31 ms·

Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years. I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a

by sph 5mo ago

Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years. I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a year or two being frugal. After that it’s anyone’s guess, but I am beyond excited not having to program for a living any more, just on what feels meaningful, in complete autonomy. Projects lined up: a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, a series of small games that I have been itching to work on, then, of course, the lifelong project of living in a rural house. Stretch goal if I win the lottery: build a solar farm. Maybe I will be so lucky never to have had to use LLMs in my work. You guys have fun without me. :-P

rob 5mo ago
Nothing like retiring with only 3 years worth of savings and no plan on what to do after that.
- sph 5mo ago
  Definitely not my first rodeo, but feel free to gloat.
  - keeda 5mo ago
    I'm probably being overly charitable, but I would have said the same thing except in a positive context, because I've wanted to do the same thing at times.
- cybrox 5mo ago
  If you don't need to support a family and are unhappy otherwise, why not? Sure it's not 'the smart thing to do' but if it makes you happy and you're still not far worse of than most people...
  - cortesoft 5mo ago
    Because if you are unhappy now, just wait until you are homeless
    - Rover222 5mo ago
      there are in fact plenty of ways to earn enough money to get by on a simple lifestyle
      - sph 5mo ago
        People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. I live in a first-world European country where the average salary is about €25,000 per year. My mortgage estimate is less than €300/mo. I'm not that afraid of having to supplement my income if I need to. The world will still need cheap and experienced software engineers for a while.
        Rover222 5mo ago
        Yeah, I was just living off $1k/month in Brazil just to see if it was possible. It definitely is. And was in a beautiful, safe area.
        alephnerd 5mo ago
        Of course you felt amazing living off US$1k/mo in Brazil - the average per capita household income in Brazil is less than US$450/mo and a salary of $700/mo puts you in the top 10% [0]. Basically, you enjoyed feeling rich in a country where the vast majority are getting screwed. And this is what I as well as my SO's family (middle and working class Vietnamese in VN) hate about digital nomads - y'all don't realize that you end up perpetuating the same inequality you try to run away from, and feels deeply colonial in nature as the countries y'all end up in had histories of being colonized and stratified. You get to travel everywhere because you have a strong passport. They don't because their passport is weak and their salaries are low. You will always be promoted to the top of the social pecking order thanks to your passport. They will always be relegated to the bottom and attacked by politicans as "stealing jobs" or "changing demographics" thanks to their passport. [0] - https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2026/05/08/veja-quanto-e-preciso-ganhar-para-entrar-no-topo-da-renda.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2026/05/08/veja-quanto...
- hobofan 5mo ago
  They didn't say that they are retiring, just that they are ending their career as a software engineer.
- staticshock 5mo ago
  Feels like an unfair judgment of someone else's values, which have no obligation to match yours.
  - ASalazarMX 5mo ago
    I think it's not a moral, but financial judgement. Unless an alternate income is achieved before that deadline, becoming destitute except for a small cottage is not a great prospect.
- jLaForest 5mo ago
  Anyone willingly making that choice has a massive safety net protecting them (almost always family money)
thesamethrowawa 5mo ago
Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless. I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.
- sph 5mo ago
  Maybe I know what you mean: after burning out 6 years ago, I have managed to dedicate 3-4h per day to work, and I didn’t know what to do with all the free time I had. It was excruciating. It made my recovery longer than it had to be. After reading a lot of philosophy and being patient with myself, I have found a source of creativity within me that regular office hours had completely eradicated in my adult years. All this to say, a person trained to work for someone else 40 hours a week for all their adult life is not able to self-direct and find meaning without a lot of introspection and readjusting.
  - vankusss 5mo ago
    Your last sentence resonates deeply with my current experience. Would you care to expand a bit more on what helped you find a way to self direct and find meaning within yourself?
    - sph 5mo ago
