Plumbers need to stay up to date, too (and they make great money).
I know several.
Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
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Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#32I have written many such comments on HN myself and seen many such comments from others. The motivation is generally universal. Software is an immature industry with many beginner experts that believe themselves to be experts but cry about how hard life is when standards are set and/or enforced.
Fortunately, I have a part time director level job as a soldier for my backup plan.
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#33No. Plumbing is gross and wet. Carpentry, on the other hand...
Plumbing is gross and wet but you clearly know where the bullshit is from the beginning. In software it is creeping from everywhere, changing patterns every coouple of years as well. I probably wouldn’t want to be a real plumber but I hear the people who would. And I definitely get the urge to find something else but generally trading off for something else is problematic as well and generally comes with its own type…
You can't catch ecoli from software at least though
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#34This comment and its top reply are dead on: https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/sm54ri/a... No job is going to get you away from unreasonable people with unreasonable expectations, and most trades introduce a bunch of other unpleasant things that you'd have to deal with. It's all tradeoffs. Someone may legitimately prefer the stresses of a trade to the stresses of working in software, and that's great…
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Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#35I enjoy solving problems, and software is an interesting place to be. Learning should be fun, not a miserable chore; I typically have one or two software/hardware hobby projects going in fields totally unrelated to my work, just to solve a little problem, and because it feels really good to expand your knowledge.
There are plenty of crappy boring jobs though (I never want to do typical web dev), so try to find something better if you're stuck there.
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#36I've considered it.
What grates with CS I feel the combination of never being challenged and not doing anything that furthers humanity. If I fix toilets then at least I'd be squandering my resources on something meaningful.
What frustrates me is I know I could do so much more, I could do good things. In the same time period of roughly a year it's taken a team of like 8 people at work (myself included) to develop a prototype for a stupid crud-application that exists entirely because Conway's law doesn't permit team B from talking to team C without going through my team, that has basic MVP-functionality of being able to process some simple requests and change a few fields in a database; in the same number of days I've developed a fully function search engine the scale of late 1990s google in my spare hours.
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#37> I’m a data scientist/software developer and I keep longing for a simpler life.
Reminds me of how Stardew Valley starts off with that premise and within 2 days you are mining for crystals in a dungeon.
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#38My constant daydream is machining. So far I learned the basics of FreeCAD, watched a shitton of machining videos on YouTube and researched some lathes and mills.
Unfortunately it is a hobby that requires lots of space to keep the machines and tools.
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#39I actually think it would be fun to "retire" and go to trade school to become an electrician. Not forever, just long enough to learn the trade. I practically have an EE degree, but since I only ever worked with low voltage, mostly digital circuits I still have poor electrical intuition for things like residential AC. Realistically though, I think my secondary post-retirement career will end up being a teacher of some…
The amount of knowledge you need for residential is minimal, there is only one voltage (ok maybe multiple phase) and you should only have to think of load per circuit.
Don't know what kind of intuition you really need for new install.
Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
#40I've considered going back to school to learn a real engineering profession. Something where people solve real world problems based on accrued group knowledge instead of faking it til they make it, constantly reinventing themselves and everything else, living the future they want to exist.
But I think I'm too tainted by software to really be any good at any of that.