jobs more effectively when interviewing. Philosophy and culture will have a much more significant impact on the pressure and environment than anything else.

Going freelance or consulting will give you a huge amount of freedom, but likely at the expense of even more stress and pressure.

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