34 ms·

I no longer build software

• vncecartersknee 6y ago
  I haven't even written a single line of 'code' at work in maybe six months now, everything is done in xml configuration files, a bit of sql here and there. Last job before this was more or less the same. Since I was a kid all I wanted to do was be a programmer, I don't really even feel like an engineer or a programmer anymore I just feel like I 'use' a computer all day it's weird. It's like a totally different part of the brain. I think I actually hate computers but I've no idea how to do anything else.
• dbuder 6y ago
  If any of you soon to be woodworkers are in Sydney, let me know.
• cwoolfe 6y ago
  I'll seek to balance this conversation by providing another perspective. I've been working in the software industry for 10 years. I think it's a bit extreme to dismiss the industry entirely because of your experience or because it isn't what you thought it would be. It's possible to find a company that is a better fit, allowing you to do programming in a way you enjoy. It's also possible to start your own company doing it a better way. I worked as a freelancer on my own terms for awhile, and frankly, the pay was terrible and the 'freedom' wasn't all it's imagined to be; you still have to work for somebody if you want to get paid. Honestly, I've been much happier in corporations, especially ones that value teamwork, and camaraderie.
• jedimastert 6y ago
  My family actually has a long history of woodworking and furniture making (my last name means woodsmen, several generations of at least hobby woodworking, etc.) and as soon as I can move into a house (we were going to before the apocalypse but credit requirements shot up and being poor earlier in life has lifelong consequences) I'm going to pick up a few tools and work down Rex Kreuger's Woodworking for Humans series. That's not to say that I've lost my joy of making computers do my bidding (yet, I suppose...), I just also really enjoy working with my hands.
• mythz 6y ago
  Seems to be a heavy "all modern software development sucks" vibe in this thread, when the issue is more "software I get paid to write sucks". What software would you write if you could write whatever you wanted using whatever language/technology you wanted? Unless all the joy gets sucked out beforehand, pretty sure I'm going to move to be developing Mobile Apps after I retire. It was the most fun I've had writing Apps & my kids loved playing with them. We're now able to target super computers in everyone's pocket with an unprecedented array of capabilities using sophisticated high-level productive languages & tools with effortless access to global distribution, we've never had it this good.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > What software would you write if you could write whatever you wanted using whatever language/technology you wanted? What does it matter? After a 40+ hour work week developing bullshit, plus all the other demands on a modern adult's time, very few people, even those who like writing software, are going to want to sit down and write more.
    • xigency 6y ago
      I think it’s more the point that it isn’t the profession that sucks but the job. There are a lot of writers out there but few New York Times best selling fiction authors. We can’t saying earning a living as a writer sucks because most people write for blogs.
  • bob1029 6y ago
    Modern software development is incredible if you are able to avoid the buzzword bullshit and focus on delivering cool solutions that solve real problems.
    • sli 6y ago
      I've never worked a development job where I get any say in avoiding buzzwords or delivering solutions I would call cool. I typically get caught up in clients bikeshedding irrelevant details and managers enabling and promoting it. I hear so much on HN and on reddit about jobs that give programmers some level of autonomy but I just don't see it. My entire experience is very much the opposite, and I absolutely loathe this awful industry.
• buttholesurfer 6y ago
  I miss the self hosted monolith. It was so simple to maintain, deploy and share. Then someone wanted a service... then we added a microservice, then we added another, then we addeded docker, then we added 10 more services, then the build was so complex we hired a devops guy... then the builds were too complex, so we started dedicated devops team... Then we moved to the cloud... Gah we've done this to ourselves.
• FpUser 6y ago
  I build my own products and I get hired to create products for others. All in various different areas: desktop, web, firmware etc. So no I do not want to stop it. Sure I get board every once in a while when all design is done and now it is time to just write a lot of code (sometime budget allows me to subcontract) but overall I am happy and not planning switching to woodworking any time soon even though I am an old fart. I do lots of physical activity though to keep in good shape and this I think helps with programming part as well.
• Igelau 6y ago
  Interesting approach to issue resolution: propose workarounds, well-actuallys, and nitpicks for three years and maybe the reporter of the issue will eventually switch careers.
• buitreVirtual 6y ago
  A colleague recently discovered by chance that his goat cheese vendor at the farmers market in his local town is, or was, a zfs developer.
• jamil7 6y ago
  The golden handcuffs are real, good on him for getting out.
  • k33n 6y ago
    The dude lives in Indonesia. Not sure he ever saw much of a reward for writing software, sadly.
    • czechdeveloper 6y ago
      I see Boston, MA on his github profile
    • 101008 6y ago
      If you get a remote job living in a 3rd world country you are in the top 1%.
      • glaberficken 6y ago
        That is an exaggeration. Don't forget that most "3rd world" countries also have their own pornographically wealthy elites blocking out the top 1%. The differences are in the distribution of the middle/bottom tiers. A remote job gets you at most into what should be a confortable middle class position.
    • koolba 6y ago
      Doesn’t his profile say he works (worked?) for Teradata. I doubt he was doing that for tips.
    • W4ldi 6y ago
      > saw
    • vbezhenar 6y ago
      From my experience, writing software in 3-rd world country is a reliable way to get out of the poverty. Some example numbers for Kazakhstan: average salary for many low-skilled labour workers is around $100-$200 per month. Average salary for junior software developer is at least $500 and you would quickly reach $1000 and very skilled developers might get $2000+ per month. The same is true for Russia or Belarus or Ukraine, AFAIK. Wages are even higher there. And I'm talking about building software for internal clients. Outsourcing or remote work allows for even higher salaries. I'm not entirely sure why the market works this way. It's not like any random software developer can go remote and compete with the rest of the world. But it works. I'd really be interested to learn whether Indonesian situation is similar or not.
• pantulis 6y ago
  Is this an official Docker repository? Why hasn't any other team member answered?
  • mrtbld 6y ago
    The person is not a maintainer of the project but the one who opened the issue.
• pliftkl 6y ago
  This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.
  • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    > passive income Just curious: is this income 100% passive?
    • brtkdotse 6y ago
      There’s no such thing, there’s just varying degrees of risk vs leverage.
      • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
        Of course there is, within a defined timeframe. If I bought 5-year government bond last year, then this year it's 100% passive income to me. I don't have to do absolutely anything in order to get it this year.
  • busterarm 6y ago
    Add me to the list of software developers who desires to switch to woodworking/machining.
    • secondcoming 6y ago
      I too would love to do it. It irks me to this day that I was taught nonsense such as latin in school instead of woodwork or metalwork.
      • mercurysmessage 6y ago
        In my High School I didn't learn Latin, but I did learn some wood and metal working, and also a little bit about engines.
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-) As I told a friend yesterday: this is fashionably called "event sourcing" these days :).
• bhaak 6y ago
  For all the possible reasons to hate this job, adding a RSS feed to anything is very low on my personal list. I'd even say I enjoy adding a RSS feed to anything. There are not enough RSS feeds out there.
• CyberRabbi 6y ago
  Sounds like a humble brag to stroke his own ego. Wood working grunt work is virtually infinitely less intellectually stimulating than software grunt work. If he’s working for himself now, good for him but the comment just comes off as superfluous and pretentious
  • shultays 6y ago
    This sounds like a humble brag to stroke your own ego
    • CyberRabbi 6y ago
      How so?
      • simondelacourt 6y ago
        As you've laid your judgement of your woodwork on all woodwork, and thus have concluded that all woodwork is less intelligible than all software building. I know this is an interpretation, and not verbatim. But it might be sensible to be a little bit less strongly opinionated on the levels of work being intelligible, as its just an opinion, and would not consider it a fact. The work I do on software I consider as relatively intelligible, but the woodwork I do, requires as much of my brain as the programming, just in a whole other area of my brain. Your harsh judgement on the matter is just rather irrelevant, it works for him, it tickles his brain, and was just an honest response on github, no need to get trolled here on HN.
