Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
alinpanaitiu.com
alinpanaitiu.com
Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
:deep breaths:
And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.
Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.
If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.
Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic translation done by some bot or something.
Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).
Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.
I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.
Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through open source repos all the time, which all have their own styles and which are often not self-consistent; my comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the other.
The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters, nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You really want to manually format that so each row is on it's own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be littered with
MatrixXf mat(2, 2);
// clang-format off
mat << 1, 2,
3, 4;
// clang-format on
[1] https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/group__TutorialAdvancedIniti...
Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).
Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.
And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.
Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.
These days they are pretty good at preserving vertical separation if it already exists and adding it if it’s missing.
This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a certain space under or over the counter, and need to be homogenous to a large extent.
For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal. Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier and that's why some products are better when they are homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be "creative."
They would if their woodworking projects spanned decades and involved thousands of other woodworkers.
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.
Companies would rather overwork 1 person than pay 2 and have both slightly under utilized
Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind.
Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
They were certainly very good at coopting the agile „movement“ in this manner.
What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.
Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.
So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.
Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)
I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.
Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.
It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.
So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.
So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
Will take one of those instead, any day.
"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.
The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to introspect what kind is important to you.
I love to build quality code. Production code that is quite efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-featured.
Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in startups.
(There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the exception.)
"Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build quality, this isn't it.
It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady revenue that there is some possibility of finding the environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is hard, and is an exercise left to the reader.
(If you know any please share!)
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts.
As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face.
Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice.
With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.
Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media)
> endless PowerPoints
We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law.
But to your point about Small versus Large entities...
> ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people.
Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems.
> people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies
These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.
> I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems
I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.
This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group' then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature.
startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an idea based in reality.
Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of enterprise IT.
Side projects and meditation supplements.
Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?
It's no surprise you can end up feeling empty and unfulfilled in a career like software development, or any other modern career, you are putting energy and emotional involvement that you would otherwise have put into the search for physical necessities. I think this is particularly acute for those in software development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the physical world. Biologically speaking fulfillment should come from satisfying your physical needs (i.e. surviving) not from the pursuit of some made up goal.
IMHO it's a classic example where "the author is excellent at identifying problems, not good at identifying solutions." Unfortunately almost nobody reads the first (identification) part because the solution part is so unpalatable and unacceptable. For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense, but for most people who have a sense of compassion and empathy the costs are extremely unpalatable.
It's pseudo-profound, but not really insightful at all. It's the kind of writing that seems brilliant to people going through difficult times in life or edgy teenagers who are angry at the world, but to be blunt it falls flat for people who are well-adjusted and thriving.
That's the crux of that type of writing: Ranting about the world in pseudo-profound prose is always going to feel brilliant to people who are struggling with something and want to identify with others who are also struggling, but that doesn't make it insightful or good writing.
> For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense,
Treating his writings and actions as two separate, unrelated things is really downplaying the manifesto. The fact that he took the ideas he wrote down and came to the logical conclusion that violence and destruction were the way forward should tell you something about his writings. Specifically, that they were hyperbolically incorrect.
To be honest, the way that you're identifying with his writings and thinking that even his actions make "logical sense" suggests that you may need to take a step back and reevaluate. It seems his prose got its hooks into you, but it's not actually brilliant content.
Quote: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
You don't actually engage with any of the ideas Ted Kaczynski brought up or offer a thorough critique, so ironically you yourself are engaging in writing a "pseudo-profound" comment, which boils down to a giant ad hominem. Ad hominems aren't wrong because of moral turpitude, they're wrong because they are devoid of information.
If you really did want to critique his worldview, you'd understand pretty intimately Kaczynski's intellectual influences, and you'd be able to identify and articulate which parts you agree with and which parts you don't. It's telling but unfortunate that you opted not to do that and instead reached for the lazy ad hominem.
My advice to you: if you truly do vehemently oppose the actions of this individual (as do I), it's even more incumbent upon you to inform yourself their worldview and influences so that you are equipped to intellectually oppose its potential resurgence. If you aren't willing to do that, you have no right to judge others who have.
You basically just said, "That guy's not all that smart, and if you think he is, take a hard look in the mirror!" Maybe you can say more about why you think his writing falls short and who you'd recommend to read as a counterpoint?
I imagine there are tons of philosophers who have said similar things.
Here's a comment recommending Jacque Ellul and Lewis Mumford - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015488
Another one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658601
(I haven't read them)
But we probably don't remember or cite them because their manifestos weren't published on the front page of newspapers.
That was due to the serial violence of the author, and it was subsequently talked about for decades.
