I am retiring from tech to live offline

I have 2 kids and we have a single Kia soul and a little house I do most of the work. I pay for a good private school mostly out of fear of big schools and gun violence in the US and giving my kids multilingual education. I can assure the rich kids have a lot of problems and have a schedule like a company CEO, they go to our place and have a blast, free range fun. The kids need money thing is mostly a marketing thing the system puts into parents minds.

This was my take too.

GP built an emergency fund, which is important, but then drained it twice for non emergencies.

A nest egg is a much larger tax advantaged holding that you don’t want to withdrawal from because you’ll have a massive tax hit. It’s also far more than a down payment, hopefully. GP had some low interest “savings” account at his bank. Poor wife, no pun intended :(

Yeah, we do ask for forgiveness for our sins during prayer too, but not in casual conversation. If you do that where I'm from everyone will look at you like you're some weirdo. And pretty much everyone's an orthodox christian there.

It was like 30 years for me.

A couple months ago I got a text in our dev channel around 4 PM on a Friday afternoon asking me to take a look at a 4,000 line AI generated PR. The guy said he was told it needed to be in production by the end of the day. So I'm supposed to look at 4,000 lines of garbage code at 4 PM on a Friday? Alright. Approved. Ship it. I'm retired now, obviously. They were giving out buyouts to old people and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

There's like this retirement advice that tells you you need to retire TO something. That hasn't been my experience. I didn't do that. I work out, I go for walks, I do self care. That takes all the time that using AI to write the AI prompts for our AI integration with our product used to take.

I don't miss it. I mostly don't remember their names. Except Kumar. Fuck you Kumar.

I don't even hate AI. I have software that I wrote that I use every single day, like personal software that I use for myself, I use AI for it. But I haven't written a single line of code since I retired. I need to, this is my software and I use it for things in my life, but I don't have time. Too busy going for walks and working in the garden.

To summarize, fuck you Kumar. Just fuck you.

I recently left my 25 year software career to attend violin making school. I am literally having the best time of my life (I was also extremely fortunate to have lived relatively cheaply the past 25 years so it's not hard for me to downshift my expenses).

I think the biggest thing I love about violin making is respect for expertise. Violin making is not a whole lot changed in the past 300 years, though we do use a lot more modern tools for evaluating acoustics and wood properties. In tech, things change so quickly that expertise is made obsolete very fast, and people are generally cast aside. I've heard a lot over my career that "any good software engineer can learn a new language in a week", and while that's partially true, real depth of expertise in any framework took much longer. All that depth of expertise has become incredibly devalued. And I've also heard a lot about how senior engineers are now more valuable with AI, as they are better able to orchestrate agents and detect hallucinations. That may be true, but I feel like the nature of the job has changed so drastically that it's just not something I would enjoy doing day to day.

I also think the thing that is fundamentally different about this paradigm shift is that it is younger people who are (unsurprisingly) most against it. E.g. when I started my career, web apps were just taking off, and a lot of older engineers at the time found the shift from native apps to be relatively daunting. While that may also be the case with AI, it's a lot of younger folks who are most against it, and that wasn't the case when the Internet really exploded in the late 90s.