Seems like lots of people here can relate to this. As time moves on I find myself doing less programming and more gardening and woodworking.
I no longer build software
151–160 of 891 posts
Re: I no longer build software
#152LoL, just go build some software dude. In the last two years I wrote a compiler, a brand new log store, heaps of other things, and I did them while doing my job. If you actually care about your craft and can say no from time to time, the amount of interesting work you can do is limitless from the perspective of human capability.
But that's not what he wants to do.
Re: I no longer build software
#153This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.
As a warning, you're eventually going to run out of places to put that furniture if you don't sell some of it!
I'm the OP on that github issue, and while my partner and still have some IKEA furniture I'd like to replace, we also have a couple of pieces of mine that don't fit readily into our lives that we just have around the house. The chandelier on my website[0] was a spec piece built for a show at the Wharton Esherick Museum[1]. It didn't sell at the show, and I don't really have a place for it. It's now sitting in a crate in a corner of our bedroom.
Likewise, the Federal period shelf clock[2] is without a shelf and is also sitting in a crate until I get a chance to mount a shelf for it. How hard can it be, you ask? Surprisingly difficult in a log cabin. If the pandemic ever ends and I get my workbench out of our living room, I might have a place for it!
[0] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/chandelier/
Re: I no longer build software
#154This is a privileged position to take. IT is one of the very few ways to have a relatively decent life in my third world (well, technically second world) country, especially for those of us who can't rely on nepotism to put them in a comfortable place. Sure, I can go make furniture out of wood for $150 a month (and I did at some point in my life), but I'd rather keep my cushy lifestyle and stare at a screen for 16 ho…
Good for you. No, really. I wish you nothing but the best. But that's now. After some years, when you have already secured a relatively decent life, your perspective on the value of continuing to do it might change. In fact, it would be rather amazing if it didn't. Yes, it's absolutely a privileged position, but it's still how I feel and how I suspect a lot of programmers my age feel. You can't dismiss our reality any more than we can dismiss yours.
Re: I no longer build software
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal trainer is fairly bad for your body and wellbeing as well. Its basically split shifts since clients want training either before or after their work. So sleep is an issue. If work was easy then we wouldn't need to be paid for it.
>If work was easy then we wouldn't need to be paid for it. "work" in its natural sense is indistinguishable from play. Animals play as a way to practice "work". Lions etc play hunt. The problem is that "work" in modern times has little to do with what we are genetically-inclined to want to do.
Yeah OK. But you see my point?
Re: I no longer build software
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question, didn't anyone else' school have shop class? I was a college prep, NHS, cross country, all AP core courses kind of guy, and I took it all four years of high school. Or was there some kind of restriction on taking it at your school? Or maybe your parents didn't let you? Genuinely curious as to why someone with a professed interest would not have taken shop?
High school was 20 years ago for me and no shop classes.
It was over 20 years ago for me, and we had shop classes. It's amazing how heterogeneous the US school system has been, and continues to be apparently.
Re: I no longer build software
#157Re: I no longer build software
#158This is a privileged position to take. IT is one of the very few ways to have a relatively decent life in my third world (well, technically second world) country, especially for those of us who can't rely on nepotism to put them in a comfortable place. Sure, I can go make furniture out of wood for $150 a month (and I did at some point in my life), but I'd rather keep my cushy lifestyle and stare at a screen for 16 ho…
I wonder if those making furniture are just doing it to stave off boredom after cashing in millions of tech stock profits. I've already seen exactly this sort of pattern in a few people I know.
Re: I no longer build software
#159Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the way software is packaged and dep…
> Building software was never simple or easy
I think it’s gotten a whole lot simpler in the past 10 years. People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches, setup RAID and backups, make sure you have that serial cable plugged in so you can telnet in in case the switches don’t work, and lock the data center doors without forgetting their keys back in the day. And this is before actually developing and deploying your application software.
Now you can just buy a bunch of db cycles and scale to >10000 qps without batting an eye (though you’ve got to watch your wallet).
I think because some of the hard stuff got a lot easier, the easier stuff got unnecessarily complex. And there are so many ways to scale things that some of these constructs and idioms used over time stopped being used because they mattered less if you could just turn a knob to scale your crappy code.
Re: I no longer build software
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Embedded programming i.e. automotive, industrial, aerospace. The problem is they pay poorly in comparison to web dev but are a lot more stable long term.
And how many of those are going to let you in without at least a decade of experience in the specific domain, and real world experience with whatever guidelines or practices they use (i.e. MISRA for X).
Maybe all of them? I worked in Automotive right out of university and they trained you for everything you need to know including C programming tricks and MISRA and they hired pretty much anyone with generic programming knowledge as long as you were willing to learn.