Cottagecore Programmers

My current project is a mid-century modern-inspired dining table. I'm delighted by the design, and I'm tickled to be building it. Not all projects are as fun. Last year I built a very large liquor cabinet that involved rather more problem-solving than expected. I should've charged more for it, and I am, as ever, grateful that my partner works a salaried job that comes with health insurance.

As a small point of order, I was never actually asked to add an RSS feed to a DBMS. I've definitely implemented things that made just as much sense to me though.

I remain delighted by how much that GitHub comment still resonates with folks, and I remain astonished that the issue is still open after almost 8 years.

ETA: I remain wholly unqualified to discuss the state of actual agriculture and homesteading. My partner and I garden, but make no pretense of ever having our small home be self-sustaining economically or even in food.

Why does everyone who sits behind a computer long to be out in the fields or workshops?

My flip answer to that is that they haven't spent their youth on a farm, worrying about a hailstorm that wipes out the entire wheat crop for the year, or you lose 25% of your cattle herd to a recently diagnosed virus diarrhea. My grandparents were homesteaders who at some point in their life lived in houses with dirt floors.

The fact of life was that due to technology, the productivity of the American farm increased by almost two orders of magnitude during my Grandfather's lifetime. This meant that a tractor that my dad purchased when I was about 3 for the equivalent of 1500 bushels of wheat cost about 9000 by the time I went to college.

Thus, the economics of a family farm, or sole dude wanting to get away from the computer and grow something is painful.

A couple of kids that do an excellent job of building a homestead are the couple behind the youtube channel Ambition Strikes. They call at an off-grid homestead, but through their unbounded energy and creativity have created their own substantial mini-grid. I have a lot of respect for them and what they have done.

The article notes It is difficult to think of any field more forcibly disentangled from any sort of understanding of the impact of your labor than the majority of positions in tech. This is discussed in some detail in the book "Stiffed" by Susan Faludi. She discusses the community nature of the naval shipyards, in which everyone apparently was connected meaningfully to their work and the workers around them. She contrasts that with the workers in aerospace whose work is so abstract that it was hard for a professional working there to describe to their kids what exactly they do all day.

I came to understand the "purposelessness" of my career very early on; when I decommissioned a bare metal server from a datacenter after finishing the deploy of it's replacement and realised that the old server was the first unit I'd racked when I started in the position 4 years ago.

That was ~20 years ago. Nothing I've had a hand in building / maintaining has "survived" for more than ~7 years.

My Dad worked to build houses. Prior to my IT career I'd laboured for him and played my small part in the creation of many homes around where I grew up. They'll be there for a hundred years maybe.

Quitting the ephemeral world of IT to work on building a homestead and creating tangible things that directly keep humans alive seems like an obvious calling to me.

The constant evolution of "tech" is a blessing and a curse.

The difference is doing it out of necessity vs. doing it out of choice. Nobody fetishizes being worked to the bone in fear of making ends meet. Tech people are by and large well-educated and comfortable enough to dream of a utopia where they can be close to nature and do tasks that feel meaningful and human in an of themselves (vs. hyper-abstracted acronym-laden functional teams value-adds that often only provide the indirect satisfaction of "I'm doing my job and my boss is happy"). "I made a chair" and "I grew some carrots" are instantly relatable and valuable to anyone.

Source: I quit my tech job and moved to the woods 8 years ago, but would only do so because I don't need to worry about grinding a survival out of it.

It's not that it has strictly to do with being outside or away from the computer (that's nice though) but for me it's that you still get to build and be proud of what you've done.

When I do work away from the computer and more in farm/homestead situations, I'm still drawn to using technology to solve problems (e.g. Automating certain tasks with microcontrollers), so it's not a rejection of my $job.

I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.

Have to disagree with the article though, I don't think it has anything to do with a mythos.

In fact, I'm also very grateful that I got to try a wide range of shitty manual labor job as a student. So many people would kill for a cushy office job.

EDIT: Might I also add, I think some engineers - especially those that have reached FIRE, enjoy the idea of LARPing a homestead / farming life. If you have enough money to not feel the stress, you can have a smaller farm.

The harsh reality is that operating a small farm can be brutal. You're at the very bottom of the food-chain, as far as the agricultural business goes.

1. We crave tactile skillful experiences

We have thousands of years of evolution that encourage us to want to use our bodies skillfully. We're a tool-using species and humans that didn't derive some intrinsic satisfaction from manipulating the physical world deftly probably didn't survive long enough to make babies.

It just straight up feels good to watch ones own hands turn a piece of wood into a utensil, a hank of yarn into a wearable garment, or a patch of dirt into edible vegetables.