        • CyberRabbi 6y ago
          > thus have concluded that all woodwork is less intelligible than all software building If you read my initial comment carefully you’ll see that I’ve made no such conclusion.
  • newyorker2 6y ago
    I couldn't stimulate myself intellectually reading your comment :(
• jb1991 6y ago
  Amen. Modern software development is frankly kinda sucky. The old days pre-2000 were arguably a lot more enjoyable. Today it's just digital plumbing and dealing with all sorts of issues that are not creative. The sheer complexity is frankly absurd as well. I've thought about moving on from software many times, and I know many who have. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's best way to spend your short life. Not to mention that sitting in front of a computer all day is not the best use of one's body.
  • kossTKR 6y ago
    Okay so it seems most people here on HN hates their jobs? That's sad but i think its not unique. Web dev was especially insane during the IE era, more than today. Most people just hate their jobs, it's nothing unique to the tech sector and i would argue that tech is still a pretty comfortable niche to work in compared to most other fields. Doctors have extreme debt and work crazy hours, teachers get way too little, manual labor is very tough on the body, journalism is dead etc. - it seems to me that everyone i know just "has a hard time" because of information-overload, 24/7 connection, lowered real wages etc. I.e systemic issues at the core. That said i also want to get more zen, cut back, transition to more resilience - but tech is not uniquely bad, and while i also have dreams about transitioning to more entrepreneurial roles or "moving into nature" - i still can enjoy "the chaos" of modern development / design - and this really is the key i think: to accept the mess, the imperfection, that no one knows what the hell they are doing in most sectors. Drop the fake self imposed yuppie consumer self policing and perfectionism mindset and just accept that we live in a crazy part of history where everything is obsolete after 5 minutes, so just do what you find acceptable, try to scrape some money together and remember to appreciate the fact that at least you are in a sector where it's pretty easy to be an entrepreneur if you want to - compared to a lot of other people who have no idea about how to get started or jump ship. Years ago if everything went awry i would stress out, be afraid of angry clients, be angry at myself - today i relax, i am interested and laugh at the complexity, and if someones angry i don't care, the world is crazy, we are monkeys living in a world not made for our biology, it's future tech dystopia/utopia right now, no one is able to piece something together that works for a long time anyway, it's mostly not my fault, but i still try to do my best. This mindset has helped more than a lot.
• draw_down 6y ago
  Yeah. Obviously there are those who enjoy it, but this line of work is kinda the pits. Best you can do is try to be well compensated so you can hopefully stop doing it soon enough. Can’t wait to do anything else.
• devwastaken 6y ago
  This is what Ive shifted to as well. Trades are much more useful in life, because you can't pay to get a job done right, and paying anyone else at all is far too expensive. For most people you have the reality of needing a 40 hour week job to live, and there's plenty of people who spent the 4 years to get a bachelor's in compsci and nobody cares to hire them. Software is volatile, you can spend plenty of time making something that will not work and won't be at all useful. Reality is the software job market sucks, and people have to learn how to build their own houses or else become stuck as rent slaves.
  • nicbou 6y ago
    I disagree. I really enjoy woodworking, but it's definitely not to save money. Same for working on motorcycles. The former is rendered useless by economies of scale, the latter by the cost of my garage and tools.
    • devwastaken 6y ago
      Woodworking is apart of a series of skills that transfer to other useful trades. Hard to make buildings if you don't know how the basics of how wood works.
      • nicbou 6y ago
        I didn't pick up woodworking to build a house. If that was my goal, sticking to programming would be the fastest way to get a house built. My ability to make money from programming far exceeds my ability to save money by doing anything else. If it was about the money, I wouldn't rent a garage, fill it with tools and spend my weekends building subpar furniture for twice the cost (a common woodworking trope). I'd just have it shipped to my door.
        • bcrosby95 6y ago
          I probably average to about $50/hour programming. Last time I hired someone to fix something in my house I ended up paying about $350 for 1.5 hours of work. Physical materials was just a low voltage cable. I had a plumber quote me $1300 to replace a $250 part that just screws on/off. I did it myself in a few hours. Since I work on salary, one of the best ways for me to get more money is to save mine by not paying overpriced contractors to fix things around my house.
• irjustin 6y ago
  This goes hand in hand with "On the Use of a Life"[0]. Please, do what you truly want. Many if not the majority of individuals on this forum have the opportunity to do so. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865
• laurentdc 6y ago
  I used to work in a kitchen for a while. My back hurt most of the time and I always had burns or cuts somewhere, but I was definitely way more happy. Mentally for sure. Also the feeling of building something, I feel like peeling a potato is more enjoyable than shipping modern frontend.
• nicbou 6y ago
  Add me to the woodworking ex-developers. I built a website that pays the bills, and now I have a lot of time on my hands. I am finishing my first piece of furniture today. It's pretty scary to work without an undo button. The physical world isn't just instructions, but movements. A little twitch can ruin a cut. A clumsy movement can dent a piece of wood you spent an hour sanding. You truly experience the meaning of "measure twice, cut once". Resources also feel tangibly limited. You can't just spin up another server, you must drive across town to buy more lumber. I still enjoy coding though. My passion for it returned once I could do it on my own time, without stakeholders, sprints, meetings, deadlines or even schedules. I sit down and work until the coffee wears off, then go do something else. It's a hobby again. I don't think programming is the probkem. Anything you do 40 hours a week for other people will get to you just the same. Programming is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered.
  • Jupe 6y ago
    Count me as one switching my "hobby" from programming to woodworking (even with the astronomical lumber prices these days). I started with some outdoor tables, and now I'm building a woodworking shop in my garage... and LOVING it. It so much more satisfying than figuring out another distributed TX compensation mechanism! But, I also don't want to start a business doing woodworking. The last thing I want are clients yammering for "seven red lines"; this is something I'm doing as a hobby. I may offer-up a few furniture items on a local for-sale app or a craft show app... but I will try and resist the urge to create a better local craft show app, or a wood inventory/cut-list app, or a simple CAD app, etc.
  • robviren 6y ago
    Hit the nail on the head. Work is work and it drains passion out for most people. Obviously not all cases, but at least I feel of you are looking for purpose and joy from work you may be looking in the wrong spot.
    • domepro 6y ago
      Agreed. Loving something and it turning into a real job with all the added fluff/protocols/whatever (things like talking to customers, having to do marketing, having to meet deadlines and such) will suck up everything you think you love about it and make it feel bad once it's in the real world with actual constraints and dependencies. It's no longer only you and it, it's no longer exploring and playing in the sandbox. From what I've heard from other sources, it's kinda like what people call being a grown up.
• clvx 6y ago
  I would like to see a tool to view the level of contributions(money, time, etc) to other projects (tech or not)of people requesting features to define a line of moral urgency.
• axegon_ 6y ago
  Strangely enough, to a degree I envy this guy. I've been at my current job for over 8 years and up until a few months ago I was pretty happy. However politics caught up and I decided to leave. At the moment I have a few offers on the table, one of which is from a company somewhere in the FAANG realm. Senior software engineer, awesome conditions, very generous paycheck, lots of benefits. So tempted by all this I said I'd take it. A few days later I got an email from a third party company, which had been tasked to do a background check on me. Which is fair - employment history, criminal records, education history - sure, I can understand that. However I got really suspicious when I saw their form and how much detail they required for what are otherwise simple checks. I decided to investigate the company before I move forward and it turns out their background checks involve a lot of... Background. As far as digging through social networks and message boards and pulling comments and likes on things which can be considered "inappropriate" and "offensive". That alone is enough for me to turn down the offer and move on with the next one. But looking at the extreme alternatives in this scenario, I take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat - at least I get the chance to keep my pride and dignity.
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    > I take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat I wouldn't make so light of that.
    • snazz 6y ago
      Totally off-topic, but the automatic blade brakes on modern table saws are really cool. It runs a current through the blade, so when something moist like your finger or a hot dog gets too close (maybe using capacitance?), it automatically drops the blade and instantly stops it with a single-use brake mechanism. Better to destroy the $100 blade-and-brake assembly than to lose a finger.
