How one hacker quit the programming life for bluer skies | Hacker News Reader

How one hacker quit the programming life for bluer skies

wired.com

91 pointsbootload44 comments

I have to say, having been both a bike messenger and programmer for several years each, that there are some very alluring aspects to the bike messenger lifestyle. It's serene and meditative, you work outdoors, it's really energizing. The fact that it rarely pays more than $300/wk (unless it's snowing) makes it a less viable option for people trying to make a good life for a family. That part's not really mentioned in the articles glamorizing the lifestyle.

Being a programmer can often seem like the opposite of that, when you're in the office on Saturday writing PHP form validation logic for the 500th time for an arbitrary deadline.

I used to say being a bike messenger was my favorite job I ever had, until I saved up a little money and started working on a startup a few months ago. Building my startup's product and market is much more energizing, freeing, and rewarding than being a bike messenger ever was. I can't wait to get up in the morning and start programming (assuming that's on the agenda for the day).

Plus now I can ride my bike around NYC during the work day, without having to hang out in corporate mail rooms 40% of the time.

wait a few more months and experience a few near-death moments or failures regarding your startup and you will see that the hard part is keeping the energy your started out with while doing the marathon that is startup-live!

"The fact that it rarely pays more than $300/wk (unless it's snowing) makes it a less viable option for people trying to make a good life for a family. That part's not really mentioned in the articles glamorizing the lifestyle."

Here's a bit that was cut from the article, originally right after the part where I write that Duff gave couriering one last shot after moving back to Toronto:

"It was humbling," Duff says. "I only lasted four months before I decided it wasn't worth it." When he was 22, if Duff had a bad day and only brought home $70, it was OK. He shared a house with three roommates and had cheap rent and few expenses. But now if he makes only $70 in day, it's barely enough to cover child care.

"I wouldn't recommend anyone who has a family consider leaving their white collar job for couriering," Duff says. "But I think it's a very reasonable decision if you hate your job and you're in your 20s and you're single and have relatively few expenses."

"... When a friend offered him a job as a bike messenger, he took it — in part because couriers had been glamorized in cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s Virtual Light and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but also because it would ease his mind ..."

Great read Klint. This is the best quote from the article and I really understand this. I remember having the best of both, working outdoors during University - some money and hard physical work. Undo-able now. Of the bike riders I see on the weekend, a fair portion I imagine are city-boys working in high-stress cerebral occupations like software & finance ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5646201528/

I think the mental grind of being a programmer can be exhausting. Especially if you work in 95% of work environments/companies. Either you're working with people who aren't passionate, or you're working on boring software. The fact it's very much a sedentary activity doesn't help too, as it saps our energy.

After doing it for awhile, you can't help but ask "What's the point of all this? Who cares? Who cares if we're producing wealth? I rather downsize, live in a cave and go back to the simple life! This mental grind for that fancy car and a new flat screen TV isn't worth it!"

I find uncertainty and confusion and then finding a solution to the problem, to be exhausting itself.

You just need to find an organization with a culture that fits you well, just like in any other profession. If nothing fits with you, then yeah you probably aren't meant to be in that profession.

Bike to work, and do an intense fitness activity (like crossfit, etc) 3-5 times a week. You'll be in recovery mode enough that it will be a benefit to be sedentary while your body recovers.

Here I was all psyched up for a story about a pilot.

"Bluer skies"? He's a pilot!

Picture starts loading. He looks just like Cid Highwind. He's an awesome pilot with a sense of humor!

I see "bike messenger." The dreeeeeeam of the nineties is aliiiiiiive in Portland... I am disappoint.

He quit his programming job, not programming.

I code (not very well), but I don't get paid for it. I'm an electrical engineer by day and enjoy writing code as a hobby. I doubt I would ever want to wade into a software development gig. I still like making computers submit to my bidding, however.

The leading sentence "Some people believe that everyone should be a programmer." is crazy.

I want everyone to learn how to code, but not to be a programmer.

Just like I want everyone to learn math, but not to be a mathematician. There's a difference, and it's important.

The whole leading paragraph implies that if some people are happier not doing something for a living, then everyone should beware learning it at all.

I remember working 8 hours a day and then coming home and not doing anything interesting. I just want to play and enjoy myself, and then go to sleep. I never really got used to programming for a living.

What do you do now?

I'm in the same boat. I'm usually too exhausted from working/commuting for 11 hours a day to actually want to do anything at home.

Now if the guy would have quit programming to become a lumberjack, that would have been interesting. Instead it sounds almost like an Onion parody of hipsters.

You must be referring to this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c1rcu/iama_person_with...

I go cut down cedar trees (for any of you tree huggers, they are non-native & invasive - they suck up a ton of water that our pretty oak trees need) on my family's Texas hill country ranch a couple times a year... It is my go to relaxation time.

Now, would I quit being a developer to cut down trees full time? No, I like web development & my chainsawing skills won't pay the bills...

I also love air conditioning.

Cedar (Ashe Juniper) is not an invasive species in central Texas. Some people are extremely allergic to the pollen though, so that's usually why they want to cut them down.

I didn't want to go into programming after I got my CS degree mostly due to the terrible job market where I lived in 2000 after the dot-com crash.

I had a year where I traveled and had jobs like handing out fliers, picking pears, and pruning vines. Then I moved to the US, spent six months living on a sofa while working as a mechanic, then as a part-time computer repair guy.

