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I am retiring from tech to live offline

openpath.quest

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Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#481

Post by theodric »

siren2026 wrote: post #237

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 bought a farm and ran away from tech. Euphoria! For a bit. Honeymoon period's well and fucking over. I did not enjoy chopping that cord of firewood, but I didn't hate it, either. I miss making impulsive, frivolous 4-figure purchases, and I miss not having to literally fucking conjure money out of soil. I don't miss the self-important corpo wankbags, "quick meetings," or the yearly cycle of having to pretend that someone who works for me is deserving of being compressed into the bad end of a bell curve because HR or some MD came back and said that we have too many high performers relative to another department. I've done more computing and written more code (and documentation!) for fun in the last few years than I did since about 2016, which is nice.

Don't run away from the desk job until you're really sure. If you're really sure, then don't let the door hit your ass.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#482

Post by booleandilemma »

djeastm wrote: post #411
GaryBluto wrote: post #189

While I admire his commitment to his ideals, I find some of this veers into an uncomfortable fanaticism, especially the remarks praising the savage acts of violence committed by the Sentinelese (which I find particularly odd considering the author's professed religion). I doubt the Amish (who apply technology selectively and intelligently) would appreciate being compared to them either; the Sentinelese are not preser…

>barbarians I didn't realize people still used this word to apply to human beings.

What word would you use for parents who sell their own children? Or people who engage in cannibalism? Or people who practice infanticide? "Barbaric", perhaps? I'm not talking about the Sentinelese, I'm talking about other, well, barbarians.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#483

Post by beej71 »

jebarker wrote: post #296
beej71 wrote: post #125

I got into teaching several years ago, leaving industry behind. It's great! I had gotten a little bit tired of programming other people's stuff. It wasn't the programming itself that was dull, but I found most products that people wanted were actually kind of boring and formulaic. And none of them really worked for the betterment of humanity. Teaching is a massive challenge. The stuff that I teach in computer science…

How did you transition from tech to teaching?

It was a bunch of factors, some forced.

I had a company I'd co-founded with a friend of mine, and Google would feed us work (in advertising, of course). It was getting old, and then Google terminated the program we were working under. I just couldn't get enthusiastic about searching for more clients in that field, so I floated for a bit.

During that time, I started doing ad-hoc free classes as part of a local meetup. And I networked with people at the local community college and state university. Taught a couple one-off courses as an adjunct (they always want adjuncts).

In the meantime, someone who was working for a startup bootcamp found some of my writing and reached out asking if I wanted to work there. So I joined that as an instructor.

And that worked for a while, but then the school and I began to disagree on the direction the curriculum was taking. And I decided it was time to move on. I resigned the position and floated for a bit.

Then, fortuitously, a 9-month contract (with benefits) instructor position opened up at the state university, and I went for it. And got it! I've been there 4 years now.

As for how I do teaching, I write a lot of tutorials. Hundreds of thousands of words of practice. I try to come up with effective plans, and I reflect on what worked and what didn't. I watch other instructors and copy the good stuff. I read books on instruction. I interview past students. I talk to people in industry.

I like programming because I enjoy optimization problems. And teaching is still an optimization problem. "How do I get students to realize durable learning with minimum instruction?" It's just that now what we're "programming" are squishy, non-deterministic humans. They don't always get it immediately right. :) But I love working on how to be more effective as a teacher. I think about it all day, every day.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#484

Post by jjulius »

latkin wrote: post #407
patcon wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chad is one of the most high-integrity persons I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. He is not fucking around for clicks in any shallow sense. I agree with the sibling comment that your cynicism is deeply misplaced imho. I mean, you can be cynical for whatever reasons, but I just think you'd be assuming (and participating in and perpetuating) a game Chad isn't playing.

> He is not fucking around for clicks in any shallow sense. He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. Clearly a lot of effort went into making this announcement social media friendly and click-worthy. He has analytics on his blog to track how many clicks he gets. Whether it's in a "shallow sense" or not is subjective a…

>He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc.