2. We want to feel resourceful and secure

We have emotions like anxiety and worry to get us to prepare for the future. Of course, we can't fully predict the future, so part of that is a general feeling of resourcefulness. "I don't know what's coming, but I know I can handle it when it does."

Working in tech is in many ways the opposite of that. We're like hothouse flowers or thoroughbred racehorses. We are fantastically good at this one specific thing that happens to be highly valued right now. But there's an underlying anxiety that if the world stops needing more software... what's our plan B?

You don't have to go full apocalyptic prepper mentality to have a gnawing worry in the back of your head that if this whole software thing doesn't work out, what else am I good for?

A craving for manual skills that transcend trends, time, and specific corporate employment is a natural hedge against that frightening level of specialization.

"Plato saw Diogenes washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, 'Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn't now be washing lettuces,' and that he with equal calmness made answer, 'If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn't have paid court to Dionysius."

I gotta admit, that on a day where it's just about chasing some elusive bug or bugs, even I say to myself: "What the hell did I do today?" even though I might have spent 8-10 solid hours actively working. If the bug is hard enough to find I feel like I accomplished nothing nor have anything to show for it.

And sometimes, when you add to the fact that as devs we have all these perks in the office like free snacks, being able to go out for lunch, free sodas, free coffee, or WFH etc. and for what? We accomplished nothing!

Conversely, you might meet blue collar workers who has to, absolutely has to commute to a job site (no WFH for them), busts their rear to get something real and tangible done. Like for example, setting up electrical, or building a frame, or fixing a major plumbing issue, or doing drywall, or painting an entire house, or doing an entire roof in the heat etc. And sometimes these people barely get their bathroom, lunch and/or coffee breaks. It really makes us seem spoiled in comparison.

And yes, I know that it's kinda denigrating to use the word "real" to describe anything but software, but, what I mean, is that most non-software people only understand finished and shipped software as real. They don't that understand DB schemas, software specs, MVPs, for example, etc. is also real as well. And they certainly don't understand time spent on thinking about data structures and algorithms as anything real or tangible. Especially if you spend most time planning properly before you code.

Anyways, we want to prove, at least to ourselves, that we can actually create something that everyone can see, touch, feel, pick up, eat, stand on, sit on, etc. And we want to prove that we can have same high standards and craftsmanship this kind of work that we have for code.

Yeah, some of us have a chip on our shoulder about that.

- Simplify (whether or not this is misguided, it's part of the appeal).

- Autonomy. Being able to, even partially, move off-grid decreases your reliance on society.

- Physical / nature. Sitting at a desk all day definitely has a toll.

There's several No true Scotsman comments here, but IMO there's nothing wrong with attempting this lifestyle. If someone decides (and can afford) to live more simply, it doesn't bother me any. Good for them!

I think the negativity might be because every frikin' one of them tries to turn into a snake oil selling influencer, and we're just seeing influencer fatigue setting in.

I would rather posit that most tech jobs have a negative societal impact and it's difficult to find a company which isn't focusing on fucking the maximum amount of profit out of their customers while utilising the cheapest lubricant.

There are a multitude of reasons why one might not like being a programmer, but most of them have nothing to do with programming itself. It's other people. Other engineers or managers or parasites. People who think antisocial behavior is okay, or worse, that it's the way to get ahead in life.

Toxic people make everything suck. I worked extremely hard to stop being even a little toxic. I wish more people would realize how their behavior affects others.

Most programmers don’t really seem to understand that programming isn’t really their job. It’s an illusion. Their job is to create value to the shareholders. That’s not really that much fun, and once the joy of writing and reading code is slowly squeezed away from their position is when those with sanity still intact start thinking “Man, I ought to get the fuck up out of here and find a real job or something.” The really lucky ones are outdoorsy folks that can afford to do the homesteading thing, or are willing to forego the immense compensation that tech work so often allures them with.

Just my two cents. I was blessed to retire in my thirties, so I could be entirely out of touch, though I hear many things.

> so few Americans are familiar with the actual work behind jobs in the agricultural sector or related ones, I would argue that for many Americans the reality of this type of work is almost indistinguishable from fables or myth in their psychological context, due to lack of exposure. Due to that seeming separation from their mental context of what work is, it enhances the feeling of escapism which this work-fantasy provides

These fantasies always seem perplexing to those of us who grew up with exposure to actual farming life. Running a modern farm is hard work. Taking it a step further to the idea of homesteading would bring unthinkable amounts of labor, difficulty, and a realization that the old office job wasn't so bad after all.