      • roel_v 6y ago
        Those videos show up in my Youtube feed the last few weeks too (although these saws have existed for many years now), but I still wonder - why do they always use hotdogs in the demo videos? Can't they find anyone who's willing to risk a finger, or is it something much more boring like OSHA rules or something?
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  [Peter and Lawrence are working on the crew cleaning up the burned Initech building] Peter Gibbons : This isn't so bad, huh? Makin' bucks, gettin' exercise, workin' outside. Lawrence : Fuckin' A. Peter Gibbons : [nods] Fuckin' A.
• katsume3 6y ago
  I find myself writing less code these days, not because I'm lazy, but because I can borrow so much already-written code from people now, thanks to things like Github and the Internet in general. I am a firm DRY[0] enthusiast, and also, a /Don't Repeat Other's Efforts/[1] enthusiast and it pains me to solve an already-solved problem. Sadly there are people out there calling me a 'Stack Overflow developer' in that I copy and paste code, but I find immense joy in challenging most of that code and tinkering with it to find a solution that fits my needs. In other words, I rarely use a snippet of code ad verbatim. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel
  • DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    DRY is a good principle when you're aiming for effective product development, but that doesn't mean it's the most fun. I often find myself reinventing the wheel in my private projects, not because I couldn't easily find a library that already does what I want, but because I enjoy that sort of "DIY-Programming". I want to think about all the messy details because it's one of the things that makes programming fun for me. Maybe this depends a lot on the individual. Some might find my way of enjoying code very boring, as I'm just messing with low-level stuff and not getting that much done. To me it would feel very exhausting to be writing glue-code all the time without messing with the internals of the systems I'm working with and recreating them myself every once in a while. As a general advise to new developers: Find out what you enjoy about coding and always keep that in mind, be it while looking for a job or starting a new private project.
  • Havoc 6y ago
    I’d say don’t repeat it if you could do it yourself. Tinkering and learning invariably involves covering some ground others have trodden on before
• microcolonel 6y ago
  LoL, just go build some software dude. In the last two years I wrote a compiler, a brand new log store, heaps of other things, and I did them while doing my job. If you actually care about your craft and can say no from time to time, the amount of interesting work you can do is limitless from the perspective of human capability.
  • robjan 6y ago
    But that's not what he wants to do.
    • microcolonel 6y ago
      Whoopse, didn't mean this as a global comment.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• GrumpyNl 6y ago
  Keep it simple, build what you need. This is so hard to get through peoples heads, now the most simple landings page seems to need react. Im 61 and still love to code but the hoops and loops you have to jump through these days to host a web page is absurd. I can not emphasize this enough, keep it simple.
• mauvehaus 6y ago
  Holy shit, this is me! A couple things to clarify: I posted the original issue as a minor complaint about the docker cli and promptly forgot about it. I never expected it to get any traction or follow-up. At the time I posted it, I was working as a contractor for my former full time employer. I had left full-time work there in early 2017 to attend the full-time program at the (sadly now-defunct) Furniture Institute of Massachusetts[0]. I finished that program in early 2019, and split my time between commission work and part time work for other woodworkers. Like software, in woodworking there are things you learn at school and things you learn doing it for money. In early 2020 (which now feels like a million years ago), my partner and I left the Boston area for her to take a job in the northern hinterlands of NH. It's been an interesting year to say the least: A lot of the opportunities I was hoping to have to publicize my business have been canceled (craft shows and fairs, open studios, etc) due to the pandemic. I'm fortunate to have brought a couple of paid commissions with me when we moved. Owing to the pandemic, the schedule on them has been protracted. I was going back and forth to Boston to fulfill a teaching obligation until early March. Then the pandemic hit, and all of my suppliers and my shared shop space[1] closed down for a couple months. Just before the shared shop closed, I grabbed my workbench and set it up in my living room. The place we're renting doesn't have a basement, garage, or anything resembling shop space, so that was the least bad option. I bought wood for a couple of house projects, and got going working entirely by hand. The first project was a desk for my partner. I built it following the design for a staked work table from the Anarchist's Design Book[2]. She's been working at it since, and we've been doing our best to manage my noise and her Zoom calls separated by perhaps as much as 20 feet. Sometime in late May or early June things started opening up slowly. I bought wood for those projects, and the shared shop space began operating with extremely limited hours. I've wrapped up those couple of projects, and honestly, the next thing on my TODO list is to spend some time doing some business planning, re-shooting some of my earlier work, and updating my website[3]. Bad timing on the pithy github comment on my part; had I known it'd hit the top of HN, I'd have made it after I updated the website! If you're in the Boston area and would like to see some of my work, the Cabinet on Stand shown on my website is on display at the Fuller Craft Museum[4] in Brockton, MA through November 8th. It feels a bit weird to mention it, but that piece is also for sale through the museum. Purchasing it supports not only me, but also the museum. They were closed for a long time this year as a result of the pandemic, and like a great many of our cultural institutions, they're hurting. They laid off the curator for the exhibit my piece is in due to budget issues. If I can offer everybody only one thing to get out of this, it's that our cultural institutions live a fairly fragile and perilous existence, particularly the smaller ones. The Wharton Esherick Museum[5] in the Philadelphia area is also taking a beating. Please, please, please take some time to support these institutions. A lot of our shared culture doesn't make it to the MFA. Those headline institutions show a limited subset of stuff; there's so much of value in the smaller museums, galleries, and historical societies. [0] http://furnituremakingclasses.com http://furnituremakingclasses.com [1] https://claremontmakerspace.org https://claremontmakerspace.org [2] https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anarchists-design-book https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anar... [3] https://longwalkwoodworking.com https://longwalkwoodworking.com [4] https://fullercraft.org/event/2020-biennial-members-exhibition/ https://fullercraft.org/event/2020-biennial-members-exhibiti... [5] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org https://whartonesherickmuseum.org
• notacoward 6y ago
  Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the way software is packaged and deployed to the horrific attitude toward testing or documentation to the biased interview processes to ... I could go on forever. I know some of that perception is mere nostalgia or other effects of my own age, but by no means all and I honestly feel less than half. Building software was never simple or easy. We've gained a lot of knowledge that makes it easier because you don't have to build quite as much from scratch, but we've more than made up for that by making it unnecessarily hard in every other way. Taking the simplest change from idea to production involves so many steps, and not even the steps that assure it's correct or maintainable. It's feeding the beast we built ourselves rather than the one born of necessity. I sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it. Some day most of you will get over the dollar-induced Stockholm Syndrome that seems universal among junior developers, but by then you'll be stuck on that train to hell. Good luck to you.
  • nobody2323 6y ago
    Stop building web apps. A terribly wrong turn was taken about two decades ago. Your problem is you're building web applications. Desktop development is the Once And Future King of computer functionality and personal productivity.
    • notacoward 6y ago
      FYI, I have built a great many things in my career but not one of them was a web app. Mostly, it has been data storage systems, from single host to few hosts to many hosts to one of the largest three or four such systems in the world. But hey, great guess.
  • tinyhouse 6y ago
    I keep saying it. Building software in tech sucks. The process, the people who complicate everything, all the unnecessary features that bloat the code, spending all your day reviewing pull requests, etc. But building software in general is fun. For me it's also not so much about the software but about the business. When the business motivation is clear and I believe in it, then I'm motivated to build software. And when I say business motivation it can even mean me wanting to learn something.
