Probably because being sat in front of a computer all day just sucks the life out of you, and programmers make enough money to experiment with something different
Definitely a big part of it -- I think that sitting in front of a computer all day is a situation that makes you feel detached from your work, and it's harder to feel like it has meaning. I wrote this largely because I was curious to drill down into why that was the case and whether it was unique to tech workers, or if everyone was feeling this to some degree, and perhaps tech workers were just the most able to transition to other fields like you mentioned.
I went through a phase about 10 years ago of daydreaming about being a landscaper. The appeal of it was that digging a ditch is easier than the stress and responsibility of deciding where to dig it. Worst case, you fill it in and dig another. Dirt and gravity doesn't have breaking changes and people aren't about to stop caring how their lawns look. At the time I was working in pre-react post Flash UI development at a marketing firm. I could see how Flash had ended and could only see the other things I was doing as suffering the same fate. Add the typical deadline and technical debt stressors and I was ready to get out. Today, what's happening with AI and the message that even when it's not really viable businesses are lined up to replace me with it really doesn't foster loyalty or commitment to my profession. At least if I grow my own crops I'll have something to eat. The problem is subsistence farming is all but illegal now with agricorps owning the genomes of the seeds. So I guess I'll keep doing this until they kick me out on the street.
You can buy "heirloom" seeds for just about anything you want to grow without any IP concerns. The genetically modified seeds are mainly only of interest to large farms growing huge amounts of staple row crops.
For me it’s also the existential aspect of realizing I’m spending the best years of my life just being in front of a screen. In my mind part of the reason good engineers are paid well us because they can mentally compartmentalize that fact and still be effective over years of the career.
I've always maintained hobbies outside of software. No one can claim I spent any years of my life behind a screen. Maybe just work hours. I highly recommend having hobbies.
It's really just "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" all over again. I grew up on a farm, and that career absolutely will suck the life out of you as well, just in different ways. I wouldn't ever choose to give up my tech career for that, because even though I know it has very real downsides I know the downsides of doing physical labor all day to get by are worse.
Sure, but anything is more fun as a retiree hobby. That goes for programming as well as farming - if you can work (or not) at your own pace on the projects you think are interesting, that doesn't really suck the life out of you.
Wait until the overproduction of code from AI and see how you feel then.
Every industry that has suffered from over production ends up cheapening and removing significant elements of artisanal beauty. If the AI hype is to be believed we are in the cusp of that for software engineering and just about any other knowledge work for that matter.
First, I don't believe the AI hype and I would advise you to not believe it either. People are notoriously bad at predicting the future. When I was in high school everyone said that programming was a dead career because it would all be outsourced to India, and that you should pursue a career as a PC repairman because it couldn't be outsourced. Needless to say, those predictions aged like milk. And even right now, AI isn't nearly as capable as the hype club makes it out to be. All that we can do is remain on our toes and be adaptive to change, but that's always been the case. Anyone who figures they will retire from this business doing the same exact job they started with has always been in for a rude awakening.
Second, even if my job gets destroyed by changing tech that doesn't make farming an attractive option. It's dangerous, it wears your body down super hard, and the pay is garbage (which isn't very just tbh, but economics rarely are). I don't know what I'll do if my career goes up in a poof of smoke next year, but farming will be very low on the list no matter what I do.
Even without complete replacement over production is a real concern. Over production doesn't necessarily mean better but it did mean your hand crafted artisanal code need to compete against the shovelware of AI generation. Given the predominance of short-termism and "productivity" metrics this may push you out anyway.
As AI takes over creative work, we won’t need humans to sit at a desk, so they can be employed in subsistence farming while AI VCs make record profits.
I grew up on a farm too, and now make a living programming while raising some chickens and pigs on the side and helping out on my parents' farm.
I wouldn't say it will suck the life out of you. I suppose that depends on your personality. But I'd agree that there's more physical labor involved, even today with modern machines, than most people fantasizing about the idea probably realize.
But even knowing how hard the work can be, there are days when I step away from the keyboard at 5pm and head out to shovel manure or harvest crops for a few hours with a lighter mood than I had all day, because there's something "real" about it that's refreshing after a day of working with the unreal.
So I get why people dream about it. I'd just warn them to spend a week or two's vacation as an "intern" on a farm to see what it's like before quitting the keyboard job and buying 40 acres.
I meant it'll suck the life out of you in a more literal sense. My dad is a good example: he had both hips replaced by the time he was in his 40s, and has since (now in his 60s) had to have one of his artificial hips replaced. He has chronic arthritis worse than most people his age, as well. That's just a hazard of the job - even if you don't get injured by the big powerful machines (or heavy animals, etc), the sheer wear and tear you put on your body is far greater than what those of us with a desk job will.
Metaphorically, farming can be far less life-sucking. There is something refreshing about just getting stuff done without any of the corporate BS to navigate. I just think that a lot of people in the tech industry aren't seeing the downsides, and only see the ways in which it's better than their career.
That's fair. I look at my fellow office workers and see a lot of obesity and back problems caused by too much sitting, but those are optional in a way that my dad's physical wear and tear from farming weren't.
I definitely wouldn't tell a tech guy with no farming experience to just jump into it. Get a few chickens or something, and see what it's like to depend on you for food and water every day, whether it's 100 degrees or a blizzard that day. Or plant a 10x10 garden in your backyard and see what it's like to pull weeds in July heat.
And don't expect to make money (or even break even) at it. Farming today only makes money if you go large-scale, which isn't what anyone dreams about, or if you find a niche and are really good at marketing something like artisan cheese. Even people who know what they're doing struggle to make that work.
Nobody is saying that being a farmer is a magical key to physical fitness. We're saying that farming, no matter how hard you try to take care of your body, will be hard on your body in ways that office work simply isn't. If you're working in an office you can choose to exercise and eat right, you can choose to practice good posture and take breaks. But as a farmer you can't choose to not do hard physical labor all day long.
> But as a farmer you can't choose to not do hard physical labor all day long.
The seasons dictate when a farmer will spend 16 hours a day in a tractor seat ploughing, or seeding, or spraying, or harvesting (and roping a friend in to drive chaser trucks behind the combine).
Eyestrain from watching the GPS screen, backache from chair springs getting old, cursing when the air conditioning malfunctions .. it's tough, demanding hard work fit only for RealMen™.
At other times of the year there's a lot of choice as to time spent welding, engine mechanics, radio mantainance, going over blueprints for new silos, contracts for grain, yarning with ag advisors, dropping trees on firebreaks, cutting rounds, feeding rounds into hydraulic splitters.
And more. So it goes.
All the farmers I know are active from dawn to dusk, sometimes quite active, often just idling along fettling something or another.
But hard physical labour every day all day long? That's 1930's pre mechanised talk for farmhand work. Picking stones off fields, drywall building by the foot, harnessing bullocks to haul water from the spring. Hand saw and axe.
Grapevine pruning and Grapes of Wrath harvesting is what farmers hire backpackers for .. and they get pnuematic cutters and fancy tools these days.
I grew up on a farm and it isnt hard physical labor that takes a toll on the human body. That is actually the healthy and beneficial part.
It is poor ergonomics and acute injury that does the damage to farmers and trade workers too. Work is physical but there is almost always a smart and safe way to do it.
> Metaphorically, farming can be far less life-sucking.
Is it though? It's not like the repetitive work of milking cows or shoveling manure every day is any less of a drudgery than office work.
And, if anything, farmers hereabouts seem to be more prone to the sort of self-destructive behaviours you'd expect from people who's life lacks meaning. Drinking all you've earned for example. Or getting into fights over nothing in particular.
For many, the "homesteading" labor is an fulfilling and concrete complement to lucrative but abstract desk work, not a replacement.