      I hoped no one asked because I'm not sure I have an easy answer. When I'm saying it's taken me 6 years to get out of burn out, I'm not joking. That, which includes 2 years sabbatical and as many years in therapy. My only advice is: if you burn out, go through the entire process. You only get one chance to figure out what actually is meaningful to you, and the answer will most likely require you to upend you life (or you wouldn't have burned out in the first place). Read Carl Jung: he did a lot of research on midlife crises, and the enormous significance of middle age (the 30-40 years old range) in our quest for meaning. In my very personal case, meaning was figuring out I'm meant to build things, on my own, at my own pace, and I owe the world to gift it with the vision that only I possess. Meaning for me happens to be one part about becoming a fully creative person, and one part about being selfless with my work, for I am not entitled to the result (see karma yoga). Your mileage might certainly vary. Feel free to send me an email if you want to talk more about it.
dataviz1000 5mo ago
> last me a year or two being frugal Word of advice. Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal. The two years are going to fly by. EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.
- lemoing 5mo ago
  Seconded, though from a different angle. In my experience, it's surprisingly hard to live frugally when you don't have a job; my spending actually went up at first because I had all of this free time for activities I didn't have before. Started doing more hobbies, going for trips around town, generally participated in the economy more than I could when 8 hours of my day were spoken for. What I thought was a year of runway was probably closer to 3-6 months. My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
  - dandellion 5mo ago
    On the other end, I live very frugally and when I spent six months without work I calculated how much my savings would last with my no job level of spending and it was 21 years. So anyone who wants to learn to live frugally would be wise to start doing so while still working, because that's when it's the easiest.
- postalrat 5mo ago
  It's very possible in 2 or 3 years there won't be much of a job market remaining and the best thing you can do now is something you own.
  - dataviz1000 5mo ago
    I imagine politically it will be like during the pandemic. The government goes full socialist to prevent riots and revolution -- they are going to print lots of money. It is going to be chaotic period. It is already starting and the best thing people can do is make sure they are employed, developing skills, and not spending savings. You want to make it to the other side of this. I have a very niche set of skills so I could up until 6 months ago pick up contract work anytime I needed. Despite being one of the best in the world at what I did, I can't compete anyone with $400 in tokens using Codex or Claude Code. I'm pivoting quickly but the sentiment is "Oh, shit, this is coming fast and heavy!"
toast0 5mo ago
> a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, I don't want to step on your design process, but if you want to explore some microkernels to run beam, I can link you to mine and another one that I ran into recently. Asking before linking, because sometimes you'd rather not look.
- sph 5mo ago
  1. Please do link your microkernel, I'm very curious to learn from other people working in this space 2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy. Processes just export a void handle(void *cap_private_state, msg_t message) entrypoint instead of a main function. I just want to see where I can take this idea.
  - toast0 5mo ago
    Your idea sounds fun, too! Here's my thing: Crazierl https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ demo (desktop recommended) at https://crazierl.org/demo/ https://crazierl.org/demo/ Here's the other one: Tyn https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel I haven't studied Tyn, I think from the high level we both have the same goals; enough kernel to run BEAM, and then BEAM does the rest. I wrote in C because learning Rust and bare metal OS stuff at the same time seemed like too much. Crazierl does much less in my kernel; my kernel handles time keeping, memory paging, interrupts, fallback console output, and a simple read only filesystem. Tyn includes device drivers and tcp/ip in the kernel as well. Crazierl runs BEAM compiled for FreeBSD and Tyn runs BEAM compiled for Linux (musl). Crazierl is x86 32-bit, Tyn is x86 64-bit. IMHO, regardless of what your eventual target is, I would consider running on x86 with bios boot, because it means you can run in v86, which is handy for sending links to demos. I think building a multiboot capable OS and relying on other people's loaders is a good step to reduce effort. Starting with serial console also helps a little. VGA text isn't too bad, but UEFI (or other) framebuffer means you need a font renderer and all that. That might be fun and interesting, but it doesn't need to be in the critical path. If you want to run on hardware, test frequently. Most of the emulators aren't super accurate in early boot, and let you get away with stuff that won't run on hardware. Serial console helps here, because on a pc, writing to the serial port is easy and your output will stay in the terminal even if the pc reboots. Fully automated PXE boot is helpful too, if you get into a boot loop, it just keeps pulling the latest, and you can push a new binary and wait for the output without having to touch the device under test. Also handy once you get it working a bit... just reboot to pull in new code.

