From senior engineer to ceramics teacher — the finances nobody tells you about

When I told people I was leaving a senior engineering role to teach ceramics, the reaction split cleanly into two camps.

The first camp — mostly people outside tech — thought it was romantic. Brave. Following your passion. They said things like "that's incredible" and "I wish I could do something like that" and looked at me with a particular kind of wistful envy.

The second camp — mostly people inside tech — thought I'd lost my mind. They were more tactful about it but the subtext was clear. You're throwing away a good salary. You'll regret it. Have you thought this through?

Both camps were missing the actual story, which was messier and more interesting than either narrative. So here it is — including the parts that the "follow your passion" crowd conveniently leave out.

First, the context

I'd been a software engineer for eleven years. The last four at a well-funded scale-up, the last two as a senior engineer managing a small team. By any external measure, things were going well. The compensation was good. The work was interesting enough. My manager liked me.

But I had been doing ceramics as a hobby for three years and something had started to shift. Not dramatically — there was no single moment of revelation. Just a gradual, persistent awareness that the two hours I spent at the wheel on Tuesday evenings were the only two hours of the week where time disappeared completely. Where I wasn't thinking about the sprint or the roadmap or whether my skip-level thought I was performing well. I was just making things with my hands.

I started teaching a beginner's class at my local studio on Saturday mornings. Then a second class. I was — and I say this without false modesty — actually good at it. Students came back. They recommended friends. The studio asked if I'd consider going full-time as a resident teacher.

I said I'd think about it. I thought about it for eight months. Then I said yes.

The finances: what actually happened

Here's where most pivot stories go vague. They talk about "taking a pay cut" or "tightening the belt" without getting into what that actually means. I'm going to be specific, because I think the vagueness does a disservice to anyone considering something similar.

The income drop was the part I'd prepared for mentally but still found jarring in practice. Knowing something intellectually and living it are different things. The first month I got a pay cheque from the studio, I sat with it for a long time. It was about a third of what I'd been used to. It covered rent and food and not much else.

What I hadn't fully prepared for was the psychological weight of spending savings. Every month I dipped into the buffer I'd built felt like a small failure, even though the buffer existed precisely for this purpose. The rational part of my brain knew this. The part of my brain that had spent eleven years equating professional worth with compensation did not care about rationality.

The timeline nobody shows you

The things I wish someone had told me

Build more runway than you think you need. I had fourteen months of expenses saved. I would recommend eighteen to twenty-four for anyone making a significant pivot. Not because you'll need all of it — but because the psychological security of knowing it's there changes how you make decisions in the early months. Scarcity thinking is the enemy of good early-stage choices.

Your lifestyle will compress more easily than you expect. I spent years earning a good salary and lifestyle inflation had quietly done its work. When I audited my actual spending in the six months before leaving, I found I was spending significant money on things that weren't making me happier — they were just filling the space that exhaustion had left. The compression was less painful than I'd anticipated because a lot of the spending had been compensatory.

Sort out your health coverage before you leave, not after. This was the one practical thing I did well. I spent three weeks before my last day understanding exactly what my options were. Don't skip this step — it matters more than you think it will.

The doubt phase is not a sign you made the wrong decision. Months four through six were genuinely hard. I came very close to emailing my old company to ask if there was any way back. What stopped me wasn't conviction that I'd made the right choice — I didn't have that yet. It was simply deciding to give it until the end of the year before making any decisions. That six-month extension changed everything.

Would I do it again

Yes. Without hesitation. But not for the reasons the "follow your passion" framing suggests.

I'm not happier every day. Teaching has its own frustrations. Running the financial side of a creative practice is unglamorous work. There are days when I'm tired and underpaid and wondering if I'm behind where I should be.

But I'm no longer spending my energy on things that don't matter to me. That trade — less money, more alignment — has been worth it. For me, in my circumstances. With the runway I'd built and the risk tolerance I had.

It won't be the right trade for everyone. But if you're reading this in a role that pays well and costs you more than it pays, it might be worth doing the actual maths on what a transition would look like — not the vague romantic version, but the real one with real numbers.

That's what this site is for. If you want to think through the finances of a potential pivot, start with the career pivot track on the Start Here page.