That is, the notoriety of his crimes could be the reason that you read and recommend his work, rather than somebody else's work -- as opposed to it being a coincidence
> Did the Unabomer have any ideas you couldn't read elsewhere?
> I imagine there are tons of philosophers who have said similar things.
I would imagine the Unabomber isn't the first or only, but it is the first place where I encountered many of the ideas/analysis. It absolutely felt like it went very much against the grain of acceptable writing of the day. It amounted to outright heresy in some cases, which I find fascinating and engaging. People who challenge the status quo are the ones who IMHO change the world the most. I'm by no means equating Kaczynski with many of the greats of the past, but they all had that same trait in common: challenging the assumptions and status quo of the day with at times heretical ideas.
In particular, his observation/separation of the three different power levels in which humans can operate deeply spoke to me and resonated with me. His identification of how operating in power levels 1 and 3 can be so profoundly different than how our brains evolved to be and therefore unfulfilling and unsatisfying struck me with the same sort of intellectual force that Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative did the first time I understood it. Then he builds logically on that to identify/describe how with technology we are essentially being pushed entirely out of power-level 2 and into levels 1 and 3, and it becomes very easy and simple to understand why he believes technology to be so disastrous for humanity.
> But we probably don't remember or cite them because their manifestos weren't published on the front page of newspapers.
> That was due to the serial violence of the author, and it was subsequently talked about for decades.
> That is, the notoriety of his crimes could be the reason that you read and recommend his work, rather than somebody else's work -- as opposed to it being a coincidence
Absolutely, I very much agree. Although if none of those other works ever made it to my attention, then they don't have the opportunity to influence me or give me the feeling of intellectual nourishment that I got from Kaczynski's manifesto.
This strikes me as a very similar problem to the medical knowledge gained by Nazi scientist from doing horrifying experiments on Jewish prisoners. Do we disregard the knowledge gained because it was gained in such a disagreeable and reprehensible way? Logically, disregarding it makes no sense, only providing emotional satisfaction. Using it can benefit our future, but not using it does nothing to change the past. We could say "incentives" but that has to be addressed through punishments/repercussions to the people who did the experiments.
But regardless, those other sources have reached me now, thank you! I'll be reading them :-)
27 years in the slammer to clear up some ideas means there is A LOT of additional reading material from him in form of letters, essays and books.
It seems the longer he thought about it the more he could not find a path to stop technology progress but figured we just need to ride through it until collapse, if that happens.
But you equating his manifesto to that makes me think you didn't read it, or at least didn't do so with an intent on understanding it. There are millions of shallow/lazy summaries online, so if you read a summary or blog post about it, you've done yourself and the text a disservice.
It's the very much not "crying about" what he calls "leftists" which I'm guessing you are translating into "SJWs," particularly in the current sense. He goes into significant analytical detail about why he thinks what he thinks. You also have to consider his background and experiences, from being severely isolated/deprived of human contact as a child due to the medical advice of the day, to his experience as a rare math prodigy and one of the youngest professors. From wikipedia[1]:
> In late 1967, the 25-year-old Kaczynski became an acting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught mathematics. He assumed the position as the youngest assistant professor in the history of the university.
Think about the different environment that was than today! This was the late 60's. Leftists then were very different than they are now, and he was at Berkeley. If you're unaware, there was a significant cultural development going on at Berkeley in the late 60s. Further[1]:
> Without any explanation, Kaczynski resigned on June 30, 1969.[35] In a 1970 letter written by John W. Addison Jr., the chairman of the mathematics department, to Kaczynski's doctoral advisor Shields, Addison referred to the resignation as "quite out of the blue".[37][38] He added that "Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy", and that, as far as he knew, Kaczynski made no close friends in the department, noting that efforts to bring him more into the "swing of things" had failed.
This period undoubtedly had a huge impact on his life, and not considering this when evaluating his text is a mistake IMHO. Also there is so much more depth to this than what I've said here, but I'm unfortunately out of time for the moment.
I think this level of hyperbole only feels correct when you've been trapped in the kinds of companies where everyone is at least ten steps removed from the customer. When you're sitting through meetings and pushing around abstract "work" to achieve artificial goals all day, it can seem like modern work is all made up and arbitrary.
But step outside one of these absurd corporate jobs and you'll see plenty of people doing "real" work, and doing a lot of it. It's eye opening to go from a corporate behemoth to a small company where what you do actually matters to customers. Once you see the effect your work has on something up close, it makes a lot more sense.
Every time I read an HN comment where someone is romanticizing Ted Kaczynski's writings, it feels like they're coming from a place of being just a bit too chronically online and a bit too disconnected from how the real world works outside of the internet and corporate life.