• WillAdams 6y ago
  It's kind of interesting to me that at least one other notably talented programmer, Glenn Reid, formerly of Adobe and author of "The Green Book" and developer of Touchtype.app and PasteUp.app chose to move on to building furniture by hand. By way of contrast, I've been trying to puzzle out how to do woodworking programmatically which has been an interesting exercise, since traditional CAD/CAM is quite limited in its assumptions, and the tools which are accessible to me (in terms of them matching how I think/work and having an immediate, applicable preview): BlockSCAD and OpenSCAD are rather limited in their ability to export files (DXF, SVG, STL) --- in particular, I'd like the ability to write out a text file w/ full control over the contents, but that's not viewed as a valid request by the devs. Making progress though: - http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-2/tb125adams-3d.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-2/tb125adams-3d.pdf - https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/3d-project https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/3d-project I just wish it were easier to make G-Code in 3D (unfortunately, I don't find the obvious tool at tplang.org very workable with my approaches).
• httpne 6y ago
  I personally think programming is a terrible job. In these threads, there are always people who say "it isn't programming, it is x", where x is "poor management", "the fact that it is a job", "the type of programming you are doing", etc, etc. It isn't, it is programming. Anyway, I want to go one step further and return to a more ancient living style. I don't want things like artificial light, computers, etc, to be a significant part of my life. The best time I have ever had, even to this day, was when all of those things didn't exist.
  • alexmingoia 6y ago
    https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg
  • thih9 6y ago
    > The best time I have ever had, even to this day, was when all of those things didn't exist. Watch out for Rosy Retrospection [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
• cowmix 6y ago
  Look, software always sucked and has always been enjoyable. It depends on where you are on your personal journey. I've been around long enuff to have suffered true burn-out more than a few time. When I take the 30K view, in the almost 40 years I've been tinkering with software, people have never had it so good. Super enterprise grade software is available to tinker with, for free, and can run on your freakin' phone. If you want to go super low level and screw with assembly language, knock yourself out.
• intotheabyss 6y ago
  I'm a mechanical engineer in aerospace looking to move to software. I like the idea of setting up an office at home and working for myself. Is software really this bad, as all of the comments here suggest? Should I make the jump to software from a career in which I have a decade of experience? I just find aerospace boring, unimaginative, stressful and low paying, and if I could work on just building code for web apps or whatever, I'd much rather do that, even if the pay was 'only' 50k per year, but with the benefit of working for myself.
  • hamaluik 6y ago
    I think the grass is always greener on the other side. I have a BSc and MSc in biomechanical engineering, was never able to get / keep a job in engineering for long but what I did do sucked—way more rote activities and way less actual problem solving than I was promised. Fell back to software development, my pay has gone up considerably but it is still a lot of rote activities and less problem solving than promised. So far the most interesting stuff I've gotten to do was when working either alone or on a very tiny team (2-3 people)—then you still have a ton of boring work, but you also get some interesting stuff too. As with any "mental" job, I find I work best when I balance it with a "physical" job on the evenings / weekends, such as renovating my house or basically doing anything with my hands. When physical jobs were my paycheque, all I wanted to do were mental things in the down time, now its flipped. Neither is necessarily better or worse, though I do enjoy the flexibility that software allows / requires.
  • tumetab1 6y ago
    It's not as bad it might appear from this comments. People are just generally bad managing their own careers and really figure out what they enjoy/want. This means that you should clarify better what do you want in a software job. Besides working from home, what do you want? Relax workflow? Adrenaline rushes from doing fixes in live/production systems? Do you know work on technical or business features? Does the tech matter (new/legacy) for you? Do you enjoy mastering a tech or just make software work? How much payment is worth a worse job? My suggestion is that you write down what's your ideal software job and review it several times. Then it's a "simple" tasks of reaching for it and keep your expectations in check.
• throwaway8941 6y ago
  This is a privileged position to take. IT is one of the very few ways to have a relatively decent life in my third world (well, technically second world) country, especially for those of us who can't rely on nepotism to put them in a comfortable place. Sure, I can go make furniture out of wood for $150 a month (and I did at some point in my life), but I'd rather keep my cushy lifestyle and stare at a screen for 16 hours a day, thank you very much.
  • notacoward 6y ago
    Good for you. No, really. I wish you nothing but the best. But that's now. After some years, when you have already secured a relatively decent life, your perspective on the value of continuing to do it might change. In fact, it would be rather amazing if it didn't. Yes, it's absolutely a privileged position, but it's still how I feel and how I suspect a lot of programmers my age feel. You can't dismiss our reality any more than we can dismiss yours.
    • fsloth 6y ago
      I don't think you can secure a decent life by programming outside of US - if this is understood as position of comfortable financial independence. I'm a programmer, my income is in the top 10th percentile, but that just means I'm in the upper middle class with the privilege to pay more taxes. I need to work until I get to retirement to secure myself financially.
      • notacoward 6y ago
        > I need to work until I get to retirement That is true by definition. No matter how much or how little you make, it remains true. The question is: when do you get to retirement? Making a lot of money makes it a lot sooner.
        • fsloth 6y ago
          In my country I get to retirement when the government says I can go - more or less. Otherwise the pension is really small. To explain: a large chunk of our salary goes to the state's pension fund - not my fund. When I reach the official retirement age the government will allow me a pension that is scaled based on my payments while employed. At this time I'm looking at 3 decades on front of keyboard (am 40 and the official pension age for me will be around 70).
• lxrbst 6y ago
  While I occasionally dream about working on cars or motorcycles at times instead of sitting in front of a computer all day, I think we tend to forget how good of a career developing is. When we picture our dream of doing a simple trade, we only think of the most awesome part of that trade. If I'm a car mechanic, most of it too is just trivial oil and tire changes or changing a basic part of two - not working on engines in depth. Same with programming. We would want to build something cool from the ground up, but we are just piping stuff from a lib to another. Comparing woodworking to corporate code is unfair anyway. I'd rather compare working at a furniture factory to corporate code, and woodworking to a solo dev project.
  • XCSme 6y ago
    > most of it too is just trivial oil and tire changes or changing a basic part of two I bet that it feels better and more rewarding than updating a dependency and spending 2 days fixing all the errors caused by updating, especially knowing that you will have to do the same thing in a few months. There is something that feels good when you create/fix/improve a real object compared to a software one.
    • douglaswlance 6y ago
      As someone who works on engines and writes code, let me tell you that the feeling is exactly the same. All complex systems stir up the same emotions. It's frustrating as can be when it doesn't work, and it feels great when it finally does work. As a human, dealing with complexity is all the same, no matter the medium.
      • XCSme 6y ago
        I do agree that "complex systems stir up the same emotions", but I was more referring to the simpler systems. I enjoy putting the dishes back into the cupboard a lot more than I enjoy moving icons on a desktop.
      • samatman 6y ago
        I know it's cliche, but Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has some of the most valuable advice for software development I've ever imbibed. His description of the feeling that something is going wrong, and of the emotional shift required to change frame before making the problem worse, that's saved me from more bad decisions than I could count.
• Chris2048 6y ago
  The question is, why is it all so BS. I think the answer is, whenever you get to any kind of scale, you leave the logical world of engineering discipline, and enter the corporate world of product infighting. Who hasn't tried a small, personal project just as a clean walled-garden-of-the-mind to relax in, free from the reality of real software. I think every SWEs dream is that all software will be just as clean. But Companies don't create frameworks to improve or optimise, they create them to own and dominate. The airwaves are bought and sold by private concerns. specs and APIs are hidden, "amazing journeys" are had by the few on the back of the many, and we end up as the paid expert tinkerers of the war-machines of someone else's empire. The FLOSS question is more important now than ever: How can we fix the social and economic systems of hard/soft-ware, and complex systems in general, to end up with flawless, frictionless sci-fi engineering impossibilities, rather than the janky, baroque "modern web".
  • qw 6y ago
    I think one of the problems is that a lot of the management methods are built for the lowest common denominator. Juniors and mediocre developers who "need" direction and strict structure. Micro management is easier than creating a culture where developers are empowered to make independent decisions, based on shared goals and understanding. At some point talented developers grow out of that role and start looking for an escape.
