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 doing this forever. I would never imagine I would get burned out in the long run. I would never imagine I would think about retiring early because tech was so fun to me.
The reality is that money and savings give you optionality. It allows you to work without worrying day to day. You never know when the next wave of AI or BS is going to hit. That's when having that optionality is really important.
I have seen so many of my peers making very high tech income but also living the American opulent life, spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area to impress their friends. Today they have no choice than continue working for another 30 years. Today I can have a simple life and retire almost anywhere in the world.
Decide what is important to you. I guarante that buying the multi-million dollar home is not worth the extra 30 years of grinding.
It comes down to perspective tbh. For someone who's worked hard labor throughout their life, the cushy tech job you get is actually worth doing forever. But for people who have never experienced that, I can see why retiring early makes sense, but honestly most of us get to work from home and do our jobs on the computer, which doesn't require much. It's still an amazing career to be in IMO
I've worked in food service, landscaping and factory jobs. You're right, the tech job does feel super cushy after gigs like that. But I'm about 25 years in on the tech industry now and I feel the same GP. At some point, you can't avoid the politics and corp BS and it wears you down. Everything is relative. Now that I have the means to say "I don't have to or want to do this anymore" I'll be checking out after this year. It's been a good run.
I went from big tech to a team of four at a small org. To work uninhibited and with close to zero speed bumps from management has been life changing for me and my stress levels. We all have each other's backs and there is none of that "West Coast Nice" stuff going on.
I worked manufacturing in my younger days and also spent some time in the Marines, so I feel ya on the cushy tech jobs... But I'd just about rather go back to Iraq before I go back to corporate culture.
Wait for the money to evaporate ... more slowly than your remaining lifespan (and dying happy in your own bed for example) is one definition of winning.
You also don't need the politics and corp bs. I worked as a contractor for tiny little orgs doing good things for ~11 years - basically 2-5 people, almost no BS, good money, tons of time flexibility.
I shifted away to get more predictability and less accounting/biz management stuff. Maybe the party has ended, but I bet there's still some ability to freelance for small orgs? Alternatively working for small yet sustainable companies should be similarly lean.
I find the BS really ramps up with the size of the org. Small orgs obviously have their own problems (and often create problems that don't need to exist), but pick your poison.
I have this idea that AI might actually be a real enabler for small or 1-man teams if you find the right niche. I haven't acted on it yet, but I expect a lot of folks are doing that right now.
15 years in running a tiny micro agency (me and my wife), working with non profits. Still looking ok right now, and I still love it and my clients who are ace. I’m mainly a PM though with hacker-developer tendencies. Hoping my sector hold together for another 10 years. I’m 53 so that’ll do it. We’ve been relatively sensible over the years, good work / life balance and our children (now adult and left home) know who we are. So that’s the main job done :-)
Agreed this is one way to go. But tbh, I'm not sure if I've lost the passion for tech as much as rather spend my time doing other things like be with my kids, travel, ect. Also, take better care of my health and be more active. We'll see if there's a desire to keep the sword sharp but I don't expect that for some time after I retire.
I have had multiple years of good times like those. But eventually it always comes to an end from my experience. Usually because the business is not doing as well eventually.
I think you can get lucky and be in those good environments for longer (looks like you got lucky for 11 years) but by the nature of capitalism and competition those things never really last.
Oh it's definitely sink or swim, and you always have to be setting up the next thing while working on your current thing. It's a big part of why I got out - I'm much happier with a more stable situation. It's all about tradeoffs, how much you can stand the stink of corporate BS vs the downsides above.
And I will admit that the mid 2000's to roughly 2020 was a pretty good time to be in that mode. I haven't freelanced since 2019 so I might just be talking about good times that are gone now - it does seem like a tough world out there right now, but I bet there's still plenty of niches to be found.
Everyone always need twice as much as they have to retire. Most people will also never do it.
Reading the FIRE subreddit I have realized that most people like the fantasy of retiring more than actually retiring. A lot of them wouldn't actually know what to do without the daily societal pressure to grind. Life is tough when you are out of the beaten path and need to figure out how to fill your days apparently.