That's one of the most absurd hyperboles (or the most detached-from-realiy statements) I have ever seen. That would mean only one out of 100,000 people is doing "real" work. Or if you spread it evenly, less than one third of a second per working day.
What makes you think think that your definition of "surrogate activity" is an interesting distinction? That only "growing your own food" is going to make people fulfilled, biologically? Is there any evidence of this? That hunter gatherers, or that farmers in history, were somehow happier?
As far as I can tell, most people throughout history worked really hard, but tried as much as they can to do anything but what they had to do to survive. Every single human culture has music, art, science, etc.
Water food and shelter are not all there is to a comfortable life.
In his words "the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex."
Or is it what the "legendary" comment in the original link calls attention to: That the pay is good? As a result, you technically only need to spend a minutes per day, if that, working on software. Everything else is fluff. This seems to match what Kaczynski is talking about.
Take a job developing software that just barely covers the cost of your survival needs and I expect there is no chance you will feel empty about it.
I only code as a hobby anymore. Burnout destroyed my career and now I design PCBs and write embedded software without LLMs.
Regulation will force you to replace your car for EV and with more technologies for monitoring the driver and surroundings.
Cuzebox as the emulator:
Seconding this; I recently wrote a game for the GameBoy Color in C and it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done with coding in a while.
The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should really be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not that you suck.
The negative connotations is a more recent development:
> The meaning "one who cultivates and participates (in something) but does not pursue it professionally or with an eye to gain" (as opposed to professional) is from 1786; often with disparaging suggestions of "dabbler, dilettante," but not in athletics, where the disparagement shaded the professional, at least formerly. As an adjective, by 1838.
* https://www.etymonline.com/word/amateur
It comes from the from the Latin amatorem, "lover": someone who does something not for any practical reason, but simply for the enjoyment / love of the activity. How well one does it does not necessarily come into consideration, as long as there is enjoyment.
Indeed, the Olympics is technically supposed to be an event for amateurs, while also being generally perceived as the peak of competition for each relevant sport.
> A person attached to a particular pursuit, study, science, or art (such as music or painting), especially one who cultivates any study, interest, taste, or attachment without engaging in it professionally.
(Wiktionary.) It just also can be used to derogatorily refer to a "low" skill level (Someone who is unqualified or insufficiently skillful., same), but the non-ad hominem definition doesn't have that connotation.
E.g., in the ballroom dance community, the "amateur" category is filled with people incredibly talented, I'd estimate with like 8-10+ years of experience. They're amazing to watch.
sometimes much-much more involved - paycheck-less - than just "next pro"
I really love physical things I can do with my body as a counterbalance to working on the computer- weight lifting, woodworking, and sailing add a lot of value to my life, and have gotten me outdoors and in shape. I'm currently building a wood sailboat in my garage together with my son, using ancient woodworking tools I inherited from my grandfather.
I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of building things with my hands or using power tools just fills me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.
1. Don't require you to interact with screens 2. Require your full attention (e.g. if you were listening to a podcast while doing it, you wouldn't remember a single thing they were talking about) 3. Has a social aspect, but is also possible to do on your own 4. Preferably physical 5. Preferably has some level of "controllable danger/risk", e.g. mountain biking is good because you can walk down hard stuff or stay on easy trails, vs. road biking you don't control the risk of getting injured / killed by a driver.
Some that fall into this category are climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing.
There's the other category that this post about woodworking scratches: building things and developing new skills and mastery doing so. However, these don't often come with an easily-accessible, accepting community; it's usually just you alone in a garage. Given how important social connection is, and how isolating a lot of tech jobs can be, this is a void that a lot of us on this orange website need to actively pursue.
If you're in any "tech city", there's definitely a climbing gym nearby. Climbers are almost always amicable, and for the socially anxious, it's a great pretense to interact with someone (because they have to be on the other end of the rope anyway). The amount of capital outlay to get started is low (e.g. shoes, belay device, and a harness will cost <$300 total if you get nice stuff, albeit sticking with the non-expert shoes!), and you can pretty much start having fun right away (vs skiing takes at least a season to get confident enough to truly start having fun and not "surviving").
I think people often turn away from sailing because it's seen as an expensive elitist thing for wealthy people, but the truth is the polar opposite of that- most people in the sailing community are working class and often have either small dinghies or older boats you can get for a few hundred dollars and easily maintain yourself. I paid $800 for my first working sailboat, and the first yacht club I joined had a literal garden shed full of rusty hand tools for a "clubhouse."
One thing I may add is commitment and responsibility, as in, if you are careless, people may die, including yourself. In most software work, with all these tests and reviews and backups, you don't have that, for very good reasons, but it kind of feels like what you are doing is inconsequential.