It takes the place of idle hobbies like consuming more media on screens, lifting abitrary weights or running in place on a treadmill, etc
It's natural to assume we'd be pretty deeply wired to productively tend to our own lives and our own well-being in very concrete way, and many people who intentionally take up neglected homesteading tasks at their own pace and convenience often find it ameliorates many of the odd feelings of depression, anxiety, restlessness, etc that hung over them previously.
We probably shouldn't be doing anything in particular all day, but doing concrete productive things in a world where so many things are abstract and alienating can provide great balance.
This is exactly the reason why I spend all of my non-desk time outside working out, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, archery hunting, golfing and camping. I even choose to shovel snow over using the snowblower.
Interesting that one of the top comments is so negative. Do you guys not like your job at all? I've done that all my life, I love it, and I still have plenty of time to enjoy life and do other stuff.
Because programmers play too much Stardew Valley and the high pay removes the anxiety of starving to death when it doesn't rain because you can just spend your way out of problems.
Also have never probably experienced harvesting things in the heat. It fucking sucks.
Yeah, in that case you're just retired and homesteading is your hobby. Nothing wrong with having a hobby when you retire from your job, but in no way is it comparable to doing the thing as a job.
No, because Stardew Valley is not real life. I may have 5000 hours in Factorio, but I'm pretty sure I'm confident that I would not enjoy mining coal to feed the burners to smelt metal in real life.
But it would be pretty cool to have a coal mine on your property and you could go down and like dig up a piece for fun. Have you ever looked at a piece of coal under a microscope? they can look pretty cool!
Haha, also have several thousand hours in factorio and you're right I don't hold this standard with all my games. That being said, if i was immune to pollution I would at least want to walk around my factories a bit
In as few words as possible, JIRA, Agile, shareholders.
Most programmers don’t really seem to understand that programming isn’t really their job. It’s an illusion. Their job is to create value to the shareholders. That’s not really that much fun, and once the joy of writing and reading code is slowly squeezed away from their position is when those with sanity still intact start thinking “Man, I ought to get the fuck up out of here and find a real job or something.” The really lucky ones are outdoorsy folks that can afford to do the homesteading thing, or are willing to forego the immense compensation that tech work so often allures them with.
Just my two cents. I was blessed to retire in my thirties, so I could be entirely out of touch, though I hear many things.
I think "back to the land" movements have existed as long as there have been cities. But a job sitting at a desk all day working on a virtual product that probably won't be used in a few years just really ramps up the effect.
Thank you, I appreciate it! I've been wanting to write things more often that aren't just for work, so I was thinking I'd try to write blog posts like this to practice.
It's pretty natural to want to not feel alienated from nature and other human beings. The specific form of this fantasy is a little bit fantastical though.
I think the dual interesting aspects for me are as follows:
Why is farming or woodworking seen as less alienating than being at a computer?
And why does it feel so impossible for us to form the communities that would give us the kind of meaning that we really seem to desire when we're working in these sorts of positions? It seems almost universal that working at a computer means we feel isolated, even when we talk in meetings all day.
I think the nature part makes sense, after all, being in a field is certainly more natural than an office, but I think lots of farming is actually pretty lonely from when I've done it, with the exception of animals. But when thinking about the profession, it just feels more social. There's something there about the way we view types of work and their importance, almost metaphysically speaking.
The goal of capitalism is to get enough money to escape capitalism and live a life of leisure. It’s not weird to want to quit and start a homestead or enjoy other hobbies. That’s normal. The people who want to keep working and refuse to retire are the weirdos. What is wrong with them that they just can’t enjoy a life of luxury on the beach and leave well enough alone?
The goal of capitalism is not to get enough money to escape capitalism.
The goal of capitalism is to get enough money to live on the revenue of your own wisely-invested capital instead of providing the wage labor paid for by other people's capital.
I think the goal you describe is categorically wrong. If what you say was the case - billionaires wouldn't exist.
Capitalism's primary focus is production. The more you produce, the more you are rewarded. Quantity has better profit margins than quality. So the winner is someone who can produce the most and reach the most customers.
Digital products happen to be the best for it. They are, relatively to other products, easy to scale, produce, and even easier to distribute. Quality needs to be just good enough to make a sale.
For me, it's that homesteading has lots of problem solving but in the physical realm.
It's not that it has strictly to do with being outside or away from the computer (that's nice though) but for me it's that you still get to build and be proud of what you've done.
When I do work away from the computer and more in farm/homestead situations, I'm still drawn to using technology to solve problems (e.g. Automating certain tasks with microcontrollers), so it's not a rejection of my $job.
I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.
Have to disagree with the article though, I don't think it has anything to do with a mythos.
That's fair, I think there are some people (like that initial hn post I reference) who such as yourself really are just people who really enjoy that sort of lifestyle. But I also think that societally we put a lot of value and for lack of a better word, "coolness factor" on manual labor. You could imagine in certain time periods and cultures that something like working in a field wouldn't be viewed positively at all, and maybe something like writing poetry is seen as a very masculine and rugged endeavor.
I think that for certain individuals that sort of mythological status ascribed to being a frontiersman or a person who can do everything themselves definitely influences how they perceive a potential job or method of living.
There is too much of a tie between being satisfied with that type of work and being successful as a pre-civilization human animal for me to agree with you completely, I think.
> I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.
Are you saying this from experience homesteading? Or from imagining what homesteading is like?
Once you get past the storybook fantasy version of homesteading, a lot of it is drudgery and unwelcome surprises. You may love finding and fixing problems now, but when the problems are coming faster than you can fix them, each one requires a lot of labor (or cash) to fix, and you haven't touched your fun project for months because you're too busy putting out critical fires, it doesn't seem so fun any more.
I think this is the biggest thing - anything will be much more enjoyable when you can choose how much to engage in, and you do not depend on its completion for income or survival.
Of course farming and carpentry will be more fun to a software engineer who is doing it as a hobby or in retirement, than the work they did in their job. Even if you “switch” to it as a source of income, it is far different to have another career and set of skills to fall back on, than to be doing it out of necessity.
I've wondered: if I could switch my main and side jobs, making farming my primary career and doing some programming and sysadmin work on the side, would I be happier? Or would I get as tired of the main job as I am now, and wish I could spend more time on the side work? Hard to say, since I need to keep it this way to make a good living.
Back when I was in school and choosing what university course to apply for, I was torn between computer science and law, both of which interested me a lot. One of the several factors that swayed my decision was that if I did law as a career I could still practise programming in my spare time, whereas if I did programming as a career, I was highly unlikely to practise law in my spare time. So (for that and other reasons) I went into law and became a lawyer.
Now, every now and again, when I am stuck working late on a deal and all I want to do is go home and hack on my latest project, I wonder if I made the right choice. But ultimately I know I wouldn't be so excited to fire up an IDE if I relied on it for my livelihood.
As for farming, I grew up in a rural area so never had any illusions about it. I do admire the resourcefulness and ingenuity of many farmers, but I know it's not for me. Most of the retirees I know like to do "a spot of gardening" in their retirement, and honestly I think the kind of micro-scale "farming" a lot of office workers dream of is not that distinguishable from gardening, so many of them will probably get their wish eventually.
I'm in the opposite lane, I have recently gained an interest in law although I just started my career in software development. Not sure if its too late to go to school now ;)
a friend recently described bouldering - which I understand is also fairly popular with engineers - as something to the effect of "solving problems in a physical space with your body". this seems not dissimilar
Yeah it seems like everyone's definition of homesteading is on a bit of a spectrum. Don't get me wrong - throwing a bunch of arduinos/microcontrollers together to automate stuff is very fun but when I personally think of homesteading it's about self-sufficiency through agriculture.
In conversations with the IT world, I have definitely found a pretty high level of romanticism" often associated with the idea of leaving the modern world behind, going off-grid and running a farm.
