Really cool blog post with beautiful photos and starts with a fun and interesting intro, here captured in an image for the the tl;dr but-want-to-comment-anyway among you :
Huh, I'm using technology as an escape from woodworking. Lack of space/tools and a few times when I tried to do something the wood was too seasoned (last thing I tried was whittling hoping to do it in my room anytime and not have dust as an issue, cheap folding knife probably didn't help)
Well not fully true on the escape part, I just drop things really easy when I run into issues like that. Well that and I haven't done anything noteworthy with technology or woodworking.
For a period i worked in assisted living tech, testing prototypes together with staff and patients in nursing homes. That was a very rewarding type of IT/tech job with a short feedback loop that you’re actually helping a real person.
I started in software and moved on to physics, which has a lot of programming and is similar in many ways. Still, it’s different and I like that I made the choice. I will soon have contributed to physics in a small but meaningful way, which was my reason for switching. I plan to stop after that and just go back to programming. Posts like these make me think I should switch again but to an even more orthogonal subject.
Left IT for flying. Figured it’d be a great change to my indoor-centric lifestyle.
My whole life I’ve seen people that are or became masters of their craft and I’ve always admired them. I’m in my 30s. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be a master of anything but I was far closer in IT than I am as a pilot lol
Working outside sounds great when you’re working indoor all the time. And at first it will be refreshing.
However after a few years (months?) of working outside, in the cold, the rain, the heat, you’ll envy the office workers and their perfect temperature open space with a nearby coffee corner.
I will never understand why burned up people in IT is so intent of changing a work where you may have intellectual challenges but you don’t need to make strenous physical effort for extreme physical labor. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing one of those jobs, and the idea of wanting them is unfathomable to me.
There’s something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can’t get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can’t reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can’t look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability…
Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you’ve spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.
There’s satisfaction to be found when labour results in a tangible and lasting result.
Some of the people I know who quit the IT industry did so because they felt all of the effort they put in never seemed to achieve anything. Too many jobs at startups who exist only to be bought and shut down by bigger fish for some IP etc.
For some work is not just about wages or challenges, it’s about building something useful and meaningful, whether figuratively or literally.
There’s satisfaction to be found when labour results in a tangible and lasting result.
Nothing human is eternal. But you’re speaking in absolutes and I challenge that. Give me intellectual challenges, I couldn’t care less about making a nice chair or a sculpture.
If you don’t think building chairs or sculptures requires solving “intellectual” challenges you’ve never tried building a completely wooden multi-axial interlocking joint furniture…
There’s satisfaction to be found when labour results in a tangible and lasting result.
That’s where I would recommend one thing to other software people as a software person myself: make your own tools.
I started writing a little notepad type thing just so I could have a cross platform tool with a set bunch of capabilities no matter what OS I’m on.
It’s very rewarding to just want something, make it, and use it.
It can be simple, it can be complicated… It can work like everything else does or only in a way that works for you.
It’s very freeing to work on something where you don’t have to ask fifteen people what the requirements are and then have them change under you. If your tool is useful and you use it you don’t even need testing overhead either.
I highly recommend it. Build your own tools when you find the existing ones to be frustrating. Or just for fun to see if you can.
To me it feels like people romanticising their hobbies/escape activities. If they started doing it as work soon enough they would have lots of pain points and stress. Sure you don’t have CVEs or libraries to update but the deadline for that chair or cabinet you were commissioned is coming and you can’t just get the damn thing right. At the same time you have another customer complaining that you need to check some other stuff you’ve made that isn’t working right … see where I’m going?
I know a lot of people in the trades and they have very similar or analogous pain points as me in software.
Doing it as a hobby though? It’s amazing. I don’t really need a car anymore but I’ve been learning how to fix mine and it has been great
I have another impression about romanticizing trades: there’s a deep anti-intellectualism and an exaltation of not having to think. For me that idea is pure hell.
You think people in trades don’t think at work? This is actually just classism or something idk. You really don’t think electricians, contractors, plumbers etc aren’t problem solving on the daily? We’re not talking about working on a factory line.
Not counting the “projects patterns” that would be invented because some manager thinks it’ll be cheaper and machines taking the fun part, leaving you to do the boring or frustrating part.
Nah I do biology as a hobby and also for work, it’s great. There are the usual trappings of work, but I’ve had jobs I’m not passionate about and it’s definitely worse lol. I feel like what you’re saying is a cope people say when they don’t follow their passions.
I have an outdoors job (biology/ecology), it’s not extreme lmao, although when I go hiking with my tech friends it does seem like maybe it is extreme to them. Your body adapts to what you do. I do office work some days and outdoors work others, and my mental health after more outdoors days just is like exponentially better. I feel connected to nature, I am using my body, I’m touching and smelling and seeing novel things every day. And in my case, doing something that I truly believe matters.
I enjoy my office days, I get to do planning, mapping, data analysis … but I wouldn’t be caught dead using all my mental energy to stare at a screen every day lol
I don’t specially dislike it, but everybody talks about the outdoor like the thing they cannot live without. I… actually thrived during COVID, I wasn’t force to tolerate idiots and I didn’t need to leave my house. I didn’t really feel the need to see the external world.
Nope. I don’t have a panic reaction when I go outside (and now I go daily to the office, because it’s near and more confortable than my house). I just don’t have the Nature fetish some people do.
In my country I went to see the Iguazú falls and my reaction was “Huh. Nice.”
Will go a step further and call it entitled white collar opinion. I lucked the fuck out and gotta outta food service for IT.
Not a minute goes by I’m not thankful, no matter what kinda shit day I’m having I’m not putting away truck while orders come in and the prep called out and don’t forget to clean the frier by the way how did you forget the onions?!?!?!?!?
Yeah go work that shit with no light at the end of the tunnel and then talk about how it’s wonderful.
I tend to agree with you. I work in a retail pharmacy and literally have had nightmares about work. Some folks dont know how good they have it. But in their defense satisfaction is an unfortunately ephemeral beast. When i first switched from the floor to pharmacy i was happier than id been in years. I still wouldn’t go backwards, but god damn some days i would love a job where i can sit down and the only customer i have to worry about is my boss.
One of my coworkers and I often discuss quitting our stressful-stupid IT jobs and going to work at Home Depot or Costco or even Arby’s.
Today I took my car in for routine service. A place I use all the time. Major chain.
The poor guy checking me in had to click past about 50 stupid pointless prompts on his workstation. He had serious muscle memory going on. The man was impressive, the software was not.
I can just imagine the asshole midlevel manager who made some beleaguered coder write all that pointless popup shit, to make sure “they don’t forget to upsell the customer” and god knows what other inane nonsense .
It’s embarassing how bad software is in 2024. Especially point of sale systems and medical records.
I feel this. At my last job, there were many meetings I didn’t think were useful in addition of software change just for the sake of change. Package.json errors everywhere. Small issues with docker to fix all day.
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