    • Chris2048 6y ago
      But I see the same everywhere at many levels. There seems to be some effort to "commoditise" development. Nice idea, but only really the committed expertise and resources of Microsoft or equivalent could achieve this - all other attempt devolve to some form of micromanagement.
• davexunit 6y ago
  Seems like lots of people here can relate to this. As time moves on I find myself doing less programming and more gardening and woodworking.
• tambourine_man 6y ago
  Software can still be a lot of fun, even more so today, when we can make huge stupid mistakes and things still mostly work. You just have to work on things you like, instead of what's fashionable or high paying.
• DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building interesting things anymore. Most of the available programming work is really just writing glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the point where it can feel more like writing configuration files than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these days is scripting. On the other hand, you have lots of fun things one can do with code, from building weird experimental things that lack any real-world application but are very interesting to think about to simply recreating some of the giants of the software world in creative ways or in different languages to get a better appreciation of their inner workings and the principles behind them. None of that has any value from a busyness perspective and nobody will pay you for it. The way I feel about programming is in equal parts as an art and as engineering. The weird obsession of the IT industry with treating code as a resource that has no purpose other than create wealth is absurd and, I believe, one of the reasons why many programmers end up disillusioned and simply drop programming altogether, both as a job and as a hobby.
  • bserge 6y ago
    That's the case in most industries. Find me one that isn't just about the daily grind and making money. In construction, you could do cool stuff, and do things perfectly, but people want "normal" and time is money so you need to work fast. If you have an auto repair shop, you could build an EV from scratch. But you're getting paid to fix other people's cars. Even if you do tuning and modding, it's all just standardized shit that you buy and install. Woodworking, farming, networking, accounting, anything really is 90% grind, with a select few getting the chance to have fun while getting paid.
    • krageon 6y ago
      So what you're saying is that it's indeed shit, just like everything else?
      • bserge 6y ago
        Yes, however when everything is shit, perhaps it's our mindset that needs to change. Learn to enjoy what we've got, because while you can try getting into a better position, it really might not get better. And there's nothing wrong with that.
• trey-jones 6y ago
  I've recently wondered how the stresses of software development would compare to the stress of knowing my family might starve if the crops fail or that we could be set upon by brigands and murdered. I mostly make this comparison in jest, and probably as a result of having read several novels in the last 12 months that deal in various ways with the decline of civilization. However, our ancestors also probably slept better than we do and dealt with the stress naturally as part of their daily physical requirements. I'm not suggesting it would be more fun, but I wouldn't argue if you told me it was healthier, and maybe even happier.
  • hajderr 6y ago
    In physical work you have a natural outlet for that stress. Confining everything to your upper body, and even one part of it (the head) is gonna cause even more stress.
    • eloff 6y ago
      Yes, I think that physical exercise helped a lot. I go the gym every weekday at 3pm, and do heavy (for me) weight lifting for an hour. That has a great way of burning off the stress and resetting the mind. I highly recommend software engineers specifically plan some time in your day to get out of your chair and get some exercise.
  • yetihehe 6y ago
    I think they think about this like we think about making an error which will delete whole database of our client. It happens to us, but there are some safety nets everywhere. Several families in the world may be so unlucky as to get killed, but it's not day to day worry for everyone.
• johnchristopher 6y ago
  I lost hours of my life last week trying to set up motioneyes + android + a pi + a vps + wireguard + ip webcam pro + tasker + an old smartphone + an online API for events for simply getting a notification when someones walks in my alley. I should have gone the Alfred route and just shell out 15 bucks but instead I am crying tears of rage over framerate settings, screen lock issues and pro version validation. /rant
• Jenz 6y ago
  I’ve a feeling the HN crowd has been in a good mood recently. I wonder why.
• hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I feel like there is kinda a lot of overanalyzing in this thread. I'll steal a line from Drew Carey: "There's a club for people who hate there jobs. It's called everyone, and our meetings are at the bar on 5PM on Fridays." If anything, I think the tech world (and indeed most of the professional world) has been fed a load of bull that work is supposed to be personally spiritually fulfilling, instead of something that pays the bills so you can get personal fulfillment outside of your job.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• ghoward 6y ago
  I made this decision as well. https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-broken/ https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-bro...
• retiredpoor 6y ago
  After a decade of experience in the industry at 4 different companies, I quit my 6 figure devops job in 2013. I think back to all the meetings, emails, pagerduty alerts, and bruised 25 year old egos over the merits of Chef vs Puppet and have to laugh. I now run a landscaping business, make less money, have more time, and I can actually avoid working with toxic people/customers.
• calamityjam 6y ago
  Spent the last few days building monkey bars for the kids to play in the backyard. It's really satisfying building something physical that others can use. It's similar to the feeling of building software that you see other people using and enjoying.
• grandinj 6y ago
  I'd suggest finding a smaller company to work for, one that makes products, as opposed to doing integration or consulting. The money is less, you typically have to work on older stacks, and you don't get to learn a new technology every year, but the upside is you get to work across more of the (vertical) tech stack, and you get to be deeply familiar with the technologies involved.
• GoToRO 6y ago
  The problem is the software was open source, zero income. I bet the woodworking will not be free.
• roadbeats 6y ago
  A naive question: is it still a real thing to be entrepreneurial software engineer? After reading this thread, as somebody who quit comfortable and well paying job for a startup being founded from scratch, I feel like I’m alone in this sort of path now.
  • christophergs 6y ago
    Not at all. It's called being an Indie Hacker: https://indiehackers.com https://indiehackers.com
• christiansakai 6y ago
  The grass is always greener on the other side. Let's see. I have 3 degrees in unrelated field (Industrial Eng, Theology, and CompSci), and worked in on a few careers, white collar jobs like being a sales engineer at a biodiesel company, helping running a cafe for a family business, being a church administrator before the current software engineering. I also worked on low paid labor jobs such as laundry, dry cleaning, deli, restaurant. All with their own physical risk, tiredness, stress from customers, etc. The current job which is software engineering is far better than any other jobs that I had. It is pretty stable, great income, great benefits, stress free, not limited to space and time, can WFH, more flexible schedule, etc. I like software engineering a lot so I did side projects on the side, learning various programming languages, programming techniques, reading programming books, etc. Now I am bored of all of those as well, and right now just focusing on my hobbies. I am focusing a lot on my musical skills right now, and that's the only thing that captivates my mind daily, not programming books, programming podcasts, etc anymore. Software is just another job. I'm not changing the world, not saving lives, not helping solving global warming or pollution or the declining flora and fauna that we have, or ending wars. It's riddled with churn mentality in this industry, politics, etc. Somedays I dream of making it in the music industry, or creating a small cafe with aquascapes that I create as decorations, or not having to work at software anymore, or not having to work because I need income. But in the end, I still work as SWE. The grass is always greener on the other side, and that depends on one's position in life like age, economic situation, etc. Right now I don't have the luxury of leaving my SWE jobs, and no I don't do this for myself, but for my family members.
  • jdmoreira 6y ago
    wait... your software engineering job is stress free? That surprises me.
    • christiansakai 6y ago
      Yeah it is. Maybe stress is relative for people.
      • war1025 6y ago
• martythemaniak 6y ago
  After reading a bunch of the comments in this thread, I have to wonder if people here have ever actually spent significant time outside of IT. It seems not. I had a continuous stream of manual labour PT or FT jobs between 15 and 23, before getting my first IT job and when I started it was a fucking revelation. People would pay me $40k/y to sit at a comfortable desk and think and write?! No baking and sweating the hot sun, no threat of injuries, no freezing in the winter time, no clocking in/out, no petty criminal coworkers?! I don't think memory of that feeling will ever go away. And yes, I did do some woodworking as well.
