The issue isn’t the tech itsefl but the corporate world and its effects throughout society.
There is a lot of cool tech, but used for the most asinine products. 2015-2016 was especially terrible with the accessibility of IoT. Everyone and their mother had a Kickstarter with a common everyday item with wireless capability tacked into it.
No, my bottle doesn’t need Bluetooth.
The problem with tech is that you aren’t usually doing the thing that made you want to go into tech. For me this was creating things and solving interesting problems. Most of my days are meetings, dealing with clueless people and having to deal with leadership and product team changes that ruin already completed work. Thankfully being at large tech companies has enabled me to hopefully retire in my early 40s. I can then continue with tech in a way that is meaningful to me while also spending a lot more time outside. The PNW is beautiful and I intend to see much more of it .
Nah, I like PC gaming too much to want that. What I want is to be free of capitalism.
Yeah, same here honestly. I too wish to be free of avarice
I love growing things and I also love tinkering, building, finding new gadgets.
Have been a techie all my life so far, will be a techie until I die.
People that get tired of tech jobs, might not be because of tech, rather the people they have worked with and the unrelenting pull of a capitalist society.
I work in tech and a lot of my interests are geared around computers. I have other interests as well, and also enjoy being outdoors, but can’t imagine never wanting to see a computer again.
Best I could do is maybe never wanting internet again.
I was a nix admin. For two decades. Printers are banned in my house. My only IoT device is a Roku stick. I have 6 geese, 4 ducks, 14 chickens, too many cats, one acre, a number of raised beds, fruit trees and grape vines. I’m now a handyman.
I fit the profile.
Definitely not everyone :) I am bad at agriculture, even worse at raising animals, so computer it is for quite a long while from now. But I would really appreciate an opportunity to just sit by the sea and stare at it for days on end
I grew up on a farm, hell no. If you think farming is going to be any different you’re delusional. It’s also full of physical labor that takes a toll on you.
But give it a go if you want just don’t think farming or ranching is simpler it’s not. And now you alone take on the responsibility of managing many lives be they plants or animals.
Yes it’s rewarding keeping a baby calf alive in -30 weather but be prepared to wake up every couple hours to keep watch on the animals. Also say goodbye to vacations. Without a family member or 5 to help out it’s hard to take a vacation without worrying that coyotes got into the chicken coop or other shenanigans.
These people are “farming” in retirement, not for a living. Basically have a bunch of ducks and a couple mule.
Exactly. There’s a huge difference between being a hobby farmer and actually trying to make a living as a farmer or rancher. Without needing to support yourself off of it, you can raise only a small number of animals you can comfortably care for, grow what you want without concern for market prices, etc. It’s the difference between coding for a hobby and coding for a job.
I work I tech and have a small nature sanctuary. Why not both? We get high speed internet out here now 🤣
It was a thing in Ukraine during the 2020-2021 boom. the sheer amount of engineers who saved up enough money to buy a house in the nearby village communities before the 2022 invasion was legit insane. part of that was remote work, part of that was interest in growing your own things. i remember talking to one NLP engineer who legit planned an apple garden and wanted to transition into that business domain over time. in some other cases, folks wanted to have self-reliant sustainability (yeah, we kinda had doomsday preppers).
Worked in tech for 18 years, now I fix rust old cars and try not to touch computers beyond looking up wiring diagrams and replacement parts.
Lie.
It’s the fucking users i want away from
As a long time tech user within about 5 years of retirement, I don’t quite agree with this for a couple of reasons. Tech is fine if its tech that serves me. I’m certainly not going to be doing JIRA updates in retirement, but I’ll absolutely use a web browser, word processor, and probably a coding environment for my own personal projects. Retrocomputing is much more appealing to me too.
Also, I think most folks in IT have no idea how hard farming actually is, both mental and physically. Farming is really hard work, and having to manage some of the same annoying things we deal with in IT such as following complicated regulations, dealing with asinine people in power over you, and delivery dates.
grass is always greener on the other side. …but, sometimes, it actually is, depending on who you are.
In my case, the forest was, and still is, the greener side. can’t really complain, and I don’t think I’ll be switching back to tech anytime soon.
Can confirm, though, a lot of people approach farming or homesteading with really unreasonable expectations.
I prefer cabin in the woods, but my paycheck says small house in a shitty neighborhood.
Actually, that cabin may be cheaper. Property is way more expensive in dense areas.
A major reason lots of people move to the country in retirement is because the land is cheaper and.they end up with a bigger house and more land for less than they were paying before because it’s cheaper land with lower property tax.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General’s Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.
Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.
The tech may be ancient for us, but it’s a superb book.
Reminiscent of how Brian Eno spoke on creating the startup sound for Windows 95:
The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3¼ seconds long.”
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made eighty-four pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