It dovetails with the same kind of naive transcendentalism that espouses that natural = good, a simpler kind of living, etc.
The post talks like tech jobs have a societal benefit but it's difficult to see it due to the many layers of abstraction.
I would rather posit that most tech jobs have a negative societal impact and it's difficult to find a company which isn't focusing on fucking the maximum amount of profit out of their customers while utilising the cheapest lubricant.
It depends on the job for sure, but you're certainly not wrong that many technical jobs have a negative societal impact. I had a hard time finding jobs I actually wanted to apply to after college because I strongly disliked the idea of working for a company where the sum total of my contribution was making people more likely to click an advertisement or something like that. Felt pretty awful in terms of "meaning" in that way.
But there are a lot of tech jobs that aren't like that as well, and I think people have similar feelings about wanting to escape into a more natural world in those ones too. The sum total of which are positive and which are negative is certainly up for debate though. I actually have another post I started writing about the negative second-order effects of certain outcomes of software development in the last decade or so.
I'll put on my devil's advocate hat and try to argue for the positive social impact of tech companies.
Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other.
People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that.
Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives.
Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D)
Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week.
The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions.
We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life.
The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3
There are also a ton of tech companies that we don’t have to play devil’s advocate to defend. Apple, AMD, TSMC, Intel, so on and so on… they make or design useful devices.
You start to realize the RPG games you grinded on in your teens and 20s (or longer) really didn't amount to anything. Then you realize if you wood cut and fish in real life you can build things and feed yourself. Suddenly that seems far more interesting working on little hobby projects and skilling in the physical world than working on whatever bullshit pays for that in the 9-5.
After some point you'd rather you didn't have to do that 9-5 at all and become depressed a bit by the fact you have to spend so much time a day on something that doesn't fundamentally concern you and you don't therefore fundamentally care about. The fact it takes up your time and energy, and you don't get to get out of it until you are old and worn out unless you hit some lottery in the meanwhile.
Tech is a treadmill. New framework, new language version, new tool version. Many, maybe most of the "improvements"...aren't. They are changes for the sake of change. Stability is a completely unknown concept.
Eventually, you get tired of it. Doing something simple becomes ever more attractive. Me, I still teach tech, but I also build stone walls.
Did you pull this out of my consciousness? For me, I’d add that I’m very tired of fighting endless DevOps culture wars but I would support anyone who wants to progress that.
Maybe they think it sounds better than it is because it's so common for them to believe they deeply understand a topic when they've really only confidently oversimplified it?
We had a fellow stop by for some, call it off grid activity. They were from a small metropolitan and looking at our 3/4 acre experimental garden, asked "so if you grow all your own food what things do you still have to buy?"
We were nice and tried to explain calorie counts per person for a year and micro nutrient requirements but we still laugh about that one. And that guy was in food service. Most people do not understand the complexity of our food supply, not only overconfident programmers.
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
Twenty-some years ago working 12am-6am overnight trying to fix production database issues and meet deadlines, I told myself I didn't want to be doing this in another 10 years.
"Plato saw Diogenes washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, 'Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn't now be washing lettuces,' and that he with equal calmness made answer, 'If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn't have paid court to Dionysius."
- Simplify (whether or not this is misguided, it's part of the appeal).
- Autonomy. Being able to, even partially, move off-grid decreases your reliance on society.
- Physical / nature. Sitting at a desk all day definitely has a toll.
There's several No true Scotsman comments here, but IMO there's nothing wrong with attempting this lifestyle. If someone decides (and can afford) to live more simply, it doesn't bother me any. Good for them!
I think the negativity might be because every frikin' one of them tries to turn into a snake oil selling influencer, and we're just seeing influencer fatigue setting in.
That scene in Office Space where he complains about having 8 different bosses really resonates with me.
I love programming, if I could get paid to work on what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted, I would (and hopefully at some point I will), but run of the mill corporate JIRA ticket churn isn't exactly something that deeply satisfies my soul, and I can understand fantasizing about getting as far away from that as possible.
Many are commenting on why they don't like jobs, but the article has a very good analysis of the other side of this trope: People fantasize about homesteading or farming because they don't know how much work it really is. To many, homesteading is an escapist fantasy:
> so few Americans are familiar with the actual work behind jobs in the agricultural sector or related ones, I would argue that for many Americans the reality of this type of work is almost indistinguishable from fables or myth in their psychological context, due to lack of exposure. Due to that seeming separation from their mental context of what work is, it enhances the feeling of escapism which this work-fantasy provides
These fantasies always seem perplexing to those of us who grew up with exposure to actual farming life. Running a modern farm is hard work. Taking it a step further to the idea of homesteading would bring unthinkable amounts of labor, difficulty, and a realization that the old office job wasn't so bad after all.
Of the few people who actually pursue these fantasies, it usually takes the form of a hobby farm or some backyard gardening with ample injections of cash to keep things moving.
Adding to this: the enormous amounts of knowledge required. How do you know how far apart (or deep) to plant the seeds? Or when? Or how much fertilizer, or water, or how often to water? Or when? Sure you can use common sense or look it up. But once you get to a certain scale, the stakes are high enough that the risk of ruin is too high.
Sure you save money by milking your cow, but how much is one vet visit? Unless it's in your blood, trying to go from techies to farmers is just stupid.
Edit to add: one of the principal differences between software and farming is we are one "git checkout" away from having another chance to fix it. In agriculture, you get another chance... next year.
Running a farm is a ton of work, exactly. The difference of having the ample injections of cash and not having them is pretty huge, especially when it comes to how common the issues that pop up when trying to run a modern farm are, and how expensive they can be.
I think when you're someone who grew up with exposure to the lifestyle of farming, it gets easier to see that the escapism is possible because of how rare it is for people to interact with people whose main employment is farming on a regular basis.
It is honestly pretty interesting from a historical perspective to think about what this means as a shift in the populace's opinion towards certain kinds of work, because we're really entering unforeseen territory in US history where no one will even really understand first-hand what a version of the US where the vast majority of humans living there are engaged in agricultural labor on a regular basis lookd like, if that makes sense.
I came to understand the "purposelessness" of my career very early on; when I decommissioned a bare metal server from a datacenter after finishing the deploy of it's replacement and realised that the old server was the first unit I'd racked when I started in the position 4 years ago.
That was ~20 years ago. Nothing I've had a hand in building / maintaining has "survived" for more than ~7 years.
My Dad worked to build houses. Prior to my IT career I'd laboured for him and played my small part in the creation of many homes around where I grew up. They'll be there for a hundred years maybe.
Quitting the ephemeral world of IT to work on building a homestead and creating tangible things that directly keep humans alive seems like an obvious calling to me.
The constant evolution of "tech" is a blessing and a curse.
> Nothing I've had a hand in building / maintaining has "survived" for more than ~7 years.
The companies? The websites? Google, for example, has been in existence since 1998. If you're working on a farm, the crops don't live longer than a year. The livestock longer than that, but probably not decades - my (limited) understanding is that most cows are slaughtered around age 2 or 3. But the farm itself can, in certain circumstances, last for generations.
If you're talking houses, sure, solid walls can last decades, centuries, millennia even (cf the Pyramids). However, I think this is because stone is particularly durable. Roofs, windows, doors, anything that isn't made of really good masonry will tend to decay much quicker than that. Even states like the Roman Republic and Empire (which had probably a good ~2000 year run if we count from 509BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453) will eventually crumble and fall.
Now a tech company is a newer type of institution than a farm, but some of them are quite old - GE was founded in 1892. IBM was founded in 1911. We can also take Bell telephone and Standard Oil, both of whom were broken up by anti-trust cases, but whose descendants still live on today, as other examples of tech companies that have had lifespans similar to or greater than houses or farms.