• whack 6y ago
  I can't relate to any of the "software sucks now" comments. I started off writing code the "old school" way. C or C++ using vanilla vim. I spent so much time wrestling with compile errors, pointer logic, memory management, looking up documentation to figure out what methods were available in a class, and using grep to figure out where/how methods were calling one another. It was a colossal mess. I had almost no interest in programming because I spent the vast majority of my time yak shaving, not coding. Then ten years later, I discovered IDEs with inline compile warnings, autocompletions, method suggestions. I discovered stack overflow, and languages with automated garbage collection. My productivity skyrocketed. I started liking coding again, for the same reason I initially liked math and logic puzzles. I could spend more time problem solving and less time document chasing. To anyone who thinks things have actually gotten worse, I would suggest building a toy project using a 90s tech stack, and comparing that to a modern tech stack. The kind of things I was able to build in the last few years in my free time, I can't even imagine building in the 90s. If things seem increasingly complex today, it's only because the bar has been raised so much higher.
  • fsociety 6y ago
    I agree with you, tooling is better - even much better around C/C++. The issue I see is that programs today have more bugs than ever. I don’t think that is just a symptom of more developers, but of the quality of development employers and such want to pay for. Suppose that is an issue of software becoming a commodity.
• wiremine 6y ago
  This made me sad... Software is a job, so on one hand we shouldn't expect it to be all roses. And software is difficult: it's nontrivial, complex work. On the other hand, it's sad how many people resonate with this. I'm all for following your passions and doing what you love. But it would be nice if more people were able to maintain their love for programming. I've been writing code since I was 14, so I'm going on close to 30 years, and I still love it: the challenge, the creative outlet, the feeling when a bug is identified and a elegant fix is applied. My question is: how do we change things? How do we keep people of all ages loving it (if that's what they're called to?)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• 1f60c 6y ago
  I’m clearly missing some context. Who is ebd2?
  • ayewo 6y ago
    I think that's part of the point. I intend no offense towards @ebd2 on GitHub, but ebd2 can be said to be a "noname" developer turned wood worker. I'm guessing the reason why ebd2's story struck a chord with the HN community is that he has figured out a way to manage to do what a lot of people here aspire to be able to do with their time some day. The working assumption (which he has graciously corrected upthread as @mauvehaus on HN) is that his software career has afforded him to switch careers to something he is far more passionate about, a trait shared by many engineers who are forced to collect paychecks from work that is considered not very meaningful or fulfilling. The trades, specifically stuff like woodworking, metalworking, farming etc involve a certain kind of craftsmanship that can be applied on real world objects but which was honed by years of coding on imaginary software objects. It's a visceral thing to be transfer the skill of using your hands to build virtual stuff to build physical stuff.
• brentis 6y ago
  To build on an idea is infinitly more complex. The supposed need for cloud architectures to save money is a fairy tale to drive the need for kubernetes/etc. They make sense for large scale deployments but for my 20k subscribers I long for a rack and a few servers vs. 20 instances and increasing monthly costs.
• devy 6y ago
  In a serious note, Woodworking is a great rewarding craft. It bears the same builder mentality, creating physical objects via reduction manufacturing and most importantly, you build for yourself and for the people that you care about.
• ricksharp 6y ago
  I’ve been building software for around 20 years. It’s more enjoyable to me than it has ever been. One of the reasons is I have my own playground repo + site where I put all my experiments and write whatever I want. I can now make more in a day than I could have made in a year 15 years ago. In the past few months, I have: - built a serverless website/ code playground that enables me to host all my experiments and costs me essentially nothing - parsed the original zork code into typescript and then made a zork style game for my family - made about 5 educational mini games for my kids - learned how to do systematic math proofs with the lean language - created a serverless and database-free user data storage service on aws - created a serverless websocket service and a real time party game on aws. This morning I started building a serverless mesh-like network on top of websockets and webrtc to further reduce infrastructure dependency. Oh yeah, last year I was part of a corporate competition to build and program a self-driving RC car. Now, of course, I do most of this on my own time by getting up at 4:30 so it doesn’t interfere with my family and my work - and at work I sometimes have to do boring tasks - but that’s life. If you aren’t having fun, you simply are not playing with all the technology we have at our fingertips.
  • NortySpock 6y ago
    Can you describe more about your serverless website / code playground? Just curious. (I'm currently re-discovering the fun of coding by writing video games and hosting them internally to my house on docker containers on a Raspberry Pi.)
    • ricksharp 6y ago
      Sure: https://ricklove.me https://ricklove.me So, almost all my content is hidden, but if you like text adventures you might have a go with the header bar. It's pointing at my repo which is a mono-repo full of whatever I feel like: https://github.com/ricklove/rick-love-master https://github.com/ricklove/rick-love-master Basically, this is a website all built in react. It uses a simplified version of gatsby to generate a static website with async loaded components. That is hosted on netlify which basically provides free https, simple dns management, and git deploy with auto CDN cache expiration. In addition, I use serverless framework cli to define my AWS infrastructure and deploy the serverless stuff from command line. Essentially, I can make anything and deploy it in about 30 secs. Some interesting things: - A text adventure called dork (it's in the console simulator in the header) - A doodle game for parties (using serverless websockets with AWS Api Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB): https://ricklove.me/games/doodle-party?room=hacker-news https://ricklove.me/games/doodle-party?room=hacker-news - A bunch of educational games I made for my kids (using AWS lambda and S3 for storage): https://ricklove.me/games https://ricklove.me/games - A code relationship visualizer: https://ricklove.me/tests/code-space/ https://ricklove.me/tests/code-space/ - Components Testing (e.g. Stripe: https://ricklove.me/tests/stripe/ https://ricklove.me/tests/stripe/)
• dionidium 6y ago
  Reminds me of jwz's line about leaving Mozilla to run a nightclub: "But in 1999 I took my leave of that whole sick, navel-gazing mess we called the software industry. Now I'm in a more honest line of work: now I sell beer."
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  The running joke at my old company was "It will be done, assuming this time next quarter I haven't quit this job to assume this chaotic world of software development for the predictable life of the humble dairy farmer." ... the joke, of course, being that there's nothing predictable about being a humble dairy farmer... Cows get sick, years are better or worse, and the market is constantly fluctuating.
• ki66le9its 6y ago
  I too make things out of wood these days; although I am hoping to get back to software soon. time to go warm up the shop...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• btbuildem 6y ago
  Well.. I've made that switch over a decade ago, and came back. Software pays better (or, a mediocre software dev like myself will do better than a mediocre carpenter like myself, because it's harder to see the mistakes I made). It turns out any passionate activity that you do as a job will tend to get the soul sucked out of it once you do it for money. Reality of having to make a profit means you work on what pays not what you want to work on, cut corners and make compromises. Doesn't take too long before you start feeling that. The very very few lucky among us (and I count myself in that group today) will stumble upon a situation where job and joy overlap -- and it has so much more to do with the people we work with rather than the subject matter. Seek out positions that give you autonomy of choice and creative freedom, having a playground (even if limited) helps a lot.
• jeremy151 6y ago
  An aside: I'd be curious to see some statistics on the number of software developers who have an interest in woodworking. I was once in a project meeting that involved two external vendors, and the topic of woodworking came up in casual conversation. It turned out that every technically oriented role in the room was not only interested, but had a wood shop in their home. Something like 8-10 people. There seem to be a number of parallels between development and woodworking, but anecdotally the number of people I've met with an interest in both is very high.
• sergiotapia 6y ago
  This weekend I started building a plain old server-side rendered web application. It felt really good to stop dicking around with APIs and graphql and resolvers and other bullshit and just get a working product that's fast. Lovely. Also write a largish project in Nim, clean and simple. Lovely. You don't _have_ to run the hamster wheel that is modern web technologies. That's what is sapping your energy. React, webpack, thunk, memos (lmao) and other churning blog-driven-developments. Don't do it!
• kps 6y ago
  “I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.” — Tom West quoted in Tracy Kidder The Soul of a New Machine
  • rrss 6y ago
    - Josh Rosen. West was there to the end.
