Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I think one of my greatest regrets about being a developer is how difficult it is to remain offline. Certain scenarios, such as maintaining uptime and being aware of security releases, requires almost constant check-in. The best resources and discussion on the profession can't be found in print. And the nature of the work, well, is inextricable from being on a computer

View on HN

Thats why I have the hard rule of not being reachable on holidays and state that upfront. I never take a computer with me and often go to places where there is no reception at all - so I couldn't, even if I wanted.

Clients have to cope with that, thats part of the game.

I live in a rural valley with no mobile phone reception. If people call me when I'm home, they get my voicemail. I do have an internet connection at home, but it's not fast and I rarely use it.

I'm on a computer all day at work, and work hard - when I go home, I have little inclination to then use a computer again, even if it's for leisure or games.

That's mostly a characteristic of service developers like ourselves. For a desktop application developer, those issues like uptime and security vulnerabilities are nowhere near as urgent. If a computer running Photoshop dies, nobody at Adobe will lose sleep over it ;)

That's the operations side of technology, but your point stands.

It's the same everywhere though -- farms, factories, govt offices, law offices, convenience stores, etc. In all cases, it's handled by spreading the workload, over family, shifts, or minions.

Perhaps the unusual part of technology is that there is a larger viable component of individual work effort. Many in the industry are drawn to that and resistant to larger group energy pools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com