But he taught me crude woodworking like framing in houses- almost none of the tools or skills translate into fine woodworking required for building things like furniture or boats. Until the last year I didn't know how to cut with the grain, what a planer was for, etc.
What my dad really taught me was the confidence that I can learn what I need as I go, to do almost anything. I'm not afraid to start big projects where I have zero idea how to do any of the steps required at first, and am expecting to learn them one at a time as I go. My dad would regularly jump into things like buying a car with a blown engine and expecting to rebuild it without any clue where to start- and then follow books and advice, and do it successfully the first time. So I learned to also do that.
YouTube has been a huge boon- anyone can learn almost anything for free, without needing someone to teach them first. Also tech like 3D printers allows people to get into making things without the physical skills previously needed.
Nowadays, I'll set everything up, cut/buy the metal, etc. and usually for under $100 have someone come over and do the actual welding for me.
You can also download his follow-up, "The Anarchist's Design Book", free here: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-design-book
Between those two, they will teach you what tools you need and how to build simple furniture by hand. Start small.
I didn't have any experience in any of these before and I was not particularly athletic. You only need to find something you want to try, and if you like it try to commit to it for a couple of years.
In my example, I started running when I signed up for a 10k race as a team event when I joined my company, and realized the racing experience was actually enjoyable (regardless of my performance). And for woodworking, I signed up for a 6 weeks course to make a simple box at my local recreation center, and ended up making a couple of furniture or decorative pieces that are not fancy at all but still a lot more interesting than IKEA stuff.
I've also replaced the starter and replaced the default head unit with something modern that includes GPS. Most of it was intimidating to get started, but none of it was what I would call difficult. There's too many very specific guides around showing you exactly what you need to do. And developers are used to following guides and running into inconsistent documentation and troubleshooting from there. Most of them would be right at home stumbling their way through auto repair.
Last year I epoxied my garage floor and got very good results thanks to my YouTube studies. My YouTube internship has also lead to me re-modelling my entire kitchen. I designed everything in sketchup and am in the middle of building the custom cabinets. I'll end up mixing and pouring concrete countertops myself as well. I've repaired my dishwasher twice and my dryer three times by looking up symptoms online and ordering the most likely parts and just digging in. Every time there have been videos with the specific model and the specific problem that I can follow along with.
Again, none of this is what I would consider to be difficult relative to some of the technical problems I've had to face at work. It's all very well documented processes and combined with the ability to troubleshoot and the budget to not have to fight your tools all the time and most things seem to be very achievable by non-experts. I still don't consider myself to be "handy". But I know I can fix pretty much anything in my house or on my vehicle with enough tutorials and time.
Watch a YouTube video.
Plan on failing a few times in ways you don’t expect.
Remember that this is a hobby so the stake are low.
Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how to work with physical objects.
Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists. Partly because my friends weren't working with physical objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect with my peers.
But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still did not pass on their knowledge.
I mean hell there's plenty you can do that doesn't require learning at all.
I get more enjoyment whole-assing one thing than half-assing many, in my case. Not to say hobbies aren't cool - I know somebody that built an entire guitar starting from wood - but I'd rather spend that time going even further in my main thing. "Majoring in the minors" or whatever.
I hope it doesn't come across as some sigma grindset stuff, it's not that I suppress my urge to have fun hobbies - I just feel happier and more secure incrementally building on my main career than creating a new persona for an activity I'm indifferent to.
If the prerequisites for having awesome hobbies are, "Having a garage," "Inheriting tools from one's grandparents," and "Having the time do something with both," there would be your answer.
I built many things at my desk or the kitchen table in our flat with very simple tools. Even a single Swiss Army knife can be used to achieve a lot. And you don't need a lot of time to make small things.
It can be easy to be jealous of the DIY YouTubers with massive workshops (I'm jealous!), but I find it more satisfying to take inspiration from the kinds of simple things people make/made in simpler societies/civilisations.
I actually felt a little stupid accepting these tools and setting up a space for them, when I later realized that I already had free access to several local community woodshops through a few different mechanisms... I am thinking about getting rid of some or all of the tools and using those instead.
I think it's pretty easy to make excuses for why something is impossible, but if people really wanted to, almost anyone could do it. The average teenager in the USA buys themselves single outfits of clothing that cost more than the basics to get into woodworking. Most Americans have streaming and Amazon Prime subscriptions that cost a lot more than I spend on woodworking- and I don't have any subscriptions like that.
Awesome hobbies are awesome! But they require time, and in some cases, financial resources.
I find plenty of time to do my hobbies despite being a single dad, and having a high stress academic PI job. I have every weekend and evening free, and I use them. I also involve my kid in my hobbies- we do them together, so it's also parenting time.
