I am very lucky to be ensconced right now within a team and a company that views the current LLM mania with a similar level of disdain as myself. I'm not sure there's a place for me anywhere else in the industry right now. I wish I had the resources to wander off like this.
I am retiring from tech to live offline
271–280 of 617 posts
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#272I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired. I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. Is that AI? Or is it me? Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I d…
I'm hoping to retire in the next 12 months (52 years old). When I do, I'll be buying a Chromebook. Any and all PC-related shit is being sold off. I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
I'm just a little bit older, and have to work a little longer due to some personal things.
But, as it stands today, I rarely touch any tech outside of work. Heck, I seldom ever bring my cell phone outside the home.
I long for the day, I can close my laptop lid and not open it again.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?…
Yes it is. You don't need to announce whether you are using AI or not. Just keep doing your job, use AI when it pleases you and keep building manual code when you think that's better. That's what I do, I have never been asked if I use AI to write my code. If it's dumb code I use AI. If it's something that I want to craft I don't
Where I work % of code written by AI and AI spend is tracked all the way down to the individual person.
It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?…
Yeah go to a niche market C++ shop
What niche market? I work for a hardware company writing C++ code and my company literally has a dashboard for managers that shows employee's token usage. My manager warned me that my low usage will reflect poorly on me during performance reviews later this year.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#275Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years. I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a year or two being frugal. After that it’s anyone’s guess, but I am beyond excited not having to program for a living any more, just on what feels meaningful, in complete autonomy. Projects lined up: a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for th…
Nothing like retiring with only 3 years worth of savings and no plan on what to do after that.
Feels like an unfair judgment of someone else's values, which have no obligation to match yours.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hoping to retire in the next 12 months (52 years old). When I do, I'll be buying a Chromebook. Any and all PC-related shit is being sold off. I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
Just curious, what are you doing for healthcare. I can retire money wise soon, but healthcare is an issue. May have to work 10 more years just because of that.
If you don't have much income, healthcare.gov plans are pretty cheap.
Some people will just risk doing without. Most will be fine; that's how insurance works.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#277I 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 basically agree, just adding context. As companies grow, it's the natural state of things, as any hope for goal alignment goes out the window. I am OK dealing with situations where the good for the company's long term might not be the same as my personal preferences. But we often see situations where what is decided isn't good for the company, or for most workers, but great for a decision maker, and we all know tha…
My bigger take here is that nothing is fine forever. We might have fun for a couple years but eventually a disruptor comes in and changes everything. This disruptor today is AI but it will be something else in 5 or 10 years.
Therefore save when you can. Don't be fooled thinking you make a ton of money today therefore you will make a ton in 20 years. Get the optionality today, that's the biggest win you can add to your life.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've rekindled by passion by working for a startup again. My previous employer (which I also joined as a startup) ended up in a situation where the head product manager became VP of engineering (it's a complicated story - don't ask). We also had a yes-man director of Eng and together they went all-in on very orthodox scrum, where they sat in the sprint planning/point meeting and overrode every decision of what to tak…
>> they went all-in on very orthodox scrum do you mean "unorthodox"? What you describe sounds both terrible and not very scrum-like, at least ideally (I too have experienced when whatever terrible approach you use is labelled "agile" by leadership...)
Well, except for the fact that they took over the planning process, everything else was orthodox. From the fibonacci pointing system to the retrospectives where we had to go into detail about how the timelines didn't line up perfectly. But we were "working faster" because we were gradually getting more points into a sprint! (queue eye rolls)
What's worse is that I kept getting written up because my main role was DevOps, which meant I was highly interrupt driven...which isn't something you can point reliably.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think is true - the endgame of software security is very secure atleast at the code level. I.e. fully clean supply chain, no memory safety issues, maybe even formally provable code. Right now we are in a very unstable place but it might not be permanent!
As long as the costs (monetary and otherwise) of breaches are not (by and large) hitting shareholders and the C level, why would they pay for better security? And why would politicians depending on campaign contributions of tech companies force the mentioned groups to take on the full responsibility by regulating them?
So full disclosure I am working on this but my thought is basically this:
* Make Rust (or similar memory safe language) drop in replacements for C/C++ code
* the stick is Claude mythos and the like - scares CISO’s, shareholders, etc into urgency
* the carrot is - improve performance significantly where possible. Either through straight up better code OR through customizing hot paths for companies specific use cases
So for companies running large workloads it could be economical in two ways
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#280I'm so offline I announce my offlineness to the internet.