by sph 5mo ago

rob 5mo ago

Nothing like retiring with only 3 years worth of savings and no plan on what to do after that.

sph 5mo ago
Definitely not my first rodeo, but feel free to gloat.
- keeda 5mo ago
  I'm probably being overly charitable, but I would have said the same thing except in a positive context, because I've wanted to do the same thing at times.
cybrox 5mo ago
If you don't need to support a family and are unhappy otherwise, why not? Sure it's not 'the smart thing to do' but if it makes you happy and you're still not far worse of than most people...
- cortesoft 5mo ago
  Because if you are unhappy now, just wait until you are homeless
  - Rover222 5mo ago
    there are in fact plenty of ways to earn enough money to get by on a simple lifestyle
    - sph 5mo ago
      People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. I live in a first-world European country where the average salary is about €25,000 per year. My mortgage estimate is less than €300/mo. I'm not that afraid of having to supplement my income if I need to. The world will still need cheap and experienced software engineers for a while.
      - Rover222 5mo ago
        Yeah, I was just living off $1k/month in Brazil just to see if it was possible. It definitely is. And was in a beautiful, safe area.
        alephnerd 5mo ago
        Of course you felt amazing living off US$1k/mo in Brazil - the average per capita household income in Brazil is less than US$450/mo and a salary of $700/mo puts you in the top 10% [0]. Basically, you enjoyed feeling rich in a country where the vast majority are getting screwed. And this is what I as well as my SO's family (middle and working class Vietnamese in VN) hate about digital nomads - y'all don't realize that you end up perpetuating the same inequality you try to run away from, and feels deeply colonial in nature as the countries y'all end up in had histories of being colonized and stratified. You get to travel everywhere because you have a strong passport. They don't because their passport is weak and their salaries are low. You will always be promoted to the top of the social pecking order thanks to your passport. They will always be relegated to the bottom and attacked by politicans as "stealing jobs" or "changing demographics" thanks to their passport. [0] - https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2026/05/08/veja-quanto-e-preciso-ganhar-para-entrar-no-topo-da-renda.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2026/05/08/veja-quanto...
hobofan 5mo ago
They didn't say that they are retiring, just that they are ending their career as a software engineer.
staticshock 5mo ago
Feels like an unfair judgment of someone else's values, which have no obligation to match yours.
- ASalazarMX 5mo ago
  I think it's not a moral, but financial judgement. Unless an alternate income is achieved before that deadline, becoming destitute except for a small cottage is not a great prospect.
jLaForest 5mo ago
Anyone willingly making that choice has a massive safety net protecting them (almost always family money)

thesamethrowawa 5mo ago

Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless. I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.

sph 5mo ago
Maybe I know what you mean: after burning out 6 years ago, I have managed to dedicate 3-4h per day to work, and I didn’t know what to do with all the free time I had. It was excruciating. It made my recovery longer than it had to be. After reading a lot of philosophy and being patient with myself, I have found a source of creativity within me that regular office hours had completely eradicated in my adult years. All this to say, a person trained to work for someone else 40 hours a week for all their adult life is not able to self-direct and find meaning without a lot of introspection and readjusting.
- vankusss 5mo ago
  Your last sentence resonates deeply with my current experience. Would you care to expand a bit more on what helped you find a way to self direct and find meaning within yourself?
  - sph 5mo ago
    I hoped no one asked because I'm not sure I have an easy answer. When I'm saying it's taken me 6 years to get out of burn out, I'm not joking. That, which includes 2 years sabbatical and as many years in therapy. My only advice is: if you burn out, go through the entire process. You only get one chance to figure out what actually is meaningful to you, and the answer will most likely require you to upend you life (or you wouldn't have burned out in the first place). Read Carl Jung: he did a lot of research on midlife crises, and the enormous significance of middle age (the 30-40 years old range) in our quest for meaning. In my very personal case, meaning was figuring out I'm meant to build things, on my own, at my own pace, and I owe the world to gift it with the vision that only I possess. Meaning for me happens to be one part about becoming a fully creative person, and one part about being selfless with my work, for I am not entitled to the result (see karma yoga). Your mileage might certainly vary. Feel free to send me an email if you want to talk more about it.