I think most people aren't short on time, but short on energy because of poor physical and mental health- things that can be solved/addressed. For me, the hobbies themselves are a key part of staying healthy enough to have a lot of energy. But also not the only thing- I had serious medical problems that caused fatigue, which I needed to treat to have the energy I now have.
I also usually find a way to do hobbies cheaply, or even make money at them. For example, with cars and boats I get cheap ones that need work, fix them myself, and usually sell for enough more to keep the hobby self sustaining.
Ultimately, the most important thing is to just do it, even if it seems too expensive/inaccessible/etc. Take a leap/risk and find a way to overcome the barriers, don't come up with excuses to stop before you even start.
The obscene idea is that whatever hobby you pick up you must master, be great at it. Fail a lot at your hobby and learn from the mistakes. Perfection in your hobbies comes from the time you spent failing. This is the time you should long after a hectic day, week or month, a time to fail.
Once in a while you will create something you love, it probably won't even be good. It doesn't matter. Your not making a dollar on your hobby(do not try to), your carving your mind and body into a better person.
After work, after kids, after exercise, I've spent many nights just carving wood into what ever I feel like. Spoons, forks, etc. Many of them suck, many have been used to keep me warm on a cool night, none have expected anything from me, its always there when I have time and the will.
I've also suggest some cut gloves as well, you need your digits for the next time you decide to pick up your hobby.
I used to buy/sell/repair cars as an undergrad in college both for fun and spare money, and did it on the side of public roads, and outside in a low budget apartment parking lot.
For many equipment-intensive hobbies, you can also take classes, e.g. at a local community college or community center, which are taught in places with all of the equipment provided.
when I was a kid, when my dad was repairing the house or car I was always "holding the flashlight" or he would actually teach me to use power tools and do the repairs myself while guiding me along.
The larger projects would often span two summers. He also did not contribute to his projects on Sundays because he is religious.
I find it very hard to relax by just chilling on a beach, or reading a book in the afternoon. I just want to work on a project.
What I find really fun is that often when I'm working on a project, my 5 year old daughter will get in to a project mindset herself, and will be working on her own thing (sticky tape, cardboard, etc), while I'm fixing a bicycle or building something. It's a really fun companionable time, where we're both working on our own thing, but in each other's company.
> don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies...
Has the curve on the creator/consumer axis shifted in recent times or has it always been skewed toward consuming? Or is there instead a social axis that has been waning recently? I'm thinking of the once popular Bridge card game or bowling leagues as examples...
And then there a collecting based hobbies* which have been ruined by being able buy rare things from anywhere in a click. Now getting a stamp collection isn’t a pursuit, it’s just an afternoon on eBay with your credit card.
*one exception here is birdwatching, which I’ve anecdotally seen a huge increase in. Almost all my friends are aware of Merlin and many Hanna the habit to stop to ask “what’s that” if they see an unfamiliar bird
Social media totally shifts and ruins our experience of things: it becomes a performance to impress others rather than actually fun itself.
Once I realized that- I realized the people everyone envies online aren't even having fun, or actually enjoying the hobby. That person doing extreme camping on Instagram with the most glamorous photos: it's 100% fake. They're lugging camera equipment to remote places, and likely bringing a professional paid photographer. They probably tore it all down and slept in a hotel after setting up camp for the photo.
Maybe it's become easier to consume incredible amounts of content for free recently, but it's also never been easier to make things if you want, either in terms of access to cheap materials and tools or instructional content. Perhaps the one thing that has waned a little is closer-knit forums that have been replaced with endless Reddit.
Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on this. But I haven’t seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have their own existential threats around amount and quality of data. Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What we don’t know is whether doing this and then handing it to an LLM is as beneficial to humans in speed/quality/feedback as simply doing it yourself. Have already seen people saying that copilot’s interaction loop short circuits actually thinking about the problem.
Regardless, hobbies outside of work are absolutely essential in this absurd time. The author made some beautiful things.
Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow. Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to force them into being sustainable.
That said, I've always described the "Maker" movement as "Geeks who missed shop class", and have argued that the world would be a better place if the Sloyd system of woodworking as a basic constituent of education was prevalent:
https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
(I'm the Geek who hated shop class, and thank my locking stars I can make a living writing software, decades later.)
Shocking!
Now I have a garage full of woodworking equipment (and wood), spend my leisure time watching youtube and building things.. sometimes I wonder if I would have ever made it to software professionally had I taken that shop class. Might have ended up making cabinets :D
I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't special.
