Hopefully, The Last Day of Corporate Job

Well, here we are.

The “I quit my FAANG job” post. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be writing this if I didn’t have AI agents proofreading everything I write and nudging me to sound more confident than I actually feel.

But here it is: I quit. After years as a senior developer at a FAANG company, I walked away.

The company gave me a lot — stability, a reputation badge, and enough financial cushion to even consider what I’m about to do next. It gave me room to breathe. But eventually, that breath started feeling stale.

If everything had gone perfectly, I probably wouldn’t have left. I would’ve stayed comfortable. That’s the hardest trap to escape: not a bad job, but a good-enough one that slowly turns into quicksand. I was well-compensated. I was a tech lead. People relied on me. And that made it even harder to leave.

But something shifted in the last few years. It wasn’t one big moment — more like a low, constant frequency that wore me down.

I’d open my laptop and feel like I was layering strokes on a painting I didn’t want to finish. I kept doing the work, because I care about doing things right. But the spark? It was gone. I was working on problems that didn’t matter to me. And when you’re doing creative work — even as an engineer — that stuff catches up with you.

At the same time, I was studying AI in an online master’s program, and that felt like rediscovering magic. Learning how gradients move across some ridiculous 700-dimensional landscape, and watching your model slowly crawl out of chaos into coherence — it was like watching a marble spiral down one of those giant coin funnels. Hypnotic, inevitable, weirdly beautiful.

And I was hooked. I’d get up at 4:30 AM, sneak out of our tiny apartment while my wife and kid were still sleeping, just to code. Just to read. Just to learn. I felt like a kid again — like the first time I saw a PC at a friend’s house, and those moving pixels just broke my brain in the best way. That kind of moment sticks with you. And I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this stuff.

But it was my wife who really made me see it. She watched me come home from work exhausted, stressed, burnt. She told me I was getting health issues. (She wasn’t wrong.) And she said, “You should quit. Just focus on the AI program.” I laughed. I was like, “You don’t just quit a FAANG job.”

But… maybe you do?

It still took half a year. I’m not one to make fast decisions. I overthink. I spiral. I spreadsheet scenarios. But eventually, the stars aligned — enough savings, a strong nudge from my partner, and this deep, unshakable feeling that I’ve finally found something worth building again.

I know I’m lucky. Most people don’t get a clean off-ramp from a stable job to an open runway. I feel like I got a golden lottery ticket — not for money, but for time. For a chance to do something that feels entirely mine. No manager. No Jira tickets. Just the terrifying freedom to try something big and possibly fail.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not walking into another company. I’m not pivoting to consulting. I’m trying to make something new — something with AI, with creativity, with that childhood sense of wonder when I saw those first pixels move.

I don’t know what this road looks like yet. But I know I’m finally on the right one.

So yeah. Hopefully, today was my last day in the corporate world.

Let’s see where this goes.

— Sprited Dev

P.S. If you’re working on something cool with AI or want to swap ideas, DMs are open.