Of the few people who actually pursue these fantasies, it usually takes the form of a hobby farm or some backyard gardening with ample injections of cash to keep things moving.

A few years ago something snapped and I started cancelling things like landscapers. Even trivial crap like mowing my own lawn and cooking my own meals is, on average, significantly more rewarding than sitting at a computer all day. There is definitely a psychological impact to letting other parties manage large aspects of your residence.

If "shower thoughts" are helpful to you, try a few hours of hard labor in the sun. You may be amazed to discover how far the spectrum of background metal processing capabilities extends. Any notion that time spent at the computer is proportional to progress with code/work/etc. is absolutely insane to me. It's almost as if you get more things done on the computer the less you use it.

Eventually, you get tired of it. Doing something simple becomes ever more attractive. Me, I still teach tech, but I also build stone walls.

The lack of exposure isn’t accidental. Romanticizing farming doesn’t extend to romanticizing farmers. It’s not like you couldn’t go to a county fair, take a stroll around and ask yourself what this thing is all about. Or, actually talk with the farmer at your farmer’s market. Keeping the people at arm’s length is key to maintaining the romantic idea of farming as something to be escaped to rather than a difficult and sometimes dangerous job. Even some reading about silo safety would be edifying.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tjic

It's not so much about ownership, but about operating on concrete things that you can point to, instead of spinning up virtual machines in the cloud.

Building software without agile or tickets or meetings feels just as good. It's what I've been doing for the last five years. It feels nice again.

> If you have the capability to contribute work in some way – physical strength, knowledge, or mental acuity, then you have a moral responsibility to do so

There is more to life than work and we should not e.g. judge retirees just because we could perhaps still squeeze a few dollars more worth of labor out of them. We can simply appreciate the intrinsic value of human life instead.

It is surprising to see the author making this blunder after sharing the following insight:

> The ideal of finding our value in work and making something of ourselves through the sweat of our brow is a noble one in many ways but contains a corrosive core as well. If you center your value entirely in how appreciative others are of the contributions you make, and in what you can provide, you ignore the actual concept of community, and you potentially build a worldview that denigrates those who you view as not contributing “enough” in your manner.

The exact argument applies to what the author proposed as the solution.

I spend a fair amount of time reading Bret Devereaux's acoup.blog, and one thing I learned from there was the idealization of the small, independent farmer by Rome's literary elite (who themselves were wealthy urbanites).

History repeats itself, it would seem :)

Also have never probably experienced harvesting things in the heat. It fucking sucks.

It’s a fantastic community project, with very capable professional people keeping things running, but most of the physical work done by volunteers who drop in to put in an hour of digging, picking (or in my case bee-keeping).

It’s a productive, diverse farm. Chickens, goats, lots of fruit, vegetables. And a place for wildlife.

Not an option for everyone. But if you have the same urge, go and look and see if there’s anything similar.

[0] https://www.oxfordcityfarm.org.uk/

A Georgist perspective on this would be that it's the decreased costs in other goods and services which have (partially) contributed to the increased cost in housing, as any increase in disposable income allows you to bid up the price of land. Not everyone does, but enough do so that it has this overall effect, and the effect is stronger where housing supply is already limited.

I think programmers - good ones at least - like building things, like seeing things go. We care deeply about what we can make in the world. We are in a OODA loop, where we put in effort, fix things, and they get better.

But often building stuff becomes jammed up, organizationally. There's other people injecting priorities and concerns. There's a whole org, that's utterly dependent on us, that thinks it want things, but don't understand what we are bargaining over, doesn't have the essential capabilities to see the truths, affinities, struggles, and joys we feel. We're on our own island of empathy with products. And the outcome is always so unknown, riding this organization ship.

The idea of going out there homesteading speaks, to me, to a desire to have a loop where there's less people injecting themselves. A very recent highlight from Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich, 1973) comes to mind,

"Survival, justice, and self-defined work. I take these to be fundamental to any convivial society."

Via https://bsky.app/profile/gordon.bsky.social/post/3ll5hgh3el2...

There are many ways to find hobbies which provide tangible meaningful value to yourself and society, reconnect you to the physical world, and even help your community that don't involve homesteading off-grid. I strongly encourage everyone I know in tech, coworkers included, to find some type of hobby that does that for them. I agree with the article author though that the idyllic fantasy of farming is bunk, and most people would be better for both themselves and their community to find something else physical to do with their time.

After some point you'd rather you didn't have to do that 9-5 at all and become depressed a bit by the fact you have to spend so much time a day on something that doesn't fundamentally concern you and you don't therefore fundamentally care about. The fact it takes up your time and energy, and you don't get to get out of it until you are old and worn out unless you hit some lottery in the meanwhile.