Of course, I understand that "I built some software/racked some servers for a company 20 years ago and they're still business" isn't the same as "I put the bricks in that wall twenty years ago and the house is still there". So I agree that the individual artifacts we create in the tech industry are somewhat fleeting, compared to things made of metal and stone, even if, compared to things like music or other performing arts, where the song disappears the minute you stop playing, software running on computers is relatively lasting. And artifacts created with software, while they are a relatively new thing, may prove quite durable. Films made with Final Cut, or songs made with Pro Tools, or heck, even video games like Doom, may prove to outlast every house that you ever worked on. It's possible that 200 years from now, people will still be watching YouTube videos made today, even if, in a Ship of Theseus like fashion, every line of code and every server that YouTube is currently using has been replaced since then.
Every company I've worked for still exists and many will clearly continue for many many years (some previous employers were Universities).
Some previous roles I was involved in solving "this could end the business" situations, so I do thank you for making me realise that I laid bricks (or more importantly; helped detect and repair serious foundation problems) for my employers.
This is a really beautiful sentiment, it's interesting to look more at our careers as stewards of a lasting organization in some ways, where every iteration of some product is dependent on the existence of work done before. Even with ephemeral software we all leave our mark in that way. Thank you for writing that.
I'm not sure how deeply involved you've gotten into homesteading, and whether you are doing anything in the IT world, but if you are still a bit connected to IT then I'd suggest scratching an itch you have with software. Perhaps something that connects your homesteading to IT, so you are able to use your knowledge from both?
I've worked for smaller companies, and have software I started in 2009 that I am still working on, literally up to 15 minutes ago. I enjoy working with the client, because they are building in an area that seems to be untapped for potential. I've moved across two programming languages, and two database systems, to keep the software running, and feel that my personal investment and belief in what my client is doing has helped push me in a direction where I am almost tied to this software as my client. It's a good feeling, and think perhaps you need a project like that for yourself. The benefit is that you are also homesteading, so you could learn IoT software for your homestead, even starting off with something simple like watching temperatures at night, or reading humidity readings to decide whether to water areas of your garden/food source.
I grew up with grandparents that lived off the land, mostly pushed from them growing up during the Great Depression. I wish I had known to ask more questions of them while they were around, but I did pick up a strong work ethic, along with what I picked up from my parents. Having a project that you enjoy goes a very long way towards keeping an interest in anything, whether it's IT or gardening of vegetables, flowers, or raising animals for meat or labor (or pleasure, but figured that fell outside of homesteading).
I have wondered how people who have spent their career jumping from runway to runway feel when they look back over their shoulder and only see plane wrecks at the end of derelict runways. Perhaps they made a ton of money, but it has to hurt on some level to have never seen your work amount to something.
I laughed really hard today. I did some contract work for a friend of mine a long time ago and he sent me a message today to let me know that the some of the code I wrote for him was broken. He sent me a screenshot of git blame… I committed it in 2011 :D. Definitely made me smile knowing that that work has been humming along in production for 14 years without a hitch.
The only reason it broke is because, apparently, Django finally removed an API that they deprecated a while ago.
You wouldn't say that manufacturing tires is purposeless just because the tires need to be replaced in a few years. They were able to accomplish a lot of transportation while they lasted.
You wouldn't say that making a sandwich is pointless just because you'll need another one tomorrow. It let you survive and gave you the energy to do things.
The purpose of a server is what it was able to do for people while it lasted. The fact that it won't last forever doesn't take away that purpose.
Luckily my uncle and aunt had a large farm, where my mother used to send me and my sister for a couple of weeks, every summer - at least for me that pretty much killed any romantic idea of what farm life is like.
In fact, I'm also very grateful that I got to try a wide range of shitty manual labor job as a student. So many people would kill for a cushy office job.
EDIT: Might I also add, I think some engineers - especially those that have reached FIRE, enjoy the idea of LARPing a homestead / farming life. If you have enough money to not feel the stress, you can have a smaller farm.
The harsh reality is that operating a small farm can be brutal. You're at the very bottom of the food-chain, as far as the agricultural business goes.
Similar story here. My grandparents had a farm and had cows (dairy). Even by the time I was around, they had mostly wound down operations and had semi-retired.
They still had some dairy cows though.. and I still remember (over 30 years later!) the almost physical wall of smell that assaulted you going into that barn when it was all closed up because it was -20ºF outside. Nothing romantic about that!
My dad built houses. Sometimes, like another poster here, I think about how his work will be around for decades if not centuries (they were nice houses). I think about how I might feel if I had kept his business going, maybe worked to expand it. Then I think about being 16, leaving the house at six to go pour concrete piers and being exhausted and caked in mud and cement by lunchtime. And how it felt a lot less exciting on the first Friday than it did on the first Monday.
None of my family worked on a farm. But, literally one time I went to visit a friend whose family farmed. We all spent some time digging up some kind of root vegetable. It was fun because it was with friends but also, it would absolutely suck to do for a living, haha.
What gets me about the homesteading fantasy: it’s, like, so incredibly easy to disabuse oneself of the notion that digging up tubers is a good time.
>In fact, I'm also very grateful that I got to try a wide range of shitty manual labor job as a student. So many people would kill for a cushy office job.
Working a couple warehouse jobs when in college provided me with some valuable perspective.
In addition to the sitting on your rear or day just schlepping code for a company, there's also this perception that other people have of programmers just not really producing anything tangible and/or the profession just being something you do if you are weak and/or afraid to do labour.
I gotta admit, that on a day where it's just about chasing some elusive bug or bugs, even I say to myself: "What the hell did I do today?" even though I might have spent 8-10 solid hours actively working. If the bug is hard enough to find I feel like I accomplished nothing nor have anything to show for it.
And sometimes, when you add to the fact that as devs we have all these perks in the office like free snacks, being able to go out for lunch, free sodas, free coffee, or WFH etc. and for what? We accomplished nothing!
Conversely, you might meet blue collar workers who has to, absolutely has to commute to a job site (no WFH for them), busts their rear to get something real and tangible done. Like for example, setting up electrical, or building a frame, or fixing a major plumbing issue, or doing drywall, or painting an entire house, or doing an entire roof in the heat etc. And sometimes these people barely get their bathroom, lunch and/or coffee breaks. It really makes us seem spoiled in comparison.
And yes, I know that it's kinda denigrating to use the word "real" to describe anything but software, but, what I mean, is that most non-software people only understand finished and shipped software as real. They don't that understand DB schemas, software specs, MVPs, for example, etc. is also real as well. And they certainly don't understand time spent on thinking about data structures and algorithms as anything real or tangible. Especially if you spend most time planning properly before you code.
Anyways, we want to prove, at least to ourselves, that we can actually create something that everyone can see, touch, feel, pick up, eat, stand on, sit on, etc. And we want to prove that we can have same high standards and craftsmanship this kind of work that we have for code.
Yeah, some of us have a chip on our shoulder about that.
I've definitely struggled with that feeling in my work as well.
When I was growing up, the metric for having done something were things like: All the hay is baled and we moved it all into a loft, or we finished shingling the roof.
Working in a technical position, it feels much vaguer. Maybe I finished a project, but then again, maybe there's a bug, and I'm back working on what I thought was done. Maybe I made a tool accessible online, but now there's a new tech stack and my tool is irrelevant unless I update it. It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't.
It's interesting that it feels like that though, because I certainly didn't have to throw hay only one time, and I didn't have to scrape paint from a wall only one time. I suppose I'm interested in why it feels more real and less repetitive, and maybe part of that is what you point out, that people outside of the field just don't understand what the work that tech workers do consists of in actuality.