• one2know 6y ago
  I started doing similar changes because software became a shitshow. Corporate software shops are just a bunch of IT people trying to get their friend's products in use in the company for kickbacks. So what you have are multiple IT teams with more power than developers trying to tell everyone which tools they MUST use. Developers at the last place I worked had no access to production, could not deploy code at all, could not test their own code, could not even push code, could not see other team's code, etc, etc. But, the company had a devops team, a team called "app ops", a "SRE" team, an IT team, an "infra" team, and a security team that strangely was dictating which tools were used to deploy code. NONE of these teams did anything remotely close to what their team name did. They would do visibility projects which, oddly, sometimes involved developing software but not the kind that generates revenue. "dev ops" would deploy software to production, if they had time between their projects. "app ops" was supposed to handle support incidents, if they had time between their projects, etc... It is useless to try to build software in this environment. It is far easier to build a hunk of wood and say, "here you fucking go, take it or leave it" than to deal with dozens and dozens of people trying to extract money from the development process while suffocating the company.
  • Ziggy_Zaggy 6y ago
    Say more. I think you're onto something here.
• tmaly 6y ago
  That comment just made my Monday. Seriously building software has not gotten any easier. Communication and attention has slipped and I think these two issues make development all the more challenging.
• InfinityByTen 6y ago
  I've been mulling about building furniture from wood already. Not as a substitute, but as an add-on after my 8 hour mark.
• elif 6y ago
  I am with him. I was a professional developer for 16 years, but last year I got tired of saving startup money and not using it, and disillusioned with the path that global productivity is exponentiating toward.
• blamefaang 6y ago
  Thanks for helping make a mess and running away. Pretty typical for your generation, to be honest. Is it any shock the President embodies that attitude? There’s little expertise on display here. Just a sad man who didn’t get his nuclear powered Star Trek reality his childish side was promised. Get to the back of the Trail Of Tears when it comes to generational suffering. What an exceptional, gritty character the United Armchair Soldiers of America have created.
• lizardking 6y ago
  I agree that software is not always glamorous or fulfilling work. The same can be said for building in the analogue world. However, you will be hard pressed to find a career that will grant a higher standard of living for yourself and your family while offering the level of flexibility that can be found in software.
• vibrolax 6y ago
  I stopped working at age 59 to help with an illness in the family. I was afraid that I would miss exercising my mind and interacting with people the way building software often did. I had a decent job with interesting work, good pay, and good working conditions. But I haven't regretted walking away to take advantage of our life-long prudence and hard work.
• luord 6y ago
  My last full time job made me consider leaving too. Alas, since I have no other marketable skills (or any type of skills) beyond software development, for now[1], and I realized I just disliked that particular project and its process, not software in general, I'll continue for a few years more. [1]: I'm learning and practicing creative writing, hoping to publish books some day.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I no longer build software for money or for someone else. I still love building software for myself, so that is what I do. I don't have any money, but nobody is breathing down my neck when I haven't made a commit in 2 days (which is rare) or if I still plan to stick to the deadlines when I have more important life events happening.
• zacharyvoase 6y ago
  what is the deal with the software engineering -> woodworking pipeline? is it that programmers get so fed up of working with abstract concepts that they immediately pendulum-swing to the most concrete form of building (that can still be done by only one person) that they can find?
  • jk700 6y ago
    It's likely not as common as it seems. Personally I only ever heard of some mythical software engineers from the US pursuing woodworking, but not from anywhere else. Maybe in the US it's a lucrative field and it's common for software engineers in the US to live in houses with plenty of space to do woodworking and where the products of woodworking might actually be useful, so it's something they can play with at home and consider a nice skill to have in case they get fed up with software industry.
• mikewarot 6y ago
  I used to build software, back in the days of MS-DOS... wrote it all in Turbo Pascal, used pkZip to make archives of the source code every day, saved them on floppy disk. Towards the end, Windows was starting to be a thing, but I didn't have to deal with it. Delphi was fun. Then I was a system admin for about 2 decades, and only occasionally did I do the odd bit of programming. I took a detour into making gears, until the plague hit. I've had a side project for the past year, Initially I tried to do it in Python because where was a good charting library for it... but it turned out that building a GUI for the user was an exercise in masochism. There just was nothing like the interactive GUI builder in Delphi that I could find for python. After months of banging my head against the wall.. it worked, but changes that should take 30 seconds were taking 20+ minutes because I had to tweak all the python code for every little change in the GUI. I tried out Lazarus/Free Pascal, since Delphi is out of my price range.... it's buggy... but it took a pretty intense weekend, and I had everything replicated, and the pace of development went back to reasonable. The focus on C++ and the weird class factory thing, Java and the madness there... so much wasted time and effort when things USED TO BE BETTER. GIT, on the other hand... is awesome.... way better than ZIP files. 8) It took a while, but GUIs work much better for users, and they are almost trivial to build in Lazarus. You can bang out a CRUD app in a few hours.
• person_of_color 6y ago
  The average Staff SW Engineer salary at Google is ~750k. The race is worth the reward.
• fabien-h 6y ago
  I really want to do this too! But a wife, two daughters and a mortgage… I love them more than my life, but think a lot about your life before you attach a millstone to your feet.
• aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  I see a lot of comments here from folks wishing they were working on something more fulfilling than a CRUD app. Maybe the problem isn’t what kind of software you work on, but what it means, and what it can help accomplish in the world. Building easy to use software that solves real problems for real people is hard, regardless of whether it’s a CRUD app or something more exotic. And building easy to use software that solves real problems for real people feels good and meaningful. Those real people don’t know and don’t care about the difference between Rust, Clojure, or PHP, they just know that you’re making their life appreciably better. Don’t find a new career. Go find work that actually carries meaning and worth for you.
• Zelphyr 6y ago
  Someone mentioned this in another thread awhile back and it really hit home with me. It's a line by the Joe MacMillan character (portrayed by Lee Pace) from Halt and Catch Fire: "The computer isn't thing. The computer's the thing that gets us to the thing." That's how programming felt when I got into it back in the 80's and was still there when I started doing it professionally in the 90's. It felt like we were using computers as tools for creativity and exploration. For making the world a better place. Increasingly, as the valuations skyrocketed, that feeling has diminished to the point where I don't see it anywhere anymore. It's not about "getting us to the thing", it's not about making the world better. It is about making a buck. Now, look; I don't have a problem with people earning a living or even with Apple having a $2T valuation. My problem is the influence that has had on the industry. One might suggest that such a thing is unavoidable and they are probably right, but can't we at least try to be better? Can't we at least try to keep in focus the goal of making lives better and less about showing yet another ad? People are genuinely suffering right now all over the world. I challenge anyone to suggest that health and economic hardships are less important than Facebook. On a more practical, day-to-day matter: my job as a programmer is, well... my GOD the amount of tooling! When I got started web programming I had a text editor, and FTP client, a server, and a browser. I made a change, uploaded the files, and refreshed my browser. Don't get me wrong. Having a debugger built into the browser is great. Having a proper version control system is fantastic. I think, however, we're missing the forrest for the trees where tooling is concerned. Here's a case in point that a good friend pointed out to me recently: https://github.com/thecreation/jquery-wizard https://github.com/thecreation/jquery-wizard It's a simple jQuery plugin (please let's not get sidetracked with "jQuery is so old|bad|blah blah blah"!) for building wizards. Just look at all the files needed for the various tooling in relation to actual source code. Babel, Bower, ESLint, NPM, Travis, Gulp, Karma. You have to ask yourself, how much time does the developer get to spend on making his/her product better versus maintaining tooling support?! And _that_ is what programming is like right now. I hope it changes. I really do.
• pklausler 6y ago
  I'm nearing 60 (decimal) and have spent a programming career in what we used to call supercomputing. I will spare you "old guy" stories, but I will share one insight: I've worked for companies who made money selling hardware, companies who made money selling advertising, and companies who made money selling software. It's always been the most fun working as a software guy at a company selling hardware to solve hard problems in the real world. If you're bored as a software person in a software or advertising company, consider being a software person elsewhere.