And many jobs have much worse stuff like danger, filth, hard manual labor, no social standing etc
I find DIY to be similar - you get a physical result, you use your hands to make something, the satisfaction is almost always about pleasing your own sense of what you want. Ok there's the wife too but ....
I also like feeling that I can cope with certain jobs even if not well. Also you do get better. Baking and cooking can be like this too. When you learn the "tricks" that make your bread turn out better or your skirting boards line up properly or whatever then it's a super feeling. :-)
I also find cooking (not necessarily baking) to be quite similar to programming: you follow steps and if some bug happens in production (too salty, too thick, not flavourful enough) then you go in and try to debug it and fix it (I guess the simile breaks down here).
But if someone is good at breaking down IT tasks, I believe they will be able to prepare a large meal with multiple courses, as I find it requiring a similar mindset to releasing a feature.
I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.
That said some domains are cleaner than others, just like small rivers have clearer water, I remember working in food stores or even mechanics and you don't get the same kind of fatigue as in software engineering. The stimulations are more diverse, a bit deeper (helps getting into flow in a way) and the culture helps (less discussion about shallow things like indentation). Fast food for instance, being a real-time thing requires tight planning and tight execution, no space for slack. It makes you sweat but you get seriously fast and good at your operations. Unlike coding where you can spin in circles for ages never get anywhere, and go home drained feeling useless.
For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.
I mean, yes - work isn't fun. But I have coding side projects I work on, and it is fun for me, still!
I'll be 40 in a few months, so recently I've been a bit more pensive than usual, reflecting on where I'm at in my life. One of my biggest regrets so far is how much time I spent wishing I was somewhere other than where I was.
I'm assuming that by this you mean that most stories you hear around the bar are just the same stories with different characters and protagonists?
Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.
If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
I think that you mean that a hobby (that you can pick up and put down as you please) is always more enjoyable than a job (at which you must work, usually on someone else's schedule, to make money), but, just to be quite clear, there's no reason that woodworking can't be a real job.
THere is a programmatic aspect, too: Fusion360's modeller has a Python API that lets you programmatically build and evaluate designs. I rarely use this, but it does come in handy. For one project, where I wanted to make a 3D topo-style map of California (basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkQ8pA_TLY) it was a great opportunity to learn geo (using the great GIS package, "OS4Geo", especially QGIS), turn that geo info into a mesh, and then render it in wood.
Stay-at-home-for-COVID made my life a lot easier, as I could start a carving in the morning and let it go all day while sitting nearby and programming.
Before that I had an XCarve but it was just too big and not rigid enough. I owned several early Shapeokos, which were simply not rigid enough. The 4040 pro is the first router I've had that's actually worked the way I expected (and even then, it clearly has some issues) in the cost window I care about.
CNC brings challenges (and joys) that 3d printing does not have. You have to spend a lot more time thinking about the tools and their paths, mounting the work in the CNC, dealing with dust, etc, etc, but it's really reawrding to hand somebody a carving and see them blown away by the results.
I find that a lot of people go to work thinking they enjoy it, and wake up later and realize it is just "work". This leads them to go off and figure out what they really enjoy, and they start doing that (they call it a hobby). Some of them ruin their hobby, by turning it into a full time job, where once again, it just becomes "work".
And it's not just "it's more fun when you're not doing a thing for money", I certainly plan to try and sell these things when they're done, and I've relentlessly optimized the way I work for being fun to do. It's just really nice to be able to look at a physical thing and know that you made it.
Said Kaimu: “Nothing yet. But when I touch a lit candle to the oil I sprinkled from my lantern during our crossing, he will learn the reason to plan for the absurd, the virtue of rebuilding in stone, and the wisdom of not insulting your customers.” - 0
It took twice as long as I thought. It cost double what it would have cost to buy one of Etsy but it's still one of my favourite things I've done in ages. My son still gets excited when he see's it sometimes
There's definitely a different type of satisfaction/reward you get from finishing something you put a lot of time in when you can feel and see the thing. I guess it aligns with why I enjoyed front end dev more so than backend enterprise stuff. Its visual.. With woodworking, its not only visual but a physical object. You see every inch of it, every corner, every joint, everywhere where you fixed something, where you took the time to perfectly sand a surface to ensure it looks just perfect in the end.
I also usually put on an audio book or music in my buds. Its a great way to disconnect and immerse yourself into something that isn't tied to anything else at that moment. No deadlines, no PRDs, no tests, no dependencies, just you and what you're working on... Its relaxing..
Sorry.. I lied... there's tons of dependencies.. Those happen to be all the right tools for the job that you don't yet have and every time you do something, you have to decide whether you'll invest the money to buy said tool, or build said thing to help you get from A to B, or if you'll go the other way around and wing it by hand, taking much longer and hopefully not too much of a worst result..
