Fairly well paid (I can work parttime and still pay the bills).
I'm ridiculously self-disciplined and stress-resistant so I find it quite easy.
I get to see behind the curtain at a lot of restaurants.
I've built something of a local reputation and a circle of friends in the industry.
Being good at cooking, organising, and leading people is in itself very satisfying.
People find me more attractive because of it, haha.
I'm just sick of making money for other people and sort of sick of working evenings. Oh, and people are always asking me to cook for them. Otherwise, I'm fulfilled. It'll be time for me to look at setting up my own place soon enough.
Ish? I run machines at a steel tube/chromed bar processing plant in the Midwest which is kinda neat but also mind-numbing, but the money is really good for what I do. They just offered me an outside sales position over my whole state so... I like doing new things and my background is in food and bev so I'd much rather be dealing with people than pushing buttons on a CNC or hone all day plus for a pay increase and not being all gross and oily when I get off work? No-brainer
I'm between jobs for the first time in my adult life at the moment. My last gig lasted nearly 10 years and it was a wild ride. I found it fulfilling for a time, but I eventually got promoted to a position I wasn't wholly satisfied with.
I started off at the very bottom rung, doing tech support for customers on the phone/chat/email. I was great at it and got promoted quickly to higher ranks of support, and eventually wound up managing the floor of tech support agents. Those were some of the best days of my life. Halcyon days.
Every day was like a really low-stakes episode of House, where in the course of helping agents solve technical issues for customers, eventually we'd encounter one really inexplicable, difficult, borderline impossible problem that nobody had ever seen before, so me and my team's brightest would walk and talk while hypothesizing and figuring out our next move.
After a year or two of managing the floor, I got promoted to a position where I was ultimately a code monkey. Then Covid happened, and my job became fully remote for 4 years straight. Which was great! It allowed me to do my work and also spend way, way more time with my infant son during his early formative years. I got incredibly lucky in spite of the pandemic. But over time, the burnout grew to the point where I knew I needed to find something else to do with my career.
I'm lucky enough to have enough in savings that I can take a bit of time to reflect and think about what I might want to do going forward with my admittedly limited credentials.
Thankfully, yes. I grew to hate my previous job because of shitty leadership. I was cut when there were two rounds of downsizing because I was the best-paid on my team. They did me a favor. I was only half-heartedly looking for a new job because doing so is challenging when your morale is blasted from working a shit job.
The new job is far higher stakes, but also far easier 95% of the time. I'm reading books during my downtime between putting out fires. I'm uniquely qualified for the role. I can also walk to work in ten minutes. And I absolutely love my boss. It'll be six months tomorrow. Wooooha!