[HN Gopher] Cottagecore Programmers
___________________________________________________________________
Cottagecore Programmers
Author : morleytj
Score : 53 points
Date : 2025-03-24 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tjmorley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tjmorley.com)
| simmerup wrote:
| 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
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| gibbitz wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| There's nothing special about engineers. A lot of knowledge
| workers spend their life in front of a screen now.
| recursive wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| But "retiring" to do leisurely amounts of farming is quite
| different than making it your career. It has always been a
| consideration for me.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| Guthur wrote:
| 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.
|
| Fields -> factory -> office -> ?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| Guthur wrote:
| 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.
| labster wrote:
| Fields -> manufactory -> factory -> office -> WFH -> fields
|
| 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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| I've met plenty of farmers who are obese and have a
| variety of musculoskeletal ailments.
| username332211 wrote:
| > 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| A career and a lifestyle are not the same thing.
|
| 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.
| jonnycoder wrote:
| 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.
| yayoohooyahoo wrote:
| 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.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I can simultaneously like and dislike parts of my
| career/job/company/coworkers.
| tekla wrote:
| 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.
| yimby2001 wrote:
| If you're not doing it for survival, you can just slack off you
| know
| tekla wrote:
| Sure, but now you're just larping because you can afford it.
| alwa wrote:
| I can think of worse hobbies...
|
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Yeah, but you can see why that's desirable right?
| tekla wrote:
| 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.
| yimby2001 wrote:
| 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!
| nottorp wrote:
| > Also have never probably experienced harvesting things in the
| heat. It fucking sucks.
|
| Cows also don't care how bad the weather is, you still need to
| wake up at 5 am and feed and water them :)
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| This was around before jira and agile, I think you're only
| partially right.
|
| It's the people we work with and for that turn the job into a
| dismal grind.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| yamrzou wrote:
| As a side note, I really like the writing style of this blog
| post.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| hatthew wrote:
| Agreed, it's eloquent without being loquacious, and has a good
| amount of engaging anecdotes backed up by research.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Midlife crisis is a saying for a reason. Many many people have
| them at some point.
| Apreche wrote:
| 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?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| 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.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thanks for reading though!!
| kulahan wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| I guess there is homesteading and homesteading.
|
| I'm sure doing homesteading at the fringes of Canada is
| different than doing it in the middle of Europe.
| dingnuts wrote:
| yeah, there's subsistence farming and cosplaying as a
| subsistence farmer. one's a lot more fun than the other :P
| Vegenoid wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| kulahan wrote:
| >Hard to say, since I need to keep it this way to make a
| good living.
|
| Golden handcuffs. I hate em too.
| 1986 wrote:
| 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
| Arch-TK wrote:
| 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.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| achenet wrote:
| 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
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| bradley13 wrote:
| 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.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| 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.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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?
| zeroq wrote:
| 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.
| dole wrote:
| 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."
| rapind wrote:
| I think there are a few reasons.
|
| - 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.
| achenet wrote:
| Huge agree with the "autonomy" part.
|
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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_.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| Grey hair sysadmin story time...
|
| 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.
| achenet wrote:
| > 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.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| 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).
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| 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!
| racl101 wrote:
| 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.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| racl101 wrote:
| > It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose
|
| 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.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| 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)
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Another TJ who's an occasional HN poster might have some insight
| here. @tjic is the author of "Escape the City: A How-To
| Homesteading Guide"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tjic
| moshegramovsky wrote:
| 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.
| jader201 wrote:
| I think this got caught by the flamewar detector. :(
|
| I like reading discussion on this topic. Not that I've ever
| seriously considered this, but still interesting to read about.
| morleytj wrote:
| RIP, I didn't realize there was a flamewar detector, I probably
| shouldn't have replied to so many comments, haha.
| jrowen wrote:
| _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.
| sinenomine wrote:
| 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.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think my primary motivator is simple autonomy. Feeling like I
| have some degree of control over my environment. I recognize that
| I can't do everything myself, but private taxi for burrito is a
| few steps too far.
|
| A few years ago something snapped and I started cancelling things
| like landscapers. Even trivial crap like mowing my own lawn and
| cooking my own meals is, on average, significantly more rewarding
| than sitting at a computer all day. There is definitely a
| psychological impact to letting other parties manage large
| aspects of your residence.
|
| If "shower thoughts" are helpful to you, try a few hours of hard
| labor in the sun. You may be amazed to discover how far the
| spectrum of background metal processing capabilities extends. Any
| notion that time spent at the computer is proportional to
| progress with code/work/etc. is absolutely insane to me. It's
| almost as if you get more things done on the computer the less
| you use it.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Extremely long post, eh?
|
| I think programmers - good ones at least - like building things,
| like seeing things go. We care deeply about what we can make in
| the world. We are in a OODA loop, where we put in effort, fix
| things, and they get better.
|
| But often building stuff becomes jammed up, organizationally.
| There's other people injecting priorities and concerns. There's a
| whole org, that's utterly dependent on us, that thinks it want
| things, but don't understand what we are bargaining over, doesn't
| have the essential capabilities to see the truths, affinities,
| struggles, and joys we feel. We're on our own island of empathy
| with products. And the outcome is always so unknown, riding this
| organization ship.
|
| The idea of going out there homesteading speaks, to me, to a
| desire to have a loop where there's less people injecting
| themselves. A very recent highlight from _Tools for Conviviality_
| (Ivan Illich, 1973) comes to mind,
|
| "Survival, justice, and self-defined work. I take these to be
| fundamental to any convivial society."
|
| Via
| https://bsky.app/profile/gordon.bsky.social/post/3ll5hgh3el2...
| nicbou wrote:
| For me, it's about having a tangible impact at a more local
| level. I make small software to solve specific needs and it feels
| just as good as making real objects.
|
| It's not so much about ownership, but about operating on concrete
| things that you can point to, instead of spinning up virtual
| machines in the cloud.
|
| Building software without agile or tickets or meetings feels just
| as good. It's what I've been doing for the last five years. It
| feels nice again.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily unique to programmers. I often
| heard the same sentiment expressed by (non-CS) postdocs, who
| longed to leave academia to become artisanal bakers or small-
| scale mushroom farmers.
| achenet wrote:
| It's interesting that the article notes an idealization of the
| yeoman farmer in the American urbanite's psyche.
|
| I spend a fair amount of time reading Bret Devereaux's
| acoup.blog, and one thing I learned from there was the
| idealization of the small, independent farmer by Rome's literary
| elite (who themselves were wealthy urbanites).
|
| History repeats itself, it would seem :)
| Animats wrote:
| The amusing thing is that either you're an unsuccessful farmer,
| and run ragged trying to keep up with the work, or a successful
| farmer, with employees and equipment and spreadsheets to organize
| the work.
|
| Or have "income from a publisher in New York", a criticism a
| contemporary made of Thoreau in his Walden period.
| montag wrote:
| Sometimes I feel more accomplished after sweeping the floor than
| I do after a whole day grinding in an IDE...
| anon291 wrote:
| This is not-invented-here syndrome extrapolated to the markets.
| darkstarsys wrote:
| Be a craft programmer. Create or join a small lifestyle tech
| company that understands the beauty of software, the importance
| of keeping your tools sharp and your technique polished. Avoid
| the giant soul-sucking companies where you're just a cog in a
| giant machine.
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