It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.
I love software development. I love building both simple and complex systems. But users often suck, and honestly sometimes even the people you're making software for suck. I just want people to be grateful for what I'm doing and I honestly find that lacking a bit in our field.
By and large, we are not doing a good job, and we are not often allowed to actually do a good job. Modern software frustrates me to no end, and in the last few years I've been noticing more non-technical folks getting frustrated. Everyone expects apps and websites to randomly fail in stupid ways or do things in ways that are not intuitive. I barely want to tell anyone I'm a software engineer at this point because it's embarrassing.
"When you’ve been conditioned to believe rightly or wrongly that your value as a human being is derived from the economic value you provide to those around you and all barriers to producing work have been removed by an unprecedented upheaval to social norms, it felt like there was only one path forward and that was working as hard as possible every day."
I am in part drawn to software development and programming, because it's logical and comparatively rigid (at least programming itself is, if you take away the environment/ecosystem/cults that develop around the idiosyncracies of different languages). I find programming very far from absurd.
I am therefore surprised to see software programmers claiming that software development is absurd - and that woodworking could somehow be less so.
The grass is always greener on the other side. (And I still can't accept that programming itself is absurd.)
But that’s only a very tiny part of the art… what breaks the camel’s back for many of us is all the BS around it coming from management, investors, clueless middle managers, political business people, overcommitted salespeople, and the constantly changing tooling so that something you wrote 6–12 months ago won’t run today anymore without a variable amount of change and effort. Not to mention the layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction that make the whole thing inscrutable.
I think that’s what a lot of us are fed up with and mean with “programming has become absurd”
Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.
Story points are dumb because they always are just a bad proxy for time.
Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with no uncertainty.
It's a half-assed reimplementation of PERT charts, which were invented in the 1950s and used successfully for many decades, until everyone decided that everything old is terrible.
I love coding. And I love woodworking too: there are so many videos out there to help you get started. Learning to use dowels was quite the revelation for me.
Still very scared of the table saw (Don t have one yet).
But it's great to have other passions outside of it. To get away from your main occupation. To reset and to get a perspective.
And woodworks seems like a good choice. You're still making things, physical ones and you can hone your skill.
I've made a handful of things in my life (e.g. two simple custom beds for my home) without any prior knowledge of wood working at all. They weren't great, but good enough. And I couldn't have been prouder.
So thanks for sharing your story. I might get back to tinkering in my garage more often!
I'd been on the new project long enough to fix a couple major logistic issues with code-build-test cycles, and to get a page that took 30 seconds to load down to 3 seconds with five lines of code, and they were starting to trust me.
One day I'm in a conversation with the architect where we are about to spiral airing the things that suck and he starts talking about how some of these seem to be intrinsic. He ends a sentence with "and the only way to solve these problems is to open a flower shop. If you sell someone flowers they don't come back in five days telling you they were the wrong flowers."
From then on, every time the outlook got dark or just spicy, we would joke about opening a flower shop together. What's the best month to open a flower shop? Most of the sales are for Valentine's Day, but how long do you need to be open for brand recognition ahead of VD?
The only downside to seeing this connection is that you’re constantly tempted to use idioms from woodworking to explain programming problems, which just confuses most people.
Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.
Of course, the business still needs time estimates, so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time estimates. But that can't be helped.
You never get handed a task which is "write as much of a prototype of a system which would do this, so we can estimate how much more work we think is involved".
And then when you do have enough knowledge to reasonably estimate, people just declare with no evidence that it should be quicker anyway and then are surprised when it is not.
Software engineers, when pressured by managers to provide low estimates and/or to provide estimates quickly, will estimate inaccurately. (It can also be deliberately high as well as low, based on previous experience of having their estimates chopped in half.)
Whether you use SP or T-shirt sizes or whatever, somebody is translating that into days because days (and thus dollars) are what matter to the business. If someone asks me for an estimate, I'll give them a range in days/weeks, and they can turn it into whatever nonsense unit they like.
Sure we can, it's always one of:
- A couple of minutes
- Today
- A week or two
- Probably around a month
- I have no idea, could be any of the above or more
> software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.
This is both irrelevant and wrong.
It’s irrelevant because t-shirt sizes, story points, and other abstract measures, are - intentionally - not measures of time. It’s a measure of effort, benchmarked against other units of work. Yes, this can, sometimes, give a vague indication of time. It’s also useful for other reasons, too, like weeding out whether or not everyone is on the same page with regard to what needs to be done in the first place. All of this is explained in literally any primer on the subject.