I think a big part of this is the same thing behind the impulse to rewrite a hoary old software system from scratch: Our tendency to underestimate reality's true level of detail.

Or have "income from a publisher in New York", a criticism a contemporary made of Thoreau in his Walden period.

I'm surprised nobody else has said it yet, but this name is ridiculous and probably at least partially why this post isn't being taken all that seriously.

I like reading discussion on this topic. Not that I've ever seriously considered this, but still interesting to read about.

I fully agree. I also have close relatives who do work with their hands (one is a fine woodworker, amusingly enough – he makes some jaw-droppingly beautiful things), and they’ve all assured me that they view the work I do as also being demanding, just mentally instead of physically.

I do personally believe that some amount of physical labor, even if it’s pure grunt work, is beneficial for your overall well-being and societal views. I’ve built retaining walls, a large deck, some fences, and various (non-fine) woodworking projects around the house. You come away from those with a sense of pride and accomplishment (TM EA) that is difficult to find with anything else.

> If you center your value entirely in how appreciative others are of the contributions you make, and in what you can provide, you ignore the actual concept of community, and you potentially build a worldview that denigrates those who you view as not contributing “enough” in your manner.

I can accept that, though I will gently push back in that I don’t think many people in tech – myself certainly included – are producing much that’s objectively valuable to society. Economically, yes, but from a communal / societal standpoint? Meh.

> If you have the capability to contribute work in some way – physical strength, knowledge, or mental acuity, then you have a moral responsibility to do so – yet not having as much capability as some other person is not something that should negate your self-worth. Instead, the act of doing what you can is what should be seen as virtuous, rather than the absolute economic output of your personal capability. Do what you can, build a community through simple acts of socialization and giving to others, and improve the lives of everyone around you. That is how we find fulfillment in a world such as this one.

Well-said! Or, as someone else once put it, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The author gives strong wordcel vibes, it's sad to read tbh.

As the blog post hints at it's not really limited to programmers or cubicle workers as such, it's deeply ingrained in the US psyche. Practically you can just hop on any social media platform and see examples. A few days ago I saw some pictures of the new BYD factory in China and it's quite funny to see the difference between Chinese reactions "it'll make us independent" or "jobs there pay better" to English media which have a lot of "that's so big and dystopian", "it'll automate away jobs" etc.

There's an observation by Fukuyama that Americans modernized before they urbanized which has left them midway between urban dweller and villager and that's really what's behind "cottagecore" and also behind the inability to build and automate and the constraints that everyone in American politics complaints about all the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden

But I would argue that the desire is also part of an attempt to escape the unrelenting bureaucracy and lack of autonomy that can be so stifling in a tech job. Sometimes it feels like all of the decisions have already been made for you.

Perhaps someone wrote a playbook of how you should cope with common work situations you might come across and suddenly you aren't an intelligent human anymore, but an infantilised child stripped of agency, your independence micromanaged away by a thousand software engineers before you who thought that it would be a good idea to treat people like machines; because it reduces risk, right?

Perhaps someone doesn't like how you formatted some code, or named a variable, and you are held to randsom at the point of a PR review.

And then you might have to explain to a customer why something in a complex system you have build cannot be changed without consequences; and they cannot really understand why this is, but suddenly you have to cope with their frustration at their powerlessness. And you are stuck between the emotions they are permitted and the inhumanity of the work that you do.

Tech jobs can sometimes seem like a sadistic prison for the mind stuck between the human and the inhuman.

Every day we work on reinventing grand rube goldberg versions of a PDP-11, insulated by a nice fluffy layer of know-nothing management, with the slow obfuscated goal to entrap, control and exploit any sector of the economy that actually does anything.

- Logistics of people moving goods? Profits eaten by software.

- Marketplaces of buyers/sellers of people? A percentage to the house of software.

- Farming? Land speculation by software.

- That one tiny minuscule coat pocket of economic required liquidity aside, the entirety of finance is parasitical and moved en masse to software a while back.

- Eductation! Theres an app for that.

Sure the investors have let it be a pleasant middle class job because building a green field full of grass is great way to catch a hog or the brightest people you can, smart people being the required instrument of your fuckery but thats finally coming to a close. Don't have to make the grass so green when you own everything anyway. And we're at the point where they're onto nakedly buying governments.

The extensively cultivated naivety of this site aside (when it comes to power), I think most of you know whats coming and that you probably shouldn't be entirely dependent on the tech companies in the future. But as always, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."