It can be intimidating to think about switching careers.

It might even seem impossible.

In today’s story, a mechanical engineer is learning UI/UX for fun, but he doesn’t think switching careers is a good idea.

That is, until he tries designing a website for the company where he works.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

Boss says I should quit because I like spending time on ‘Hobbies’ so I did.

I was working for a startup engineering firm working as a Piping Design engineer.

But since it was a start up firm, we didn’t have a lot of man power and the ones we had weren’t as qualified either.

I was one of the very few qualified enough to handle a team of my own.

The boss trusted me with almost everything.

I was like the second in command after the boss only because I was managing a lot of things on the side as a voluntary basis.

Things like paycheck balancing, client meetings, quality assurance, documentation, and other stuff which he should had hired someone else to do.

I was good at it and he took full advantage of it by giving me things to do that never was under my job description.

The boss wanted to update the website.

One day he had this bright idea that we should revamp our website to attract more clients.

And he gave this project to his nephew who just graduated from college as a developer of sorts.

After a week or so the nephew came up with the first draft of the website and the boss was fairly disappointed as it didn’t look anywhere near to what he expected.

He then called me in and asked me if I knew anything about website design.

At that time I was very much interested on UI/UX and was doing an online course to learn about it more.

So I told him that I’ll see what I can do.

The work started to pile up.

I spent the next week full making a proper information architecture, wireframes and colour guidelines that the nephew could pick up and build the website from scratch.

In the end the website looked futuristic and the boss was pretty happy.

But during the week my other ‘responsibilities’ were put in a backlog and it just kept piling on.

I knew I would be able to cover it once am done with the website and didn’t pay too much attention to it.

The boss was upset.

The next week my boss caught up with backlog and called me in to his cabin.

He started yelling at me for all the ‘responsibilities’ that I didn’t attend to.

I calmly told him that I was working on the website and its not a big deal.

Told him that I would clear it out as soon as possible.

But he wasn’t happy.

He asked me why I spent so much time doing something that isn’t even my responsibility.

I told him that I was learning about UI/UX and was pretty much interested to learn more.

(I obviously never thought about perusing it as a career because frankly I was a mechanical engineer by qualification and didn’t think jumping to IT would be easy)

He took the boss up on the suggestion and quit.

The boss snapped and told me that I should quit and pursue my ‘hobby’ as a living.

He said that only then I will understand how lucky I am to have a job that pays.

I kind of got offended because 1. He doesn’t even pay me the worth of things i do for the company and 2. He knew I could cover and yet took this as a opportunity to ‘discipline’ me.

I stepped out of this cabin, went to my desk and put in my resignation and went home.

Turns out he was able to change careers.

He called me a couple of times asked me to revoke my resignation and then made other people from the organization call me to convince me to come back.

I wasn’t having it at all.

It’s been 2 years now, I decided to pursue UI/UX as a career now and am working as a product designer in one of the biggest organisations in the country with a pay that’s almost 300% more than what I was getting as a mechanical engineer.

It’s great that the boss told him to quit.

Otherwise, he probably never would’ve been brave enough to try switching careers.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

The boss was really stupid to dare the employee to quit.

This reader agrees that the boss wasn’t very smart.

This reader thinks he should’ve sent the boss a thank you letter.

Here’s another story about losing a job and getting a much better one.

Don’t dare a valuable employee to quit!

They just might do it.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.