I feel this every time I touch CSS. Sometimes I spend hours just fiddling with it, and my code commit is a few characters. And what's worse, it's the thing I stumbled on in the first 10 minutes of debugging, but that, for some reason, never worked that I tried again out of desperation, after not getting anything else to work (an hour later) and that I'm now trying again for some reason. Yet, for some reason, it works this time. CSS makes me feel stupid.
> It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't.
An ex-manager had a phrase that stuck with me, that we are building the factories. Ultimately software gets used to do something, there are lots little "products" being emitted each time it is used. If you are looking at physical products on the shelf, people don't normally think "who fixes the factory that built this when something goes wrong? who makes the factory more efficient so the producer doesn't go bankrupt? who changes the factory when a new design needs to be produced?". This kind of work is rather ephemeral and Sisyphean by nature, so sometimes I like to remind myself that there are these tangible products people rely on but they are just a layer removed. (Nowadays I'm two layers removed - I build a factory to build factories, i.e. compilers and platforms and such).
(This particular business line essentially processed data - it was much more complicated than that but fundamentally was remote-sensing -> data-in -> data-out, so the "data factory" metaphore kinda made sense in that setting).
While non software people certainly don't understand data structures etc themselves I'm sure they get the idea that software has to be designed, just as they get that most buildings (like larger than a shed) have to be designed by an architect before construction people actually start building it.
Most / all of software work, including coding, is actually architecture / design (at varying levels of zoom) the equivalent to construction in buildings is fully automated in software (compilation etc)
Judging from the questions I've received from clients and managers I think the average person has no clue what our work involves. They certainly don't know that software has an architecture, that someone had to create that architecture. All they know is I type on a keyboard and the result is software that probably doesn't do what they want.
I don't know if I can agree with this. I am a programmer. I work with programmers and I know quite a few outside of work. Maybe three or four have expressed this wish, but not many.
There are a multitude of reasons why one might not like being a programmer, but most of them have nothing to do with programming itself. It's other people. Other engineers or managers or parasites. People who think antisocial behavior is okay, or worse, that it's the way to get ahead in life.
Toxic people make everything suck. I worked extremely hard to stop being even a little toxic. I wish more people would realize how their behavior affects others.
Why would people who are so comfortable, whose job was to me a lifelong goal, want to do exactly what I worked so hard to move away from?
The difference is doing it out of necessity vs. doing it out of choice. Nobody fetishizes being worked to the bone in fear of making ends meet. Tech people are by and large well-educated and comfortable enough to dream of a utopia where they can be close to nature and do tasks that feel meaningful and human in an of themselves (vs. hyper-abstracted acronym-laden functional teams value-adds that often only provide the indirect satisfaction of "I'm doing my job and my boss is happy"). "I made a chair" and "I grew some carrots" are instantly relatable and valuable to anyone.
Source: I quit my tech job and moved to the woods 8 years ago, but would only do so because I don't need to worry about grinding a survival out of it.
That's a lot of consideration from someone who transitioned from hands-on farm work to ML, but I’d propose a simpler take: sensorimotor loop integration is a core brain function. When we spend years extremely prioritizing logic and verbal tasks while neglecting physical/sensory engagement, the brain naturally craves that activation to stay balanced. The author’s focus on American mythos psychoanalysis feels like an overcomplication that misses the point of what might be a basic biological need. Maybe I’m missing nuance, but this blogspot was disappointing and felt intellectually cowardly.
The author gives strong wordcel vibes, it's sad to read tbh.
Your point is a bit strangely stated. If just doing physical activity and sensory engagement is all you think a person needs to balance, why not just lift weights or go for a run? Why fantasize about milking a cow? There's clearly more to this, in my opinion.
And no real insult taken if you see me as being pretty verbal, I am, though I can rotate a shape too as evidenced through my job.
No, you miss the point. My point is very low-level biological in nature: the neocortex is a cognitive system which developed via evolution to process complex sensorimotor loops. Very recently in the history of our species it was imperfectly repurposed for planning, reasoning and verbal intelligence, the complete adaptation still ongoing. Our current neocortex usage pattern in the occupations you analyzed differs drastically from ancestral usage pattern which is likely more in line with intrinsic reinforcement pressure (presumably touch and sensorimotor engagement is a large part of it), again built into our neocortex via evolution.
Why fantasize about milking a cow? The yearning for applying one's intelligence, problem solving skills, cognition etc in this naturalistic context is just a high-level conscious representation of the ache some parts of neocortex feel when they don't get enough intrinsic reward, similar to feeling touch-starved. The associated mental imagery of touch-, body-, and vision-heavy activities which finds and incentivizes its online media correlate likely directly triggers some part of this desired sensorimotor integration. This phenomenon is likely shared between e.g. US and Russian population as you mention, as it is less culturally dependent and more biologically determined than you find palatable to admit.
Now to psychoanalyze you a bit (feel free to apply the method to me, I will be amused): you grew up on the farm and disliked forced manual labor (conditioning via negative reinforcement) which did not stress your superior verbal intelligence enough, also you habituated to the farm & natural environment and this happened during critical periods of development, so the associated opinions are likely an integral part of your identity. The farm is a closed, finished gestalt for you, unlike for a typical software engineer from middle class urban family (to deter too obvious reverse psychoanalysis: I have spent 30% of my childhood and adolescence in countryside, so I'm not a typical SV case either). You followed your intrinsic reinforcement which is mostly verbal, went through higher ed and ended up in lucrative position: this strongly reinforced the associated identity and worldview and you applied your verbal iq to write that blogpost trying your hand in writing a think piece (a genre associated with american brand of public intellectualism I could write a critical essay about, but won't), which, again, I find intellectually disappointing due to, at least, either a blindspot, negative disposition to, or professionally motivated disdain for discussion of the underlying neuroscience & biology of the matter, which would at least be interesting.
You say you can also rotate shapes, but it's obvious from your writing that you revel in playing with words and narratives first, all the rest is secondary. I found it so revolting for a person of our level of intelligence, I had to get out of read-only to comment on this. I also revel a bit in contrived language I use to deliver this, feel free to untangle it as you wish. I REPEAT: THE ROAD TO [SECULAR] HELL IS PAVED WITH VERBAL INTRINSIC REINFORCEMENT SIGNALING.
The econ-brained bs undercurrent and psychoanalysis angle on this with a fuckin Hofstadter quote is a cherry on the cake made of rationalization interlayered with cope. You would make a fine PoMo literary critic, and honestly that would be the right field to apply your talent. If you were intellectually fair while exploring this, you would end up like him: https://webperso.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
You can play with words all you like, but do not pretend seeking truth while doing so.
Read the game of glass beads and think about it, it might save your soul.
Cука за живое задел, блять. Ненавижу ваши офисы ёбаные и сьебался от них в горы к морю уже, очень ...
How do you say "I REPEAT: THE ROAD TO [SECULAR] HELL IS PAVED WITH VERBAL INTRINSIC REINFORCEMENT SIGNALING" in russian? I think I would understand it better in russian
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadEvery industry that has suffered from over production ends up cheapening and removing significant elements of artisanal beauty. If the AI hype is to be believed we are in the cusp of that for software engineering and just about any other knowledge work for that matter.
Fields -> factory -> office -> ?
Second, even if my job gets destroyed by changing tech that doesn't make farming an attractive option. It's dangerous, it wears your body down super hard, and the pay is garbage (which isn't very just tbh, but economics rarely are). I don't know what I'll do if my career goes up in a poof of smoke next year, but farming will be very low on the list no matter what I do.
I literally didn't start a software career until nearly 30 because I heard this growing up.
I'm growing very weary of all of these world-ending proclamations.
As AI takes over creative work, we won’t need humans to sit at a desk, so they can be employed in subsistence farming while AI VCs make record profits.
