When a techie felt relieved after quitting a Rs 3-crore-a-year job

This is the story of a software engineer who earnings over Rs 3 crore or $3,70,000 as a software developer in the US with Facebook and what made him to quit his job. Eric Yu told Business Insider that in 2016 he landed job offers from Google, Meta and some other tech companies but opted to join Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

"But about two and a half years in, I started experiencing anxiety. My typical day started at 7 a.m. I worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. Even after work hours, I couldn't turn work off," he said.

"I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work."


Eric Yu said that in November 2019 he suffered his first panic attack while working from home.

"It was around 4 p.m., and my left pinky went completely numb. At first, I ignored it, but it got worse: An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast. I was zoning out and felt intense thoughts," he told Business Insider.

He narrated an incident when he "was the only engineer on the Android team because people were either on vacation or taking mental-health leave. I didn't want my team to be held back because of me, so I felt pressured to perform" .

"Looking back, my workload at that time was potentially unhealthy. I should have just told my manager that I couldn't handle it and that I needed more people to help me out. The last straw was when my manager questioned my 'commit count'," he said.

And by the end of 2020, Eric and his fiancé decided "they needed exit plans because neither of us wanted to work in tech for that much longer" and contemplated plans to generate income.

"We planned to buy a house, live in a part of it, and rent out the rest of the home to someone else. Our thought process was simple: We wanted to buy a property with a low down payment of 5% and have the mortgage payment be less than what we were paying in rent in San Francisco. I even set a personal goal to quit Meta once I was making $10,000 a month from real estate. We doubled down and bought two more properties in 2021, and by the end of that year, I reached that $10,000-a-month milestone. I then bought two more homes in 2022 and one more in 2023," he said.

Then he decided to quit his Meta job. "After my last meeting, I closed my laptop and felt relieved: "Wow, I'm done. I know it sounds crazy to leave a $370,000 job, and staying at Meta for the rest of my life would have ensured financial security, but I knew it wasn't right for me."