TBH I think most people's lives are on autopilot and I can't blame them. This is what late stage capitalism has endoctrinated into our culture. I was one of them until some events made me look critically at retirement. After crunching the numbers I could have retired years ago. Sticking it out a bit longer to squash the rest of the concerns my spouse has.
As you can imagine, it's a planning heavy decision. I came off parental leave earlier this year and prior to that my wife and I talked about me not going back. However, we decided to delay until my next vesting later this year and to see how the midterms play out with this clown car of an administration and the potential impacts on healthcare. Barring anything catastrophic, it's happening this year. Parental leave already gave me a taste of the life I'd rather have.
Same boat, my son was born in October last year and have been back at work since February and I am already completely overwhelmed. Our plan is to wait for the second child and get another paternity leave and then I will fuck off from any corporate/enterprise job and try to do my own thing first and we'll live off menial jobs + the income from the couple of apartments we have on AirBnB.
I am not planning to stay out of tech altogether though, at least long term.
I also worked hard labour at the start of my career.
They are not really comparable and are exhausting in a different way. Tech makes me mentally exhausted fighting things out of my control. Hard labour made me physically exhausted but I felt more in control of my life. I didn't need to do any performative tasks. Once the day was over, it was over.
Just different type of exhaustions. Grass is always greener on the other side I know
It's an amazing career because of the pay, not because of how American workers are relating to their hours. Kids out of college joining startups may be working harder than... just about everyone in America, really.
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 that at those layers, talking about the misalignment to the layer above is a great way to get canned. A decade or that, and the company is a zombie.
I've enjoyed tech in environments where there was alignment, and in a few cases it made me serious money, which is why I have said optionality myself. But nowadays AI has led to much higher capital costs to do innovative things, so the number of companies with the right size and potential has shrunk, and that makes fulfilling careers far less likely.
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.
This has been me as well. While I don't think my time is quite up, I have heard the call of the sea. Grey ships are waiting.
There have been times in the last decade where I wished I had chosen a profession that lets me stay offline more. Ironically, AI has given me more enthusiasm for tech than I've had in years, which seems opposite to most people's experience.
You know, I think the experiences you are describing are the norm for non-tech corporate jobs. Now with AI as an excuse, management is now subjecting the tech positions the same as the non-tech workers and it stings. Tech people were previously treated far better than the average corporate workers, and started after the tech hiring boom from Covid.
Quite right. I bemoan shortsightedness of managerial types often, but too many fellow techies had assume that gravy ride will last forever. In eyes of management we have not the same leverage now.
I have asbestos in this modest[0] house: it's not any sort of a problem. (Lead only in my soldering kit in significant quantities so far as I know...)
I always have been fairly frugal and am in semi-retirement now from the residues of my last two small start-ups (to which COVID was unkind, so died simultaneously!).
My extended family has/had big houses, including one in which a famous film was set it seems, but I see those as mainly expensive liabilities. Never owned a car. Etc etc.
[0] As described by a visiting Secretary of State!
There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house.
I read on HN all the time that once you have kid it is unavoidable to spend 300k$ a year. But yet 99.9% of the world and the US manages to raise kids with a fraction of that income and they turn out mostly fine. (Before you ask, yes I have kids and yes we still live simply)
The mental gymnastics I've seen kids enable is Olympic level. Need to upgrade to a bigger house, need to upgrade the car to a SUV, need keep traveling 2-3 times a year, need to sign up for some crazy sports league and coach which means domestic flights and hotels every other week.
American trucks are an arms race. You need one to protect the occupants from the other trucks on the road, unless someone legislates to stop all of you from driving them.
> There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house.
That's exaggerating a bit, but some places near offices are kind of that way. (Why I love working remote, which absolutely increases the spectrum of choices.)
Many of the homes in the world were built when lead and/or asbestos were in use. Asbestos isn't much of a concern if you don't disturb it - don't let your kids play in the attic or tear out the drywall, and you should be fine. Don't let them lick the paint, and you're probably good. Or paint over it / get it remediated - it doesn't have to be a deal killer.
I certainly agree that it'd be hard to have kids in a small space though, I definitely appreciate having more room - especially with a WFH setup.
Some people need to touch fire to know the feeling of getting burned.
I was one of those people.
Excellent tech income; zero savings other than a 401(k) I barely contributed into.