I wouldn't say it will suck the life out of you. I suppose that depends on your personality. But I'd agree that there's more physical labor involved, even today with modern machines, than most people fantasizing about the idea probably realize.
But even knowing how hard the work can be, there are days when I step away from the keyboard at 5pm and head out to shovel manure or harvest crops for a few hours with a lighter mood than I had all day, because there's something "real" about it that's refreshing after a day of working with the unreal.
So I get why people dream about it. I'd just warn them to spend a week or two's vacation as an "intern" on a farm to see what it's like before quitting the keyboard job and buying 40 acres.
Metaphorically, farming can be far less life-sucking. There is something refreshing about just getting stuff done without any of the corporate BS to navigate. I just think that a lot of people in the tech industry aren't seeing the downsides, and only see the ways in which it's better than their career.
I definitely wouldn't tell a tech guy with no farming experience to just jump into it. Get a few chickens or something, and see what it's like to depend on you for food and water every day, whether it's 100 degrees or a blizzard that day. Or plant a 10x10 garden in your backyard and see what it's like to pull weeds in July heat.
And don't expect to make money (or even break even) at it. Farming today only makes money if you go large-scale, which isn't what anyone dreams about, or if you find a niche and are really good at marketing something like artisan cheese. Even people who know what they're doing struggle to make that work.
The seasons dictate when a farmer will spend 16 hours a day in a tractor seat ploughing, or seeding, or spraying, or harvesting (and roping a friend in to drive chaser trucks behind the combine).
Eyestrain from watching the GPS screen, backache from chair springs getting old, cursing when the air conditioning malfunctions .. it's tough, demanding hard work fit only for RealMen™.
At other times of the year there's a lot of choice as to time spent welding, engine mechanics, radio mantainance, going over blueprints for new silos, contracts for grain, yarning with ag advisors, dropping trees on firebreaks, cutting rounds, feeding rounds into hydraulic splitters.
And more. So it goes.
All the farmers I know are active from dawn to dusk, sometimes quite active, often just idling along fettling something or another.
But hard physical labour every day all day long? That's 1930's pre mechanised talk for farmhand work. Picking stones off fields, drywall building by the foot, harnessing bullocks to haul water from the spring. Hand saw and axe.
Grapevine pruning and Grapes of Wrath harvesting is what farmers hire backpackers for .. and they get pnuematic cutters and fancy tools these days.
It is poor ergonomics and acute injury that does the damage to farmers and trade workers too. Work is physical but there is almost always a smart and safe way to do it.
Is it though? It's not like the repetitive work of milking cows or shoveling manure every day is any less of a drudgery than office work.
And, if anything, farmers hereabouts seem to be more prone to the sort of self-destructive behaviours you'd expect from people who's life lacks meaning. Drinking all you've earned for example. Or getting into fights over nothing in particular.
For many, the "homesteading" labor is an fulfilling and concrete complement to lucrative but abstract desk work, not a replacement.
It takes the place of idle hobbies like consuming more media on screens, lifting abitrary weights or running in place on a treadmill, etc
It's natural to assume we'd be pretty deeply wired to productively tend to our own lives and our own well-being in very concrete way, and many people who intentionally take up neglected homesteading tasks at their own pace and convenience often find it ameliorates many of the odd feelings of depression, anxiety, restlessness, etc that hung over them previously.
We probably shouldn't be doing anything in particular all day, but doing concrete productive things in a world where so many things are abstract and alienating can provide great balance.
Also have never probably experienced harvesting things in the heat. It fucking sucks.
Doesn’t the Financial Times periodically run a column called “How to Spend It”?
A hobby farm sounds like a lovely and wholesome alternative to some of the luxury pursuits they outline.
Cows also don't care how bad the weather is, you still need to wake up at 5 am and feed and water them :)
Most programmers don’t really seem to understand that programming isn’t really their job. It’s an illusion. Their job is to create value to the shareholders. That’s not really that much fun, and once the joy of writing and reading code is slowly squeezed away from their position is when those with sanity still intact start thinking “Man, I ought to get the fuck up out of here and find a real job or something.” The really lucky ones are outdoorsy folks that can afford to do the homesteading thing, or are willing to forego the immense compensation that tech work so often allures them with.
Just my two cents. I was blessed to retire in my thirties, so I could be entirely out of touch, though I hear many things.
It's the people we work with and for that turn the job into a dismal grind.
Why is farming or woodworking seen as less alienating than being at a computer?
And why does it feel so impossible for us to form the communities that would give us the kind of meaning that we really seem to desire when we're working in these sorts of positions? It seems almost universal that working at a computer means we feel isolated, even when we talk in meetings all day.
I think the nature part makes sense, after all, being in a field is certainly more natural than an office, but I think lots of farming is actually pretty lonely from when I've done it, with the exception of animals. But when thinking about the profession, it just feels more social. There's something there about the way we view types of work and their importance, almost metaphysically speaking.
The goal of capitalism is to get enough money to live on the revenue of your own wisely-invested capital instead of providing the wage labor paid for by other people's capital.
Capitalism's primary focus is production. The more you produce, the more you are rewarded. Quantity has better profit margins than quality. So the winner is someone who can produce the most and reach the most customers. Digital products happen to be the best for it. They are, relatively to other products, easy to scale, produce, and even easier to distribute. Quality needs to be just good enough to make a sale.
Capitalism's primary focus is ownership. Then you can let other people do the dirty work for you.
It's not that it has strictly to do with being outside or away from the computer (that's nice though) but for me it's that you still get to build and be proud of what you've done.
When I do work away from the computer and more in farm/homestead situations, I'm still drawn to using technology to solve problems (e.g. Automating certain tasks with microcontrollers), so it's not a rejection of my $job.
I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.
Have to disagree with the article though, I don't think it has anything to do with a mythos.
I think that for certain individuals that sort of mythological status ascribed to being a frontiersman or a person who can do everything themselves definitely influences how they perceive a potential job or method of living.
Thanks for reading though!!
Are you saying this from experience homesteading? Or from imagining what homesteading is like?
Once you get past the storybook fantasy version of homesteading, a lot of it is drudgery and unwelcome surprises. You may love finding and fixing problems now, but when the problems are coming faster than you can fix them, each one requires a lot of labor (or cash) to fix, and you haven't touched your fun project for months because you're too busy putting out critical fires, it doesn't seem so fun any more.
I'm sure doing homesteading at the fringes of Canada is different than doing it in the middle of Europe.
Of course farming and carpentry will be more fun to a software engineer who is doing it as a hobby or in retirement, than the work they did in their job. Even if you “switch” to it as a source of income, it is far different to have another career and set of skills to fall back on, than to be doing it out of necessity.
Golden handcuffs. I hate em too.
Now, every now and again, when I am stuck working late on a deal and all I want to do is go home and hack on my latest project, I wonder if I made the right choice. But ultimately I know I wouldn't be so excited to fire up an IDE if I relied on it for my livelihood.
As for farming, I grew up in a rural area so never had any illusions about it. I do admire the resourcefulness and ingenuity of many farmers, but I know it's not for me. Most of the retirees I know like to do "a spot of gardening" in their retirement, and honestly I think the kind of micro-scale "farming" a lot of office workers dream of is not that distinguishable from gardening, so many of them will probably get their wish eventually.
In conversations with the IT world, I have definitely found a pretty high level of romanticism" often associated with the idea of leaving the modern world behind, going off-grid and running a farm.
It dovetails with the same kind of naive transcendentalism that espouses that natural = good, a simpler kind of living, etc.
I would rather posit that most tech jobs have a negative societal impact and it's difficult to find a company which isn't focusing on fucking the maximum amount of profit out of their customers while utilising the cheapest lubricant.
