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I work with my hands and I love it. Not only do I code, but during the day, I am renovating my house, shoveling horse manure into my garden, and caring for a f
by fnid2 16y ago
I work with my hands and I love it. Not only do I code, but during the day, I am renovating my house, shoveling horse manure into my garden, and caring for a flock of 9 chickens.
No one around me understands what I'm doing on the internet or what all these keystrokes mean. When they see a chicken coop I built, my beautiful tomatoes or home that looks 100x better than before I started on it, I get to see a look of appreciation for that work on their face.
Programming is abstract and the appreciation of it is only a surface level appreciation because they only see what's on the web page, not all the nuts, bolts, and pipes that make it work.
It sounds vain to want that appreciation, but I do. I spend thousands and thousands of hours building an elaborate web system, lots of them actually, and I barely get a smile. People don't even know what it is. How can they appreciate it?
When I work with my hands, I spend a couple hours painting a room and people are like, "Wow! That looks SOOOO much better!" Or "Did you build those chicken pens yourself? You should do that for a living, people will pay good money for pens like that!"
- mrvir 16y agoThat's a neat story :) Did one interior renovation myself with tight budget/schedule before we could move in. My wife still wonders how we survived that. I nowadays take very seriously the advice my in-laws gave me: "Concentrate on doing what you do best. Hire the pros for other serious work." PS Just wait, your computer skills will get you appreciation from the younger generations.
- shpxnvz 16y agoI nowadays take very seriously the advice my in-laws gave me: "Concentrate on doing what you do best. Hire the pros for other serious work." Ah, but you miss out on so much in life by focusing on only one thing. I've found much satisfaction by taking quite the opposite approach; to learn by doing as many different things as possible. Of course, it's also important to know your limits lest you wind up in over your head. http://elise.com/quotes/a/heinlein_-_specialization_is_for_insects.php http://elise.com/quotes/a/heinlein_-_specialization_is_for_i...
- fnid2 16y agoNice quote. I loved "Stranger in a Strange Land." Recommended reading for all...
- demallien 16y agoI understand what you're getting at, I have a huge amount of trouble trying to get people to understand what I do at the office. I even have trouble explaining it to java-land "enterprise" programmers. But, here's the thing. About 5 months ago I started working on a product that I am hoping will be the basis for launching my own start-up. This particular product was something that people could immediately understand was useful. It did some of those magical things that their computer does, and that they think they couldn't understand in a million years. And all of a sudden, instead of people's eyes glazing over, I started getting comments like "I really don't know how you do this stuff, that's amazing!" There seem to be two things that are important here - one is that you need to be working on a product that is user-facing, so that they can actually use what you have just made. The second thing is that it has to be done just by you, or by you and just a couple of friends. It was you, and not some faceless organisation that did it, even if you were a part of the organisation.
- kungfooey 16y agoIn my opinion, gardening/raising animals and programming work pretty well together. It gives you the opportunity to work outside in the evening (alongside family) and it's so different from our normal stock and trade that I ultimately find it refreshing.