After an amazing meal at a burger place several years ago, I asked my wife about upgrading to a Model S. She figuratively sat me down (after we literally sat into the seats of our Model 3) and was more straight-forward with me than she had ever been prior to that moment.
"How much do we have saved? Oh, _we_ have basically nothing? Yeah, so I'm not saying no, but you need to fix that before we discuss this again."
I took it defensively in the moment, but not for long because I knew she was right. Building that nest egg became priority #1 since that talk.
That was in 2023. I saved a lot since then. It felt VERY VERY GOOD to look at my savings and say "You know, I could fuck right off for six months if I wanted to. I won't, but I could!" It completely changed my priorities at work.
Now, I've had to drain my savings twice now: once to secure a down payment for our house, and again for a major repair of said home (b/c I am strongly against treating our home as a credit card). Regardless, I chip away a good amount into several savings accounts every two weeks and am expecting to regrow the account within the next year. I can't wait to feel that feeling again!
As someone who took that time off, don’t. Not unless you have a solid re-entry plan. The money was nice for raising our daughter but I’m out of runway and no way to recover. Do well at your job and be thankful to live such a luxurious life.
Very good advice. I was at it for 40 years, actually did some MUMPS (for those of you who watched The Audacity), as well as every tech from the old days, even some hardware, and kept current and on the very edge up until the end. I also loved it and thought I would do it forever, I felt so grateful that my hobby and passion as also my career, and very well paying (eventually, back then no one thought it would be a career).
I retired 10 years ago when I had enough (money) and had enough (of the industry). Always lived below my means. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in the industry for the past 10 years.
As far as the nonsense that is pushed top down, it is not so simple. I was at/near the top. I know what was happening, what I was doing, but everyone has a boss, even the boss. The industry is too important, too big, too critical for it not to be run by human nature. So glad I got out when I did.
I feel like I could still endure this AI hype cycle a bit, that things will eventually stabilize to some point I’m comfortable with, agents already seem kinda cool after the psychosis wears off.
But the next big disruptive thing like this, that will probably be my last straw. Not sure what it will be, but when it comes, I’ll just know. Maybe it will be developers installing neuralink type devices or something into their brains to have some kind of “organic interface” or something using their thoughts to build prompts or whatever. You will have to have it just to stay competitive in the industry.
I would take this advice a bit further even -- I don't think savings alone is the key, because inflation and de-dollarization are exponentially eroding purchasing power. The key is ownership of income-producing assets. In late-stage capitalism, the vast majority of people who work in exchange for wages will be members of the debt class; workers who manage to escape debt will still be living on a knife's edge where you can be laid off at any moment regardless of how well your company is doing. The only people living with stability will be those whose lives are paid for by the assets they own, rather than by the hours they sell.
A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one that would be pleasant to live in.
There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on?
It sounds like a return to the way things have been for a long time. Our post-WWII abundance has been a bit of an aberration compared to most of our history.
I'm not saying it's good, I think it's very concerning and potentially very destabilizing. But it is the way things are right now. It's also possible to be on the wealth-producing side and not see your savings disappear into the ether while still providing things of value to people that appreciate it. "rent-seeking" is a real thing, and much of finance doesn't actually provide any real value to society, but this isn't a simple black and white dichotomy across the have's and have-nots.
We ought to find ways out of this mess, ideally something that doesn't involve communism and the typical humanitarian nightmares that usually come along with it.
> aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on
Self-perpetuating generational wealth is not a zero-sum game if said wealth is put to good work.
Having wealth morally obligates its holder to put it to use to benefit others. I think we all intuitively understand this; it's the impulse behind calls to "tax the rich!"
People the last 500 years who put wealth to good use, even in modest proportions, are part of the reason western culture is so rich. We would not have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven today if someone hadn't employed them (though I do decry the relative poverty some composers lived in and some OSS maintainers currently live in - come on, people). And modern infrastructure wouldn't exist if capitalists hadn't at one time thought it worthwhile to invest in railroads.
If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.
This really just sounds like a return to slavery via indentured servitude. If the working class is the debt class, someone owns that debt as an “income-producing asset”.
This whole thing is eye-searingly performative. Whether or not he follows through and goes dark after this, this farewell is just so ridiculous.