But there are a lot of tech jobs that aren't like that as well, and I think people have similar feelings about wanting to escape into a more natural world in those ones too. The sum total of which are positive and which are negative is certainly up for debate though. I actually have another post I started writing about the negative second-order effects of certain outcomes of software development in the last decade or so.
Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other.
People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that.
Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives.
Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D)
Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week.
The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions.
We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life.
The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3
After some point you'd rather you didn't have to do that 9-5 at all and become depressed a bit by the fact you have to spend so much time a day on something that doesn't fundamentally concern you and you don't therefore fundamentally care about. The fact it takes up your time and energy, and you don't get to get out of it until you are old and worn out unless you hit some lottery in the meanwhile.
Eventually, you get tired of it. Doing something simple becomes ever more attractive. Me, I still teach tech, but I also build stone walls.
We were nice and tried to explain calorie counts per person for a year and micro nutrient requirements but we still laugh about that one. And that guy was in food service. Most people do not understand the complexity of our food supply, not only overconfident programmers.
"Plato saw Diogenes washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, 'Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn't now be washing lettuces,' and that he with equal calmness made answer, 'If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn't have paid court to Dionysius."
- Simplify (whether or not this is misguided, it's part of the appeal).
- Autonomy. Being able to, even partially, move off-grid decreases your reliance on society.
- Physical / nature. Sitting at a desk all day definitely has a toll.
There's several No true Scotsman comments here, but IMO there's nothing wrong with attempting this lifestyle. If someone decides (and can afford) to live more simply, it doesn't bother me any. Good for them!
I think the negativity might be because every frikin' one of them tries to turn into a snake oil selling influencer, and we're just seeing influencer fatigue setting in.
That scene in Office Space where he complains about having 8 different bosses really resonates with me.
I love programming, if I could get paid to work on what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted, I would (and hopefully at some point I will), but run of the mill corporate JIRA ticket churn isn't exactly something that deeply satisfies my soul, and I can understand fantasizing about getting as far away from that as possible.
> so few Americans are familiar with the actual work behind jobs in the agricultural sector or related ones, I would argue that for many Americans the reality of this type of work is almost indistinguishable from fables or myth in their psychological context, due to lack of exposure. Due to that seeming separation from their mental context of what work is, it enhances the feeling of escapism which this work-fantasy provides
These fantasies always seem perplexing to those of us who grew up with exposure to actual farming life. Running a modern farm is hard work. Taking it a step further to the idea of homesteading would bring unthinkable amounts of labor, difficulty, and a realization that the old office job wasn't so bad after all.
Of the few people who actually pursue these fantasies, it usually takes the form of a hobby farm or some backyard gardening with ample injections of cash to keep things moving.
Sure you save money by milking your cow, but how much is one vet visit? Unless it's in your blood, trying to go from techies to farmers is just stupid.
Edit to add: one of the principal differences between software and farming is we are one "git checkout" away from having another chance to fix it. In agriculture, you get another chance... next year.
I think when you're someone who grew up with exposure to the lifestyle of farming, it gets easier to see that the escapism is possible because of how rare it is for people to interact with people whose main employment is farming on a regular basis.
It is honestly pretty interesting from a historical perspective to think about what this means as a shift in the populace's opinion towards certain kinds of work, because we're really entering unforeseen territory in US history where no one will even really understand first-hand what a version of the US where the vast majority of humans living there are engaged in agricultural labor on a regular basis lookd like, if that makes sense.
I came to understand the "purposelessness" of my career very early on; when I decommissioned a bare metal server from a datacenter after finishing the deploy of it's replacement and realised that the old server was the first unit I'd racked when I started in the position 4 years ago.
That was ~20 years ago. Nothing I've had a hand in building / maintaining has "survived" for more than ~7 years.
My Dad worked to build houses. Prior to my IT career I'd laboured for him and played my small part in the creation of many homes around where I grew up. They'll be there for a hundred years maybe.
Quitting the ephemeral world of IT to work on building a homestead and creating tangible things that directly keep humans alive seems like an obvious calling to me.
The constant evolution of "tech" is a blessing and a curse.
The companies? The websites? Google, for example, has been in existence since 1998. If you're working on a farm, the crops don't live longer than a year. The livestock longer than that, but probably not decades - my (limited) understanding is that most cows are slaughtered around age 2 or 3. But the farm itself can, in certain circumstances, last for generations.
If you're talking houses, sure, solid walls can last decades, centuries, millennia even (cf the Pyramids). However, I think this is because stone is particularly durable. Roofs, windows, doors, anything that isn't made of really good masonry will tend to decay much quicker than that. Even states like the Roman Republic and Empire (which had probably a good ~2000 year run if we count from 509BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453) will eventually crumble and fall.
Now a tech company is a newer type of institution than a farm, but some of them are quite old - GE was founded in 1892. IBM was founded in 1911. We can also take Bell telephone and Standard Oil, both of whom were broken up by anti-trust cases, but whose descendants still live on today, as other examples of tech companies that have had lifespans similar to or greater than houses or farms.
Of course, I understand that "I built some software/racked some servers for a company 20 years ago and they're still business" isn't the same as "I put the bricks in that wall twenty years ago and the house is still there". So I agree that the individual artifacts we create in the tech industry are somewhat fleeting, compared to things made of metal and stone, even if, compared to things like music or other performing arts, where the song disappears the minute you stop playing, software running on computers is relatively lasting. And artifacts created with software, while they are a relatively new thing, may prove quite durable. Films made with Final Cut, or songs made with Pro Tools, or heck, even video games like Doom, may prove to outlast every house that you ever worked on. It's possible that 200 years from now, people will still be watching YouTube videos made today, even if, in a Ship of Theseus like fashion, every line of code and every server that YouTube is currently using has been replaced since then.
Some previous roles I was involved in solving "this could end the business" situations, so I do thank you for making me realise that I laid bricks (or more importantly; helped detect and repair serious foundation problems) for my employers.
I've worked for smaller companies, and have software I started in 2009 that I am still working on, literally up to 15 minutes ago. I enjoy working with the client, because they are building in an area that seems to be untapped for potential. I've moved across two programming languages, and two database systems, to keep the software running, and feel that my personal investment and belief in what my client is doing has helped push me in a direction where I am almost tied to this software as my client. It's a good feeling, and think perhaps you need a project like that for yourself. The benefit is that you are also homesteading, so you could learn IoT software for your homestead, even starting off with something simple like watching temperatures at night, or reading humidity readings to decide whether to water areas of your garden/food source.
I grew up with grandparents that lived off the land, mostly pushed from them growing up during the Great Depression. I wish I had known to ask more questions of them while they were around, but I did pick up a strong work ethic, along with what I picked up from my parents. Having a project that you enjoy goes a very long way towards keeping an interest in anything, whether it's IT or gardening of vegetables, flowers, or raising animals for meat or labor (or pleasure, but figured that fell outside of homesteading).
The only reason it broke is because, apparently, Django finally removed an API that they deprecated a while ago.
Half-assed solution I threw together as an intern in 1999? Still operating and foundational to this day.
Ah, well.
You wouldn't say that making a sandwich is pointless just because you'll need another one tomorrow. It let you survive and gave you the energy to do things.
The purpose of a server is what it was able to do for people while it lasted. The fact that it won't last forever doesn't take away that purpose.
In fact, I'm also very grateful that I got to try a wide range of shitty manual labor job as a student. So many people would kill for a cushy office job.
EDIT: Might I also add, I think some engineers - especially those that have reached FIRE, enjoy the idea of LARPing a homestead / farming life. If you have enough money to not feel the stress, you can have a smaller farm.
The harsh reality is that operating a small farm can be brutal. You're at the very bottom of the food-chain, as far as the agricultural business goes.
They still had some dairy cows though.. and I still remember (over 30 years later!) the almost physical wall of smell that assaulted you going into that barn when it was all closed up because it was -20ºF outside. Nothing romantic about that!
