421–430 of 617 posts
I feel all of these things too. I'm 42 and started working right out of high school. Unfortunately I was dumb, didn't save money or pursue high earnings until 6 years ago when I joined big tech. I live in HCOL area, and realistically have 10 or maybe even 20 years left before I can even start thinking about retirement. Trying to figure out how to make this sustainable.
I think this is fine. A person, having worked for so long and successfully on something, has every right to call it quits and switch to something else. Something fresh and different. Godspeed!
It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.
I simply can’t handle the performative Machiavellian culture anymore.
I could play that game for longer, but I don’t want to. All I want is to build cool and ambitious things without any of the theatrics.
I don’t want to go offline. I just want to live a normal, modern, and peaceful life. I would go nuts without all of the comfort of modern tech, especially the high speed broadband.
I have been at it for 20 years now and have started to feel my time is up as well As a lot of comments here highlights, the issue is not so much the tech but the politics, constant perf reviews, re-orgs, nonsense BS that is pushed top-down. This industry is taking a toll on you. My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot. When I started my career I thought I would love…
I was one of those people.
Excellent tech income; zero savings other than a 401(k) I barely contributed into.
After an amazing meal at a burger place several years ago, I asked my wife about upgrading to a Model S. She figuratively sat me down (after we literally sat into the seats of our Model 3) and was more straight-forward with me than she had ever been prior to that moment.
"How much do we have saved? Oh, _we_ have basically nothing? Yeah, so I'm not saying no, but you need to fix that before we discuss this again."
I took it defensively in the moment, but not for long because I knew she was right. Building that nest egg became priority #1 since that talk.
That was in 2023. I saved a lot since then. It felt VERY VERY GOOD to look at my savings and say "You know, I could fuck right off for six months if I wanted to. I won't, but I could!" It completely changed my priorities at work.
Now, I've had to drain my savings twice now: once to secure a down payment for our house, and again for a major repair of said home (b/c I am strongly against treating our home as a credit card). Regardless, I chip away a good amount into several savings accounts every two weeks and am expecting to regrow the account within the next year. I can't wait to feel that feeling again!
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there are in fact plenty of ways to earn enough money to get by on a simple lifestyle
People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. I live in a first-world European country where the average salary is about €25,000 per year. My mortgage estimate is less than €300/mo. I'm not that afraid of having to supplement my income if I need to.…
Quality of life in suburban America is incredibly high relative to a "first world" country with such a low average income. From what I have seen, most families in the "European periphery" still live in small Soviet-era apartment buildings, own one small car or no car at all, and are far from enjoying many other things taken for granted in America.
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Yep. Chad is great. Although, if anyone were to lead a cult, I figure it would be Chad, hopefully he doesn’t accidentally charisma himself into a cult leader situation.
Well he does say in the letter he wants to be part of an offline-only community, and is starting a magazine centered around it combined with Orthodox Christianity... this after talking about a community in India that kills outsiders and wanting to be like the Amish. Seems cult-adjacent
update after reading the comments: a good portion of the HN community is so f*ing judgmental
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Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade. He said he has been offline in his personal life since February, not his professional life. His BlueSky is professional. He quit his job and will be offline completely following the handover.
> His BlueSky is professional. It's plainly not. https://bsky.app/profile/chadwhitacre.com/post/3mmvzmugfqk2g "my good friend Dana could really use some help paying for major dental work. " His latest YouTube post, from 2 weeks after the alleged go-dark date, is also all about his personal plan to walk away from tech. Needed to make sure there is a GoPro in his face while he talks about how low-tech he yearns to be.…
Yes, of course this is "performative". Publishing is performance. Chad is, obviously, performing for his audience in sharing this, he wants to get his perspective out into the world.
Given Chad's decade plus of leading by example, embracing his ideals, it is important to know that he is a person of integrity when reading his words. Could this be a grand lie to some strange end? Sure, I guess, but everyone who knows Chad knows that he is exactly the type of person to mean everything in this letter in earnest.
His blog was part of his job. His job was an open source advocate, he was responsible for talking about open source. He posted on BlueSky in his role as an advocate for open source. Adding in a GoFundMe link that someone emailed to him on a post that got a bunch of attention doesn't undermine his point, at all.
A "hypocritical way to make this particular transition"? He's not advocating for you to make the same transition. He's not espousing moral superiority because he made this transition and you didn't. Life is messy, complicated, difficult, it's not "hypocritical" to... have a BlueSky account as part of your job while announcing you're stepping away from technology.
https://openpath.quest/2024/welcome-to-open-path/
"I work for Sentry, and my job requires me to be a “thought leader,” so I need a platform."