Claims to have not used the internet or a phone since February, does all communication via USPS, declares that AI and social media make him hate himself... But somehow is continuing to post on Bluesky, continuing to update his blog, continuing to post YouTube videos, continuing to solicit donations on GoFundMe for personal matters. The account that posted this link to HN is brand new and this is the only submission -- hmm...
If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.
Need to tie off some loose ends first? Write a paper letter to your IRL inner circle and/or business partners. Get it copied at Kinkos. Call people (use a land line if you need) and talk to them about it.
Just this last time (you swear!) you absolutely must announce this at internet scale? Then walk the walk and minimize the tech involved by typing out your farewell in plain text and posting it directly. Y'know, like we did pre-AI, pre-social media. Don't pull out a typewriter, write a sappy "Dear Internet" letter, add a bunch of likely-pre-planned "edits" in red pen, pull out your digital camera, take a photo, transfer it to your laptop, carefully adjust and crop, then finally combine it into a multimedia update that you go out of your way to promote across multiple social media channels. This announcement has obviously been tailored for maximum social media engagement -- supposedly the thing they are making a principled stand in opposition to.
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 and there's no way to really argue against that. Do I think he's karma-obsessed and drooling over engagement dashboards? No. And maybe that's what you mean.
But you have to be willfully naive to deny the irony in deploying numerous completely unnecessary layers of tech, over numerous social media channels, to let everyone know that you no longer want tech and social media in your life.
If you are somewhat of a public figure and working in a leadership role at a company, I think it's more sensible to put out a widely-seen public announcement about where you are going next, than to just disappear.
Well, at least the way he handless the typewriter and scribbles seems somewhat performative. If it's just a draft version, he seems capable of handling the typing hammers very professionally, adding online corrections staying within margins.
Seems way more seasoned in typing, than most typist of those days. And yet, he can't find the time or patience to retype the piece without typos as a final version?
I don't know the man and don't doubt his sincerity. I even agree with most of what he's saying. But it's pretty obvious imo that this is all somewhat performative.
Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade. He said he has been offline in his personal life since February, not his professional life. His BlueSky is professional. He quit his job and will be offline completely following the handover.
His latest YouTube post, from 2 weeks after the alleged go-dark date, is also all about his personal plan to walk away from tech. Needed to make sure there is a GoPro in his face while he talks about how low-tech he yearns to be. Needs to make sure everyone on the internet sees HD digital footage of him tapping on a typewriter, carving a stamp by hand, and switching to paper bank statements.
> Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade
I don't doubt it. I also don't doubt the claims in other comments that he has made incredible contributions to open source, is a good, kind person, and so forth. He deserves immense credit for these things.
None of that negates the fact that this is an incredibly performative and hypocritical way to make this particular transition. Defending it by pointing out his other virtues is just a reverse ad hominem.
You initially suggested that there was something suspicious about this being posted on HN. If you want to walk that back, okay, but doesn't that poorly judged initial sentiment undermine your cynicism?
Yes, of course this is "performative". Publishing is performance. Chad is, obviously, performing for his audience in sharing this, he wants to get his perspective out into the world.
Given Chad's decade plus of leading by example, embracing his ideals, it is important to know that he is a person of integrity when reading his words. Could this be a grand lie to some strange end? Sure, I guess, but everyone who knows Chad knows that he is exactly the type of person to mean everything in this letter in earnest.
His blog was part of his job. His job was an open source advocate, he was responsible for talking about open source. He posted on BlueSky in his role as an advocate for open source. Adding in a GoFundMe link that someone emailed to him on a post that got a bunch of attention doesn't undermine his point, at all.
A "hypocritical way to make this particular transition"? He's not advocating for you to make the same transition. He's not espousing moral superiority because he made this transition and you didn't. Life is messy, complicated, difficult, it's not "hypocritical" to... have a BlueSky account as part of your job while announcing you're stepping away from technology.
I’ve noticed HN becoming a cynical black hole lately. Any contrarian opinion is pushed back with a lot of force and grayed out, like yours. I thought about upvoting you but I’ll just leave a comment agreeing with you. Fighting against people determined to see the worst in every situation is exhausting.
I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.
But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff.
Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.
Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.
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 take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.
I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.
Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.
