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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?

#461

Post by tzs »

blindmute wrote: post #431
techsupporter wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly in this position, yet when I said in another thread that I was quite content with my salary that's mid-tier for Seattle (but fantastically wealthy in a lot of the rest of the country), at a company that's all but certain to be around for at least the rest of my working lifetime, doing work to enable that company to do work that I consider useful (we're a medical practice group), and had no plans to change…

No, money is fungible, and its marginal utility only decreases when you have enough to retire. Another 5k is another 5k, meaning another 2 months that you don't have to labor. Dollars linearly correspond to future free time. You really will get back that night you spent working: it likely afforded you many more nights retired, free.

A day when you are younger isn't necessarily equivalent to a day when you are older. There are all kinds of potentially fun physical activities I might have done when I was younger if I had had more time that 40 years later I would not try because injuries have bigger impact and take longer to heal now.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#462

Post by emteycz »

emteycz wrote: post #455
nathanlied wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will have to third this. I have friends and acquaintances I talk to regularly from all walks of life - from construction workers to tradesmen/mechanics, all the way to bankers and the like. Out of all of them, I have the "best" job in terms of what's expected of me on a day-in-day-out basis. The biggest problem I feel us tech-workers have is that we compare our "bad" with their "good". On a good day, a construction w…

> I've often been embarrassed to describe my day to some of my friends. Nearly every bad day at work I had ended with beers + sometimes a huge (and expensive) party. This is lifestyle comparable to high-level directors in other fields. No wonder it's totally unrelatable experience to them - they usually find the boss of their company relatable too.

* don't find the boss relatable.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#463

Post by hogrider »

Same. I definitely don't want to stay in this field for decades, bc companies see you as radioactive as an ilder worker instead of a venerable expert of years of experience. I don't think that'll ever change, anytging code slinging related is susceptible to be biased to older workers.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#464

Post by maccard »

blindmute wrote: post #431
techsupporter wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly in this position, yet when I said in another thread that I was quite content with my salary that's mid-tier for Seattle (but fantastically wealthy in a lot of the rest of the country), at a company that's all but certain to be around for at least the rest of my working lifetime, doing work to enable that company to do work that I consider useful (we're a medical practice group), and had no plans to change…

No, money is fungible, and its marginal utility only decreases when you have enough to retire. Another 5k is another 5k, meaning another 2 months that you don't have to labor. Dollars linearly correspond to future free time. You really will get back that night you spent working: it likely afforded you many more nights retired, free.

> its marginal utility only decreases when you have enough to retire.

If the only thing you value is retirement and complete freedom indefinitely. Personally I'd much rather have an extra day on my weekend now, and have to work an extra year at the same pace I'm working at now (and enjoy it too) rather than minmax to the point of sacrificing everything for the next 15 years to finally be able to do what I want to do - which is what I have right now.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#465

Post by hpen »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #452
hpen wrote: post #302

Landscaper -> retail associate -> construction worker -> software developer Would never go back.

Funnily enough (part-time) landscaper is neat the top of my list if I would change careers from software. Being outside, dirt in your hands, physical exercise, and the satisfaction of seeing large changes and accomplishments relatively quickly compared to many trades.

Yeah but that $10 / hour doesn't compare to the $60+ / hour I make from software. What a joke.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#466

Post by hackerfromthefu »

hpen wrote: post #465
hackerfromthefu wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough (part-time) landscaper is neat the top of my list if I would change careers from software. Being outside, dirt in your hands, physical exercise, and the satisfaction of seeing large changes and accomplishments relatively quickly compared to many trades.

Yeah but that $10 / hour doesn't compare to the $60+ / hour I make from software. What a joke.

Yes, and software has more room at the higher end too. Our industry has built in golden handcuffs! I have already taken sabbaticals to do other things for a year three times, but always come back for the money.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#467

Post by mikewarot »

blobbers wrote: post #101
mikewarot wrote: post #29

I took a job making gears in a job shop. I learned quite a lot of interesting things. However, the pay and commute were both horrible. I caught Covid in March 2020, and have been dealing with Long Covid ever since. Now I find myself needing to jump back into programming, and my strongly preferred language is Pascal. It's going to be an interesting ride. If you do this yourself, make sure you have planned for continge…

Hope your covid gets better. How does one "jump" into Pascal? I used Pascal in 1992 programming in high school on a Mac LCiii, and never really thought about it again. Do modern compilers even exist for this language? What genuinely curious what you could possibly want you to program in Pascal let alone prefer using it for anything meaningful?

>How does one "jump" into Pascal?

It's not pascal that I was talking about into, it was the job market. I haven't been a full time programmer in decades. I've written quite a few things since then, but not full time.

As for Pascal, I learned it back around 1985, when Turbo Pascal first came out. I followed through version 7, then into Delphi for Windows. It was at Delphi 5 that I took a non-programming job.

I also tried out Borland's C++, but all the non-editable boilerplate, case sensitivity, and non-counted strings really seemed like antipatterns to productivity.

A few years ago, I had used python for some small projects, and so I figured I'd try it out for a GUI project that came up. I figured in the 2 decades since I had used Delphi, things had surely gotten way better.

What a disappointment. There were no open source 2-way GUI builders that offered IDE support for python. I wasted a year trying to support the project building a shim between wxBuilder and python 2.x. It worked, but was so brittle that I ultimately gave up on it.

I was able to rewrite it all in Lazarus in less that two weeks of part time effort.

I still think it's one of the best programming languages available, despite its failure to overtake C/C#/C++ in the market, which I blame mostly on Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero management.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#468

Post by bartread »

user3939382 wrote: post #94
bartread wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I work in tech and, outside of work, I'm refurbishing my house. I'm enjoying the refurbishment but would I do a trade as a full time job? Hell no. Crawling around in my loft sistering joists is satisfying work but also, if it were to become the kind of thing I did over a long period of time, would 100% wreck my knees. And that's just one downside. There are plenty more: e.g., all the ancillary guff you have…

Get yourself a pair of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001P30BQE/ I use them all the time. Cable management under desks, tile work, electrical. I wonder how I went so long without them.

Thanks for the recommendation. Believe it or not I have a pair of exactly those but unfortunately I hate them because they rub my knees nearly raw when worn for prolonged periods. In the end I've bought an old skool rubber kneeler, which seems to work better, but of course you have to continually move it around, which isn't always convenient (or even possible).

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#469

Post by all2 »

tim333 wrote: post #460
all2 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "retirement plan" is a book store/coffee shop. I don't want to code professionally forever.

Beware that those tend not to be very profitable if not loss making.

I tell people it's how I plan on losing money when I'm old.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#470

Post by _bfhp »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #376
_bfhp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a manifestation of the inherent feeling that many of us developers are doing something mostly useless compared to others. We know that the world could be different and we could be working jobs that are physically and/or mentally difficult but also fair and useful. Ursula K. Le Guin puts it thus, from her novel "This Dispossessed": "A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic compe…

The Dispossessed was a fantastic book but you're taking away the wrong thing if you're using Anarresti propaganda to sum up the work. The full title of the book is "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" and Anarres has many problems.

Good point! Though, I wasn't trying to sum up the book nor was I endorsing the quoted sentences as gospel
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