You’re wrong in saying that software engineers aren’t capable of estimating effort (or even time) with any degree of accuracy. They can. I can tell you that my Python hello world script will take less time and effort than rewriting the Linux kernel. None of the “research” and “experience” that you so confidently refer to says what you think it does. It says that there are big limitations to the degree to which timelines can be estimated. This is entirely true. But there’s nuance to it. You’re so desperate to find a shortcut to being smart on the internet that you’re spreading blatant disinformation in the process.
A hobby gives me enough distance from work problems to come back to them with a fresh perspective and more energy.
Often when people are asked who they are, they respond with their job titles.
I grew up further North in a region where every house had some tools for working wood. It was natural, some people were really good at it, some mediocre, but using a manual wood planner or a wood chisel was almost routine for any man or kid. I am no longer living there and I am not working with wood, but I find it escaping to do some work in the garden, put some pipes for irrigation or fixing something on the vise. It is a different world than the craziness of the software industry, especially in the corporate world.
Lovely phraseology - this definitely resonates with me, and is one of several reasons why any interest I might have had in working in tech has evaporated.
I am currently happy at my current job that pays well enough writing proxies. The team and leadership are great with tremendous internal training. It just feels military, which is fitting since it’s at a military organization.
If this line of work doesn’t work I will still not go back to software. I would rather be unemployed and lose my house.
Some ppl simply dont have money to start:
- woodworking
- sailing
- skying
- buying motors
- building boats
- renovating cars
Be happy you are in 1% of the richest ppl on the Earth.
Most of my friends are happy when they can get by in given month.
If you're only in it because it pays well, you've got the wrong idea and will run into those "throw the laptop out the window" urges and are likely to burn out fast and take up woodworking, or some other thing.
I think it's working for a huge corporation vs a tiny one.
If you feel drained by all the bullshit of your current development job, I'm guessing you work for a huge company. Start work at a <10 employee company, and see if you can find more job satisfaction there.
I dunno that it's a midlife "crisis" per se. I think the older you get the more aware you are of the time that's left, and you ask "why are we doing this" instead of assuming there's time to do anything.
Actually, these solutions are just two different ways of working toward the same goal: absolute power
This attitude will fail you. The meaningless work must be done as carefully and joyfully as the meaningful work. Think of it as building the foundation for serendipity, something very difficult to see from the present moment.
I do a lot of programming, some wood working (a little fine stuff but also timber framing), stone work, and (ornamental) gardening. I find all of these things very similar. Building, guiding things that I don't quite control towards an end I want. Open-ended and creative. I find all of them very relaxing.
> software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon
circa 2006 my father begged me to not pick Computer Science as a major. He was certain by the time I graduated there would be no jobs left.
> And I got so tired of everything being online, immaterial, ephemeral and lonely, like indie development tends to be.
Ah well, it's good he's not gardening!
There, fixed it for you.
People are the same just pay sucks way more.
I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to have some very rude discoveries.
Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as well. Fine woodworking, the projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table (and you spend a few months making it full time), needs much more design vision and years of practice. Those 10k hours required to master a skill seem about right.
Been through a burnout 20 years ago, had to take a year off and then discovered that if you place correct boundaries and don't let people mess with you, our trade can be pretty enjoyable.
The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job is to resist the urge to monetize it.
Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO. I enjoyed reading about and seeing the projects produced with simple tools and some work. The author is clearly very creative and resourceful and I bet this inspires a few people look for a creative outlet of their own.
It's really satisfying to see stuff grow, to learn how to tend to plants, how they compete and cooperate.
It helps me to preserve some sanity.
The lesson: Woodworking is physically dangerous, do not cheapen on tools and protection.
I enjoy the former. I enjoy collaborating on my craft and doing something fun and cool. I like the people I work with and enjoy helping grow and build other people’s careers.
Then there’s the reality of navigating a workplace - the “career” has the silliness of managing narcissists aspiring to be the next Steve Jobs. It’s generally lucrative, but that money attracts its own absurdity and egotists, putting more into advancing their status in an arbitrary org structure than building. The older I get the less energy I have for these sorts of politics.
Let me tell you, there is nothing more joyous than going outside 3 days after planting new seed varieties in a recovered-soil hügel-bed, and seeing brand new leafy life reaching for the stars. I get the same sort of buzz out of watching seedlings push dirt out of the way, as I used to get from checking for PR's on some of my repo's, lol ..
Its at the point now where I have to have a desktop garden, or else I just don't feel complete as a human being. Lucky, there are tons of things I can take from my new hügel-bed's to plant on the desk, herbs, spices, salads and things .. its just so rewarding.
So yeah, garden, programmers. Garden. Its so good for you. And you can get a buzz from the methods, just like you do with code, too ...