Good for you. It’s so exhausting dealing with these people who are constantly chasing a fantasy that through some process, or through sheer force of will, we can achieve a system where all the feature work gets done super quickly and we never have to pause or slow down to handle engineering concerns because they simply don’t exist.
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...)
I somewhat recently had a conversation about how we were going to start being more "strict" about how we do Agile (with a straight face). And they were right!
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.
nothing tactical from me, but I've fostered a strategic approach over the years that's lead to a deep appreciation for the real-time experience. You can probably recognize when it's good (and bad) once you've worked for a while, and you really need to consciously pause and remark "If this isn't nice, what is?"^1 at those times when it is good.
A decade of consulting had me always ready to wrap my engagement at the end of any day, and (for better and worse) I carried this with me to future jobs. I always miss (at least some of) the people, but never the situation when it turns sour and I leave. The good news: you often get a chance to work with the good ones again (even if that's because you entice them away to your next gig).
I'd say it's missing the FI part and the RE part of the FIRE strategy. Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it. The reason regular saving and regular humble living look a lot like FIRE saving and FIRE humble living is that an average person can only do so much to increase their net worth, so the possible variance between any two people is very limited.
"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?
> "Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about.
As someone who has successfully FIREd, I would disagree. If you are fortunate to be in a successful tech career and have a like-minded spouse, you don't need to do anything extreme to be able to FIRE. We only own one home that is comfortable but not impressive; we take care of our cars and drive them 10+ years; we leaned into hobbies that are cheap or money-saving (cooking, gardening, hiking, biking) and didn't get into owning boats or taking trips with first-class airfare and all-inclusive resorts.
I would say we "live humbly" and therefore had savings that covered expenses well before the age of 65. Part of our motivation was early retirement, but you can be doing the same thing without intent to retire early.
If it gets you to the point that you could retire early, then you were following a FIRE strategy, even if you weren't doing it with that goal in mind.
Well, I'm also FIREd, and obviously I'd disagree with your disagreement :)
I do agree you don't need to do anything extreme, personally I basically stumbled upon financial independence, I was just doing what I thought was fun, turned out it was profitable as well, and here we are with 24/7 freetime for ~50 more years or whatever.
But when I talk with peers who are all into aiming for "FIRE", then that's very different from the experience I had actually achieving it, I haven't though about retirement a single time, and obviously don't relate at all to these people who think about "reduce expenses and maximize savings", but I'd still relate to "lived humbly", fwiw.
"reduce expenses and maximize savings" simply means spend less than you earn. Live below your means. We call that 'living humbly' in the modern world, when you're not buying the latest phone and watching the latest movie at $50 a pop.
I will admit, when it came to brainstorming sources of crashes with threads, AI has helped me find sources I hadn't considered (as a systems guy, multi threading real experience is something I am sprinting through)
Fwiw we hired a "gray head" earlier this year and it was a huge mistake. guy has solid Linux knowledge but has absolutely zero motivation to get work done. If you don't constantly prod him on his progress he will just sit there and stare at the code. No longer am I going to be dazzled by someones 30 year tech resume.
The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code
If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?
What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.
In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before
My strong feeling is that the firms who get too deep into this and have lost the ability to engage deeply with their minds (necessary requirement for imagination) are long term fooked and will get destroyed by those who preserved the ability to imagine and create and recognise the subtleties, nuances etc of product development.
The AI cartel's hope is that the market will stay irrational longer than the naysayers can stay solvent both financially and intellectually.
Putting it a different way, it won't matter if the firms who went too deep at the very beginning are fucked if the rational are forced to succumb to the market pressures created by the irrational and thus are reluctantly pushed to adopt AI-first workflows for appearance's sake in order to survive anyway. Because then everybody will be likewise fucked and completely dependent on AI, despite it being a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness of the systems under development. History has taught us that it is adoption dynamics not capability that determines the winning paradigm or technology (Betamax vs VHS is one historical example. Javascript vs everything else is another one).
(We know it's a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness because the entire coding agent paradigm turns the most knowledgeable programmer into a person "who doesn't know what they don't know" because development speed far exceeds their ability to reason about the codebase and the underlying SOTA models that they depend on to fix the bugs that the model itself has introduced are at best unreliable narrators with no objective evidence of correctness or deterministic behavior.)