Is he? I realize your comment is 2 hours old at the time of my response, but go to his webpage now, and click through to Bluesky. Then do LinkedIn. Then Twitter. Those accounts all appear to have been nuked from orbit. The argument that someone's "fucking around for clicks" falls apart when there's nothing to click on.

If someone was a frequent blogger with a big following, I won't fault them all that much for saying, "I'm out," to their audience. It's easier to answer, "Where'd you go?" in a public fashion right up front than it is to, potentially, field that question in private more than you'd like to after you bail.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#485

Post by bdcravens »

senordevnyc wrote: post #396
bdcravens wrote: post #268

Seeing some of these retirement comments, as a 49 year old developer who has been doing this since the late 1990s, I'll be honest, I can't relate. I have no interest in retiring anytime soon. I still see a ton of frontier to explore, and personally I love AI. I've always loved writing code, but was always frustrated at how it took at trudge through learning new languages and approaches, and all of the plumbing and bo…

I feel the same. I think it really does come down to a theory I've seen here a few times: if you were the kind of developer (code artisan) for whom the code was the point, AI sucks. If you were the kind of developer (problem solver), for whom the code was just the tool at hand to solve the problem, AI is awesome.

And if I may cynical for a moment, there's the third category, which is probably a subset of the first: the framework gluers/bunker sitters that really felt no reason to try to expand beyond their reasonably well-paid nest.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#486

Post by vankusss »

sph wrote: post #123
thesamethrowawa wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless. I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since…

Maybe I know what you mean: after burning out 6 years ago, I have managed to dedicate 3-4h per day to work, and I didn’t know what to do with all the free time I had. It was excruciating. It made my recovery longer than it had to be. After reading a lot of philosophy and being patient with myself, I have found a source of creativity within me that regular office hours had completely eradicated in my adult years. All…

Your last sentence resonates deeply with my current experience. Would you care to expand a bit more on what helped you find a way to self direct and find meaning within yourself?

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#487

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

RobRivera wrote: post #474
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, my app is a memory hog. I went all-in on performance, and neglected frugality. Lots of caches, local copies, and pass-by-value. I suspect the best solution will be architectural, which promises to be a pain.

Yea, one cant go all in on performance, and then not co soder architecture. A language choice is a starting point but you have to know the techniques of architecture learned.

It looks like it wasn't too painful. I just kept a couple of array references too long. The LLM gave me some threaded crap, and I now need to make sure to let go, before another thread grabs the PC.

That's the issue with the new "memory is cheap" model. I cut my teeth with 256 BYTES (not KB or MB) of space for the program, the stack, and the scratch.

But I've gotten sloppy, over the years.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#488

Post by hermitcrab »

jasonkester wrote: post #56
azangru wrote: post #32

Earlier 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, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it. I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck. When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.

Same here. I am maintaining and enhancing several 100k of C++ I have written over 20 years. I use MS Copilot to write little snippets now and then. But I always modify them to fit my own style. It is challenging enough to navigate and understand all that code without letting an AI loose on it.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#489

Post by beached_whale »

bluGill wrote: post #406
beached_whale wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.

We have long ago learned as an industry that code tends to live for a long time and so maintainable code is important. However for individuals your stance is just fine.

Some code definitely does, but it isn't the product. People, outside the devs making it, don't value how good the code is, but how well it solves the problem.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#490

Post by coldtea »

hellohello2 wrote: post #216
coldtea wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just like talking and some program comes out (aka "business problem solving") you might like it. If you like coding (aka "problem solving"), it feels like crap. And if you like still having an IT job in a couple of years, it feels like dangerous crap. (Of course you can be hoping you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off, to get to keep working on a higher level).

Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then? I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses, and am having a great time. In the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen. But I guess its a bit scary that we don't know how much more it will improve...

>Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then?

It's a big part. But the erosion of what coding means is another big part for some.

>I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses

There are people who like coding, but they mean "building things" by it, and other who like coding and mean "coding" itself. The latter we aren't as pleased.

(I also like building things, but I like building them via coding, not thru vibing and getting them spit out).

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