(2025-08-03) Procopio Why Sheila Left The Tech Industry

Joe Procopio: Why Sheila Left the Tech Industry. I read her text twice, but I still couldn’t believe it. “I’m leaving the tech industry. For real. I start my new job on Monday.” That was from “Sheila,” who inadvertently became a bit of an anonymous folk hero when I wrote about her as “the Last Great Tech Employee” almost a year ago

“I hate it,” she said, when we talked in person the next day. “I hate that I’m giving up everything I loved about making awesome software. But it hasn’t been about that for a while.

She loved the tech industry—for over a decade. But it never really loved her back. Then it started actively working against her.

For over a year, she was in a box, with a mandate to deliver more bottom-line results with far fewer resources and time. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do her job anymore, it was that she couldn’t. They had made it impossible.

She gave plan B “about six weeks,” she said. Then she spent 10 months looking for another job.

And she never found one.

The job boards were useless. In fact, she listed several positions she’d applied for 10 months ago that were still open 10 months later. When she applied to companies that were actively hiring, she says she got an initial interview maybe 5 percent of the time, and did “probably 10 or more final interviews, about one a month.” Almost all of them required a presentation or some other live test, she said.

But here’s what really killed her. After almost every final interview, no matter how big or small or friendly or cold the hiring company, all of them responded back with a plain old generic “Nope!” email. Almost all of those emails were system generated and sent from a no-reply address, almost all of them with a subject line that started with “Thank you for applying…” like she had just slipped a résumé under their door yesterday.

“That got me thinking,” she said. “No one has the decency to reach out personally and maybe… maybe give me some indication of why I didn’t get it?

And then she talked about her other failed job-hunting strategy.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve lost friends over the last year,” she admitted.

Of course, Sheila could count on one or two friends to reach out to. But these were people in roughly the same boat as she was—people who couldn’t really help her—and so those chats became mostly complaint sessions. Mostly, her networking time was spent reaching out to well-meaning, busy people who had their own problems, and they assured her they’d look out for her.

Here’s my interjection, and I wrote about this a while back. A lot of networking is randomly throwing shit at a wall, waiting for someone to miraculously “come across” the right person with the right opening

And now back to Sheila: When you keep throwing shit at a wall, you hit people.

“I know, after a while, people just got tired of hearing from me,” she said. “And after a while, I didn’t really have anything to offer. And, you know, they didn’t have anything to offer. I started dreading it. And some people just stopped responding.”

Those people, she says, and another cohort of colleagues who either never replied at all or just plain blew her off with undisguised contempt, that’s what ultimately got her out of the tech industry.

“I’m completely hurt,” she said. “It’s the people. The lack of… loyalty… humanity

I feel like I’ve got skills that no one cares about and friends that were never friends. I’m back at square one. Why not make a change?”

What I Told Her

Sheila, you were never meant for a tech job.

the kinds of skills you have and the kinds of results you can produce—a lot of times those can be devalued and wither and die in the tech industry environment.

This unholy marriage of tech and business can produce modern miracles, especially at companies founded by people who understand what makes people love tech. But when too many of the people who don’t understand tech control the gates, they tend to devalue, push out, and even not hire people like you in the first place.