dataviz1000 5mo ago

> last me a year or two being frugal Word of advice. Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal. The two years are going to fly by. EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.

lemoing 5mo ago
Seconded, though from a different angle. In my experience, it's surprisingly hard to live frugally when you don't have a job; my spending actually went up at first because I had all of this free time for activities I didn't have before. Started doing more hobbies, going for trips around town, generally participated in the economy more than I could when 8 hours of my day were spoken for. What I thought was a year of runway was probably closer to 3-6 months. My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
- dandellion 5mo ago
  On the other end, I live very frugally and when I spent six months without work I calculated how much my savings would last with my no job level of spending and it was 21 years. So anyone who wants to learn to live frugally would be wise to start doing so while still working, because that's when it's the easiest.
postalrat 5mo ago
It's very possible in 2 or 3 years there won't be much of a job market remaining and the best thing you can do now is something you own.
- dataviz1000 5mo ago
  I imagine politically it will be like during the pandemic. The government goes full socialist to prevent riots and revolution -- they are going to print lots of money. It is going to be chaotic period. It is already starting and the best thing people can do is make sure they are employed, developing skills, and not spending savings. You want to make it to the other side of this. I have a very niche set of skills so I could up until 6 months ago pick up contract work anytime I needed. Despite being one of the best in the world at what I did, I can't compete anyone with $400 in tokens using Codex or Claude Code. I'm pivoting quickly but the sentiment is "Oh, shit, this is coming fast and heavy!"

toast0 5mo ago

> a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, I don't want to step on your design process, but if you want to explore some microkernels to run beam, I can link you to mine and another one that I ran into recently. Asking before linking, because sometimes you'd rather not look.

sph 5mo ago
1. Please do link your microkernel, I'm very curious to learn from other people working in this space 2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy. Processes just export a void handle(void *cap_private_state, msg_t message) entrypoint instead of a main function. I just want to see where I can take this idea.
- toast0 5mo ago
  Your idea sounds fun, too! Here's my thing: Crazierl https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ demo (desktop recommended) at https://crazierl.org/demo/ https://crazierl.org/demo/ Here's the other one: Tyn https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel I haven't studied Tyn, I think from the high level we both have the same goals; enough kernel to run BEAM, and then BEAM does the rest. I wrote in C because learning Rust and bare metal OS stuff at the same time seemed like too much. Crazierl does much less in my kernel; my kernel handles time keeping, memory paging, interrupts, fallback console output, and a simple read only filesystem. Tyn includes device drivers and tcp/ip in the kernel as well. Crazierl runs BEAM compiled for FreeBSD and Tyn runs BEAM compiled for Linux (musl). Crazierl is x86 32-bit, Tyn is x86 64-bit. IMHO, regardless of what your eventual target is, I would consider running on x86 with bios boot, because it means you can run in v86, which is handy for sending links to demos. I think building a multiboot capable OS and relying on other people's loaders is a good step to reduce effort. Starting with serial console also helps a little. VGA text isn't too bad, but UEFI (or other) framebuffer means you need a font renderer and all that. That might be fun and interesting, but it doesn't need to be in the critical path. If you want to run on hardware, test frequently. Most of the emulators aren't super accurate in early boot, and let you get away with stuff that won't run on hardware. Serial console helps here, because on a pc, writing to the serial port is easy and your output will stay in the terminal even if the pc reboots. Fully automated PXE boot is helpful too, if you get into a boot loop, it just keeps pulling the latest, and you can push a new binary and wait for the output without having to touch the device under test. Also handy once you get it working a bit... just reboot to pull in new code.