What gets me about the homesteading fantasy: it’s, like, so incredibly easy to disabuse oneself of the notion that digging up tubers is a good time.
Working a couple warehouse jobs when in college provided me with some valuable perspective.
I gotta admit, that on a day where it's just about chasing some elusive bug or bugs, even I say to myself: "What the hell did I do today?" even though I might have spent 8-10 solid hours actively working. If the bug is hard enough to find I feel like I accomplished nothing nor have anything to show for it.
And sometimes, when you add to the fact that as devs we have all these perks in the office like free snacks, being able to go out for lunch, free sodas, free coffee, or WFH etc. and for what? We accomplished nothing!
Conversely, you might meet blue collar workers who has to, absolutely has to commute to a job site (no WFH for them), busts their rear to get something real and tangible done. Like for example, setting up electrical, or building a frame, or fixing a major plumbing issue, or doing drywall, or painting an entire house, or doing an entire roof in the heat etc. And sometimes these people barely get their bathroom, lunch and/or coffee breaks. It really makes us seem spoiled in comparison.
And yes, I know that it's kinda denigrating to use the word "real" to describe anything but software, but, what I mean, is that most non-software people only understand finished and shipped software as real. They don't that understand DB schemas, software specs, MVPs, for example, etc. is also real as well. And they certainly don't understand time spent on thinking about data structures and algorithms as anything real or tangible. Especially if you spend most time planning properly before you code.
Anyways, we want to prove, at least to ourselves, that we can actually create something that everyone can see, touch, feel, pick up, eat, stand on, sit on, etc. And we want to prove that we can have same high standards and craftsmanship this kind of work that we have for code.
Yeah, some of us have a chip on our shoulder about that.
When I was growing up, the metric for having done something were things like: All the hay is baled and we moved it all into a loft, or we finished shingling the roof.
Working in a technical position, it feels much vaguer. Maybe I finished a project, but then again, maybe there's a bug, and I'm back working on what I thought was done. Maybe I made a tool accessible online, but now there's a new tech stack and my tool is irrelevant unless I update it. It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't.
It's interesting that it feels like that though, because I certainly didn't have to throw hay only one time, and I didn't have to scrape paint from a wall only one time. I suppose I'm interested in why it feels more real and less repetitive, and maybe part of that is what you point out, that people outside of the field just don't understand what the work that tech workers do consists of in actuality.
I feel this every time I touch CSS. Sometimes I spend hours just fiddling with it, and my code commit is a few characters. And what's worse, it's the thing I stumbled on in the first 10 minutes of debugging, but that, for some reason, never worked that I tried again out of desperation, after not getting anything else to work (an hour later) and that I'm now trying again for some reason. Yet, for some reason, it works this time. CSS makes me feel stupid.
An ex-manager had a phrase that stuck with me, that we are building the factories. Ultimately software gets used to do something, there are lots little "products" being emitted each time it is used. If you are looking at physical products on the shelf, people don't normally think "who fixes the factory that built this when something goes wrong? who makes the factory more efficient so the producer doesn't go bankrupt? who changes the factory when a new design needs to be produced?". This kind of work is rather ephemeral and Sisyphean by nature, so sometimes I like to remind myself that there are these tangible products people rely on but they are just a layer removed. (Nowadays I'm two layers removed - I build a factory to build factories, i.e. compilers and platforms and such).
(This particular business line essentially processed data - it was much more complicated than that but fundamentally was remote-sensing -> data-in -> data-out, so the "data factory" metaphore kinda made sense in that setting).
Most / all of software work, including coding, is actually architecture / design (at varying levels of zoom) the equivalent to construction in buildings is fully automated in software (compilation etc)
You’d be surprised at the number of people who don’t. The rise in popularity of vibe coding won’t do our industry any favors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tjic
There are a multitude of reasons why one might not like being a programmer, but most of them have nothing to do with programming itself. It's other people. Other engineers or managers or parasites. People who think antisocial behavior is okay, or worse, that it's the way to get ahead in life.
Toxic people make everything suck. I worked extremely hard to stop being even a little toxic. I wish more people would realize how their behavior affects others.
I like reading discussion on this topic. Not that I've ever seriously considered this, but still interesting to read about.
The difference is doing it out of necessity vs. doing it out of choice. Nobody fetishizes being worked to the bone in fear of making ends meet. Tech people are by and large well-educated and comfortable enough to dream of a utopia where they can be close to nature and do tasks that feel meaningful and human in an of themselves (vs. hyper-abstracted acronym-laden functional teams value-adds that often only provide the indirect satisfaction of "I'm doing my job and my boss is happy"). "I made a chair" and "I grew some carrots" are instantly relatable and valuable to anyone.
Source: I quit my tech job and moved to the woods 8 years ago, but would only do so because I don't need to worry about grinding a survival out of it.
The author gives strong wordcel vibes, it's sad to read tbh.
And no real insult taken if you see me as being pretty verbal, I am, though I can rotate a shape too as evidenced through my job.
Why fantasize about milking a cow? The yearning for applying one's intelligence, problem solving skills, cognition etc in this naturalistic context is just a high-level conscious representation of the ache some parts of neocortex feel when they don't get enough intrinsic reward, similar to feeling touch-starved. The associated mental imagery of touch-, body-, and vision-heavy activities which finds and incentivizes its online media correlate likely directly triggers some part of this desired sensorimotor integration. This phenomenon is likely shared between e.g. US and Russian population as you mention, as it is less culturally dependent and more biologically determined than you find palatable to admit.
Now to psychoanalyze you a bit (feel free to apply the method to me, I will be amused): you grew up on the farm and disliked forced manual labor (conditioning via negative reinforcement) which did not stress your superior verbal intelligence enough, also you habituated to the farm & natural environment and this happened during critical periods of development, so the associated opinions are likely an integral part of your identity. The farm is a closed, finished gestalt for you, unlike for a typical software engineer from middle class urban family (to deter too obvious reverse psychoanalysis: I have spent 30% of my childhood and adolescence in countryside, so I'm not a typical SV case either). You followed your intrinsic reinforcement which is mostly verbal, went through higher ed and ended up in lucrative position: this strongly reinforced the associated identity and worldview and you applied your verbal iq to write that blogpost trying your hand in writing a think piece (a genre associated with american brand of public intellectualism I could write a critical essay about, but won't), which, again, I find intellectually disappointing due to, at least, either a blindspot, negative disposition to, or professionally motivated disdain for discussion of the underlying neuroscience & biology of the matter, which would at least be interesting.
You say you can also rotate shapes, but it's obvious from your writing that you revel in playing with words and narratives first, all the rest is secondary. I found it so revolting for a person of our level of intelligence, I had to get out of read-only to comment on this. I also revel a bit in contrived language I use to deliver this, feel free to untangle it as you wish. I REPEAT: THE ROAD TO [SECULAR] HELL IS PAVED WITH VERBAL INTRINSIC REINFORCEMENT SIGNALING.
The econ-brained bs undercurrent and psychoanalysis angle on this with a fuckin Hofstadter quote is a cherry on the cake made of rationalization interlayered with cope. You would make a fine PoMo literary critic, and honestly that would be the right field to apply your talent. If you were intellectually fair while exploring this, you would end up like him: https://webperso.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
You can play with words all you like, but do not pretend seeking truth while doing so.
Read the game of glass beads and think about it, it might save your soul.
Cука за живое задел, блять. Ненавижу ваши офисы ёбаные и сьебался от них в горы к морю уже, очень ...
How do you say "I REPEAT: THE ROAD TO [SECULAR] HELL IS PAVED WITH VERBAL INTRINSIC REINFORCEMENT SIGNALING" in russian? I think I would understand it better in russian