Does leaving the corporate ladder matter?
Need some advice from experienced entrepreneurs or people who have been through it all.
My husband and I are tech professionals nearing our 30s. I’ve been a believer of the corporate ladder for as long as I remember, but one day I realized that I didn’t want the rules anymore. I wanted to live my own life, work at my own hours, and yet have time to take care of my children. Moreover, corporate salary is fixed for a few years regardless of effort, while the amount you can make in a business has no ceiling and scales with effort.
So I asked my husband to work with me on a side hustle last year. We are both in tech and are quite good at (and enjoy) building apps, so it took off quite quickly. Gradually, the year-long endeavour covered the salaries of our high paying tech jobs, although we only spend around 3-4h a day working on it while juggling our full-time jobs 8h a day.
These days, I feel like we are nearing burn out, and probably also quite done with feeling guilty not putting 100% in our jobs (and disappointing our managers who happen to both trust each of us a lot). With the money we make on the side with much less effort, vs our full-time jobs which pay the same salaries regardless of effort, we can no longer convince ourselves to give anything to our corporate jobs. Honestly, it has made us very unhappy everyday having to turn up to our jobs knowing all these. The extra time from leaving our jobs will let us scale the business and also actually enjoy our lives and contribute to causes we believe in, while still making money to fund our lifestyle.
However, we are at the peak of our careers, with my husband and I each being senior executives at big tech with strong trust from our managers and colleagues. I feel like given our trajectory, we would do very well if we stay in corporate. Moreover, I’m also unsure of other side effects like losing credibility from not having a corporate title. When we leave, our effective income will also be halved immediately, and the safety net is gone. Our skills will also be fully dependent on our own growth efforts rather than guided by corporate and the network from corporate. I’m unsure of the full spectrum of costs we have to bear in the future.
Has any entrepreneurs here regretted leaving their high paying corporate jobs? Any other advice is also appreciated.