• droptablemain 6y ago
  I still enjoy building software. What I don't enjoy is dealing with a barrage of tech-bro/founder types that are convinced their niche CRUD app is going to revolutionize industry X. Among other things.
• aogaili 6y ago
  Here is the same conversion happening other the side between woodworkers: https://thewoodwhisperer.com/articles/why-i-dont-offer-woodworking-business-advice/ https://thewoodwhisperer.com/articles/why-i-dont-offer-woodw... The lesson: things are not much greener on the other side, work is not fun, it is not a hobby, and adult life is not easy :)
• meowzero 6y ago
  All these complaining is funny. I was building software since the later 1990's. I'm not tired of it. Sure, most of the jobs out there are your standard CRUD stuff. But I still like it. A lot of people complain about not having interesting stuff to work on in the day job. Well, that's why it's called a job. I was burnt out from my software job as well until I got a shift in perspective. I picked up a photography hobby and got pretty good. In fact, I was seriously contemplating changing careers and was gaining steam. But I realized the more clients I picked up, the more uninspiring crap I had to shoot. This wasn't your everyday wedding or family photos. It was fashion photography where the industry was seen as more "creative" and "edgy." But once you get down to it, it was the same crap as any other job. Sure I shot a lot of my own personal projects as well (like open source projects for software engineering). In fact, in that industry it's more required to have a huge portfolio of test shots where you're constantly evolving. In software engineering, that's not as required. But even that became a grind since you're pressured to constantly hone your blade while new, younger, more creative people were coming up. Is it hard dealing with your manager, product managers, changing requirements, etc. in your software job? Well it's the same stuff in commercial fashion photography. Change their minds constantly. Sometimes I doubt they know what they want either. Budgets change, scope changes, a ton of politics, and so on. It's all the same. This is when I realized I actually liked software engineering better. I found it more fun solving "boring" problems and learning the new technology of the day instead of hustling hard in the photo industry. I get people complaining about not doing interesting work in their job. But that's what 99% of the industry is. You'll most likely create another CRUD app or work on stuff that is the least interesting to you. Only the lucky/elite 1% (just like in other industries) gets to do cool, interesting stuff. Grass in greener on the other side. But I've stepped my toes on the other grass, and it's the same shade of green. I learned to enjoy my job as a software engineer. I'm in the 40's, and hopefully I'll have enough energy to keep it up for 20+ more years.
• allenu 6y ago
  I still enjoy writing software. I mainly do mobile development on iOS. However, after 20 years in the industry, I grow tired of the corporate life and how projects are run. I can't complain about the pay or the hours, though. I've managed to hold jobs that generally don't have crunch or any type of regular overtime. What I grow tired of is the endless cycle of performance reviews, planning for the work ahead (short-term and long-term), discussions about what will be done and what won't be done, seeing how hard it is to come to consensus on some things, and how some of it doesn't even matter. When you're younger, you have more of a fire in your belly and will passionately argue for certain decisions or directions, but after you've worked a while, you realize a lot of those things that don't make huge differences in how well your product actually does out in the field. There are decisions above your head that have greater effect and worrying about those is just a waste of time, and so you detach a bit. The technical challenges themselves can also be the same ones you've encountered again and again, so that becomes sort of same-y. As others have suggested, I highly recommend working on your own side projects if you are looking for a creative outlet. That's what I've ended up doing over the years and it's helped a lot.
• progman32 6y ago
  I understand this sentiment. Software can still be a lucrative and fulfilling field to work in, though perhaps not as uniformly as back in some sort of day. Perhaps the motivators for starting a tech career are different today. I work in government data transparency, and my work directly affects (hopefully positively) the communities that use our product. The code part is fun, but wouldn't be sufficient to keep me there alone. Have I taken a financial hit for taking a social-impact track vs. something else? Without a doubt. It works for me, though, in a way that optimizing for "the engineering experience" would definitely not have. If you're feeling burnt out but want/need to stay in coding, perhaps it is worthwhile to think about how much "fulfillment" you require from coding tasks. If you find you want to reduce it, could think about: * Mentoring other devs. It's very fulfilling to help someone grow. * Take a pay cut and work at a nonprofit/B-corp/mission-driven regular corp. There are tons of these. There are lists (i.e., climatescape) but ask around. * Traditional hobbies. Woodworking, painting, gardening, travel, music, etc. If you'd prefer to stay technical, some tech-adjacent hobbies with vibrant and exciting communities are retrocomputing (say, check out Adrian's Digital Basement on YouTube), cosplay/prop making (check out the Role Play Forum, there's some extremely knowledgeable people there), security capture-the-flag events, 3d printing... many choices. I feel we live in a hobby golden age - there's so many excellent online communities for seemingly every niche or mainstream hobby.
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• teddyh 6y ago
  “I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.” — Josh Rosen in The Soul of a New Machine
• dang 6y ago
  All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=3
• rdevsrex 6y ago
  As a self taught dev, looking to go back to college, I'm always debating if I should major in CS or something else like Math or Stats in case software gets old to me and I want to transition to a quantitative field. But then I don't know what those kind of jobs are like and the chances are that I might feel the same way after n years. I think it's good to have something that's strictly a hobby where there are no real stakes to the game, so it is play. Work always means responsibility and largely doing it how someone else wants it done, even if you are an entrepreneur.
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Every field looks mysterious and fun from the outside. Your imagination of the work in that field doesn't take into account the fact that you'll have to work with other people, there will be politics, cliques, pointless meetings, fads in the field, disagreeable coworkers, losers, unreliable people. There will also be, at the end of the day, a business that needs to keep afloat, and you'll always have to "just ship it" before it reaches your personal standards. And after you've done everything a few dozen times, on top of everything else, you'll also be bored. That all said, software development is by far the best career and I'm pretty happy with it.
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  I am no longer paid to build software. I was a SWE for 15 years at things from startup to a FAANG. Not I teach high school CS. I build software anyway. Today I automated a workflow to turn zettlerkasten lesson plans into PDFs and post them to Google Classroom. I’m also upgrading the school timetable to sync everything (schools have lots of proprietary tools with their calendars) to Outlook. In class I wrote a one page Huffman encoder with my pupils. We also turned a binary tree into ascii art. I showed another class the mypy typechecker. Then I came home and put a final coat of Osmo 425 UV oil on my 100” garden dining table, and spent two hours designing a hardwood gazebo in the style of a mini English barn (crucks, beams, etc.) I told my partner about this thread and she said maybe I could become a commercial carpenter. The idea of having to do this for money made my heart sink. No thanks!
• naveguese 6y ago
  > Software is eating the world. Software ate software.
• CGamesPlay 6y ago
  Reading over the comments there's a lot of "wow, I want to do that" and "wow, I'm so glad I also did that". My story is somewhat different but might also help those who want to do that but, say, need to pay bills to eat. I left my most recent full-time (45+ hrs/wk) job coding after 9 years in the valley. When I was planning it, I was treating it as a long sabbatical and was going to travel and not do any work. However, along my travels I've found myself stuck in one country or another for various reasons (like global pandemics) and with nothing better to do, logged back online. Except, this time I knew before I started exactly what my goal was: I wanted to make enough money to pay my bills, and not a penny more. Going in with this outlook, I took freelancing gigs with a few companies, and I've now settled into a consistent relationship with a software consulting company. I agree with many comments in this thread: what I'm doing isn't creative; it's basic operational stuff; "glue" software... But I don't need it to be interesting. I work 15 hours in a week and when I don't feel like working on a particular day--then I don't. I make just over what I spend each month. Since I have so much extra time, when inspiration strikes me, I can go and work on hobby programming projects as a creative outlet (which is why I got into programming in the first place)! I've spent 15+ years learning these computer programming skills. If the job isn't interesting and I can do what's required in my sleep, then--to me--I should do the job in my sleep and spend my waking hours doing what I enjoy. I think in general OP and I have the same goal, but we're approaching on different tacks.