It's liberating working blue-collar jobs because you really don't have to care, and certainly don't think about the job out-of-hours. I learnt that there were two kinds of jobs--those that you shower before work and those you shower after.

The real lesson was that you really can't have a decent living on minimum wage. I ended up calling every local web design firm in the Yahoo! Directory and begging for a job. I feel privileged that a decade late I'm earning nearly eight times minimum wage and that I can enjoy the trappings that come with that.

It sounds like he just didn't like his programming job. I quit a decent paying full time job in 2010. A bunch of my friends thought I was crazy at the time. I left my office, I worked in a coffeeshop for a while, did some freelancing and figured out what sort of job and work environment would make me happier. There are a galaxy of programming jobs, this story doesn't strike me as being actually about programming, just about a guy who was unhappy with one job and did something very different for a while to feel better about it (which can be a great idea for some people!).

"The pay was decent, and he was doing good for the world, but he realized that programming just wasn’t his calling."

An he self-identifies as a hacker? By definition, if you are a hacker, it IS your calling. No story here.

Clearly, he is a writer by calling (self-identified in the article) who learned to program and uses it to pay the bill from time to time; an occasionally writes a code riff for fun... but that doesn't make him a hacker.

Hacker != Programmer

Being a hacker to me just means someone with an "engineering" mindset. Someone who can make solutions out of whatever's available. It's the innovative and clever mindset that most programmers share, but there's no rule that you have to be a programmer or work in IT.

You'll find people with these traits working in medicine, construction, agriculture, and any number of different professions. We wouldn't have advancement in lots of areas if everyone that was a "hacker" only became programmers.

Programming is merely one skill of a hacker.

I'm assuming s_henry_paulson meant someone who programs as a hobby or profession. You don't have to be a programmer to come up with novel solutions as a mechanic, janitor, or writer. It's not an essential element of the job.

Useful, but not essential.

This is such an excellent point. In my life I've met all sorts of hackers. Hacking predates computing. It probably predates most things. Whatever it is, its the kind of thinking that solves puzzles and can apply to anything.

I've met woodworking hackers, cycling hackers, comedy hackers, food hackers, etc who don't give two shits about computers. In fact, I'd say IT/programming is something of a ghetto (long hours, hard work, seen as non-management, seen as almost blue collar, worry about uptimes/bugs/security, dealing with end users, etc) and the people who didn't get into computers are better off. If you're sharp go disrupt a field that isn't full of disruptors. You'lll have better chances.

It's entirely reasonable to imagine a hypothetical "programmer hacker" who chooses something other than programming as a career anyway. One could spend their time hacking on open source projects or hobby projects or whatever, while making a living doing $WHATEVER. But they'd still be a hacker.

As soon as I hit the 30s and have a family, I intend to move to teaching as a career. I've been programming since i was 12 and have always had side projects, and I don't think that will ever stop- but I have a hard time imagining myself writing code for arbitrary projects and deadlines my whole life.

Right now though, I'm young, it pays really well (and I save a lot of money for later) and I enjoy the lifestyle.

Why does this guy deserve a Wired story? He's not interesting. What next, a story about stock brokers who start a restaurant?

I suppose Wired covered this because the general sentiment these days is that everyone needs to learn programming since it is pretty much the only way to be productive in the future.

Bingo. He's a slightly personable foil to the new rhetoric.

I enjoy stories counter to the current cultural sentiment, however I found this one to be very bland.

because they need pageviews to stay alive and someone over there figured, 'huh, i bet we can get this on the front page of hacker news'

Quote from the article:

"He gave the bike messenger gig one more shot, but that only lasted for a month or so. It’s not career, but neither was programming, and being a courier helped him realized that. “I really shudder to think what I’d be doing now, if I had stayed with programming for the last seven years,” he says."

Everyone should be a programmer, but not in the eight-year-in-cubicle-daily sense. So it's not even mutually exclusive.

s/year/hour/

I dunno, sometimes it feels like I spend 8 years a day in my cubicle.

The mistake in this (and in similar articles) is conflating activity and purpose. Programming is an activity, not an end in itself. To love programming is to love solving challenging problems with a computer, not the act of typing code for 9 hours a day.

That is why articles like these just end up being psychological mirrors - those who aren't being fulfilled in a programming job will always perk up at the idea of "bluer skies". Job unhappiness almost always has a root cause that has little to do with the activity of the job itself, and more with the job situation.

Hmm. Yeah making $300 per week sounds really great. Not. Silly article.

I'm a professional programmer who feels like he maybe shouldn't be. Articles like these are encouraging, even if never wind up quitting.

Why is this presented as a either-or dichotomy, between programming and "blue skies"? If you want to do just physical labor, OK, then I guess you don't really need to program. However, if he decides to eventually start his own messenger service, I imagine knowing how to program, even if for the equivalent of 0.5 days a week in order to custom-build the kind of logistics tool needed to break into the messenger-service market, will help him achieve this kind of bluer-skies lifestyle.

He's not giving up programming for bluer-skies. He's giving up a complex-life...but that entails many other fields of knowledge besides programming.

Because short attention spa

I stopped reading at

Though some say that Duff was never a “real coder” if he was willing to give up the life

Dribble.

Take away: do what makes you happy.

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