Death of a Programmer. Life of a Farmer | Hacker News Reader

Death of a Programmer. Life of a Farmer

robfarrell.substack.com

51 pointsredbell21 comments

They took the factory schedule 8h/day and they applied it to office work which is bs. Office work should be 4h/day.

They did the same when people switched from agriculture to factory work. People were working in factories as if they were working the fields, from sunrise to sunset. Only later did they gain the "right" to only work 8h.

For me this is the real reason that drives people away from IT.

https://www.4dayweek.com/ is an effort to bring improvements to work arrangements, although not 4 hrs/day (rather a shorter work week).

Huh. I would trade 8h at a desk for 4h in the factory.

Depends on the factory and depends on your age.

Biologically we are not evolved for sitting all day without movement. The old Mind(Brain)/Body connection with feedback loops. Note that this is independent of stresses from the Environment itself (eg. indoors with no sunlight, stressful boss/colleagues, deadlines etc.) which makes the situation even more worse.

This is what makes a lot of us Programmers prone to depression/listlessness/low energy/loss of concentration/negativity etc. I think all of us Programmers need to find something to do with our hands and force us to move around outdoors whether it be Farming or anything else; and this needs to be regular and consistent.

Addendum : See my comment and others for some practical tips here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38438204

This is exactly what im doing this year. Though im 30yrs in. I bought a farm next to my dad in idaho. Im done in march and moving cross country and growing alfalfa and potatoes

Kudos! I hope it works out great for you!

I grew up ranching and completely surrounded by dairies/farms. It's even more physically demanding than they say and long hours, but in many ways I would prefer that type of work and miss it and it might allow me to enjoy coding/math for fun in my spare time again. If you HAVE to depend on it for your income it's usually another story though. Farming at a small scale usually leads to a meagre income that can fluctuate wildly with the markets and you have no safety nets from company health insurance and other benefits(if you get sick, no PTO or medical leave and your farm starts failing while you recover). Farms are massively consolidating and you're competing with corporate megafarms that can be much more efficient due to scale. Your suppliers like John Deere and Monsanto are becoming notorious for their abusive relationships with farmers and price gouging. Your fellow small scale competitors aren't paying a fair wage to hired help like you would aspire to, but mostly relying on illegal immigrant labor with below poverty pay, and you can't compete if you don't do the same or work triple time to compensate. When crop prices cratered or there were crop failures due to drought, other weather, and/or insects and plant diseases - and it's common for something like that in a given year - you would hear about a couple of the farmers in our community committing suicide. Be careful before you leap into it full time, although it can be rewarding on the side or after you've accumulated enough wealth to not fully depend on it.

Twenty years is enough for any occupation.

And the best change, is to something completely different! Feeds your soul in a different way. You can grow again.

Why does it link to a scam website at the top of the post?

Looks like the farming has taken away from the site monitoring!

"One Funnel Away Challenge One Funnel Away https://www.onefun... $297 Value •. Each day of the One Funnel Away Challenge, you'll be given tasks that you'll need to complete in order to get your funnel built and LIVE. The "One ..."

Rob started doing the very thing I’m dreaming of while I wait for the build to finish and the tests to complete running. I’ll take this as inspiration and validation that it really is possible.

Read a similar story here in HN some time ago: http://tinyurl.com/d2j7htv9

I am a programmer and run a dairy and egg farm. The two professions go very well together.

I am a programmer and run a grain farm. Can confirm.

I expect farming goes well with just about any profession, though. The data shows that almost all farms also have on an off-farm income, and the large majority of farmers have their primary income come from an off-farm job.

Have you found programming to be a useful tool in your farming endevors?

Yeah. Like recently I was finding it difficult to stay on top of the grain markets amid other things going on, so I built a program that regularly polls local elevators to find out how much they are paying for grain and if the software thinks there is a change in price that I might be interested in, it sends a push notification to my phone to let me know. There is a lot more that I'd love to do, but it's hard to find the time.

Perhaps even more useful is the engineering mindset in general. For example, when equipment breaks, troubleshooting an repairing it isn't really a whole lot different than debugging software. Although, having grown up on a farm, I'm not sure if that came before or after my foray into programming.

That's awesome, thanks for the reply. I have worked on software in the grain industry, just by happenstance an agency I worked for had some grain network operators as clients. I'd say you could probabaly sell what you built, but then you run the risk of accidentally having a software career again.

I have wanted to move away from software as a career and start doing something else in a different industry, but have always hoped that I could keep writing software as a tool to help automate the boring bits of the new work. Very cool to hear that you've done that!

> I have worked on software in the grain industry

If willing and able, I'd be quite interested to know more about what you were working on.

> I'd say you could probabaly sell what you built

I think so too, and have considered it, but I foresee reliable access to data becoming an issue when others see money being made. That's a problem I am not sure I want to try to solve.

> but then you run the risk of accidentally having a software career again.

Oh, I still have a software career. That's in large part why I was struggling to keep up with the markets and work on my own projects!

The title should include (2015).

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