Ask HN: If you didn't have a computer, what would you do for work?
If you didn't have a computer to code on, or even use the internet on, what would you do for work?
edit: Imagine if computers didn't exist at all.
edit: Imagine if computers didn't exist at all.
And I took a couple of years of welding in high-school, and did a lot of shade-tree / hobby auto repair stuff in the past, so I could see welding or auto repair work as possibilities. I also toyed with the idea of becoming an electrician when I was younger, so maybe that? I also kinda always wanted to be a private detective.
So yeah, I dunno, there's a lot of paths I could imagine going down, in a world where I can't do this computer stuff.
I enjoy the rat race - nicer titles, nicer places to live, nicer cars, faster tech - but sometimes, I wish I could just live a simple life and not need as much.
Sometimes you can. Go camping. Leave the phone behind.
I actually went to school for this, but never had the guts to fully follow my heart :(
Closest I ever came was backcountry trail work, where I spent a few months cleaning up burned forests and building trails and staircases through them. Hardest thing I ever did, and makes programming seem so easy in comparison. We had no electricity, gathered water from the river, and had our food and mail delivered by mule wagons. It was great!
These days, in a temporary situation, I would use anything that got the job done. A tablet with or without an external keyboard perhaps, but a phone would be marginal.
I wouldn't change professions if an employer couldn't supply a computer, I would change employer.
But, if I think about what I would have liked to do, hypothetically, I'd love to have pursued math further and gone on to do a PhD. After that, assuming academia hadn't imploded in this hypothetical world, as it has in the real world, I'd like to end up on the tenure track somewhere in a nice city with some culture.
I wonder about that. Pretty much everything around us apart from computers themselves already existed in some form before computers. When I walk down the street, or look around my house, the physical world looks much the same as it did in the 60s or 70s. Cleaner perhaps, and the billboards are now animated. Cars are sleeker, clothes are messier. Aeroplanes, houses, buildings, etc. look much the same.
I think the social world has changed more than the physical. In part due to the internet, but mostly due to the pill.
In one of those civilization reset type of scenarios, I'd likely die quickly, but if I managed to survive, I'm teaching how to make gears and analog computing systems from them.
I'm one of the odd birds who knows how to make Slide Rules, and compute logarithms by hand.
Man that's going to be tough. Maybe I'll find a gig that provide components so that I can assemble a computer. From what you described, essentially we are back to the 40s, so going back to school to learn EE/Math and get into a gig to make computers is not a bad descision.
Or is this a deeper question about "What if there were no computers"?
What exactly are you counting as a "computer"? I would've called both of those computers. Install the right software, and I'm back to a Linux environment. Connect it to a TV, and I've got a big screen. Connect a keyboard, and I've got convenient input.
That may be cheating. Probably a systems engineer designing factory automation or something.
Being the local crazy hermit who shouts at trees sounds like a good vocation, too.
I would probably be an engineer or a draftsman.