This is different from a full pivot/leaving tech question. It just seems like with a potential recession looming, and tens of thousands of engineers (well maybe they’re not all SWEs) getting laid off and fighting over the handful of job openings, it might be good to have a plan B.

Does anyone have any experience or have heard of others’ switching out for a couple of years before going back? Are there any SWE adjacent jobs that are even hiring? Some ideas-

IT/devops: seems like you still need to train a lot and have the mentality to be on-call, plus people in those fields probably don’t take kindly to being considered a fallback option. OTOH every company needs an IT department so maybe more jobs?

Product manager/project manager/sales engineer/etc.: seems hard to break into unless you’re really working within your org for it, plus with the declining fortunes of this industry, they are probably in the same boat as SWE.

SDET/QA: ditto

So how about other industries? The one I’ve seen that seems promising is patent agent, but the hours seem tough and the pay is lower and the USPTO seems to be facing a reckoning like the rest of the federal government (just look at r/patentexaminer) so sounds like tough times for everybody not just us.

What about data science occupations? How are they doing? Is getting into it like getting into SWE except you do Kaggle exercises instead of Leetcode and there are fewer roles? What’s a business analyst is that the same thing