I am not convinced that the "dark factory" / "gas town" people are actually shipping anything that isn't also part of the AI ecosystem. At least the noise/ship ratio is incredibly high.
The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence.
It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives
That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN.
It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.
I feel this so much. I woke up at 1am last night stressing about AI and my potential lack of productivity. 2am rolls around, and I could not get back to sleep so I worked till 4:30am. Slept fine till 7:00am. AI has been causing a lot of stress for me and many others lately. My biggest source of stress is what will AI transform the human work world into by the time my children need a job? Most of us live in a capitalist society so AI utopia is right off the table.
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.
> 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?
In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?
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
They started doing that tracking where I worked until last summer, stress so high, GERD kicked in worse than it'd ever been and that's going back to the 1980's. I retired, and I do thank God I was able to. I now just dabble every week or so in my personal side projects.
My personal situation is unusual, but I don't see my coworkers being forced into AI. They also don't seem to be ignoring it, but they're also not using it very much afaik.
Some do try feeding it log based mysteries, which sometimes spots problems but usually not the one that was being investigated.
So far, all their attempts to write code with AI don't seem to have been worth the time. Although there's one report of good unit tests being generated.
I don't get much feedback on my open source projects, because the audience is limited, but I did get an annoying report recently where the reporter was using AI instead of their brain. AI took them (and me) through a pretty wild goose chase over a very simple reported error (unused variables in a couple places). Just remove them and carry on.
> In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Working on my own product using Claude, I feel like front-end coding hasn’t changed much. It still requires a lot of manual tweaking and understanding users at a human level.
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
That's refreshing to read (frontend is my wheelhouse). I mostly agree. It seems like most people using AI treat FE as a solved problem, satisfied using tailwind and settling for "looks close enough".
I think there will always be space for good artisanal FE. This is a Ford Model T moment, the software production line has just been invented, but that didn’t stop smaller sports car manufacturers pushing the envelope.
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.
I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?
Having watched people use these kinds of tools, it feels like trying to tell an intern to do a project.
Except with an intern, hopefully there's personal development and you only have to be very specific a few times. And the intern's manager gets good feels for helping someone grow, and maybe it's a hiring pipeline.
If I'm going to have to do that for everything, I would rather just do the work myself.
I have seen some sessions with let's call it over agressive autocomplete... That's mildly tempting, but I'm happy with my disintegrated development environment, and it doesn't have any way to do autocomplete at all, so that's not happening for me either.
Current SOTA is far past "agressive autocomplete" at this point, more like ask for a PR for a small feature and its done... I guess for me the fun is you can build a lot yourself, without relying on others. I hear you for the social aspect though & thanks for sharing your pov.
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...
I wasn't clear enough, I was replying to "you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off," in context I meant "mass layoff" as in "95% of everyone is out of a job permanently".
> have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy?
I haven't. But I found myself, to my surprise, not particularly interested in trying; which makes me wonder what motivates other developers if not peer pressure or demands for more productivity. I find coding interesting and fulfilling enough to do it on my own. I do ask LLMs questions from time to time, but for that, even a chatgpt or a gemini in a browser tab is enough.
The best experience I had so far is with code reviews, when the models pointed out my mistakes. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I would want them to write code for me.
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.
I'm banking on this. I don't really know anyone younger than me at the moment that writes C++. Best-case scenario I'll be in-demand. Worst-case when my grandchildren visit me at my cardboard box I can tell them spooky bedtime stories about SFINAE.
Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago.
The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it.
He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.
Man I really want to retire. I've gotten a couple stark reminders recently that life is fragile and short. I'm trapped by the golden handcuffs of the software industry, but I console myself by saying it's a means to an end (early retirement). I really hope that becomes possible in the near future, because whatever this is now is not sustainable.
I also can't wait for the day I retire, I got laid off recently, so that sets things back for me for now, but as soon as I get another job, it's all about saving to escape this damn rat race. I hope you can retire soon too.
Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI.
Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
>Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it.
And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...
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.
Yes, that's a concern for me too, I'd like to retire early but healthcare has me wondering about getting a job as a teacher or something just to make sure I can afford it if I get cancer at 55.
Same age, but I gotta hang on a little longer. I'm a little too anxious about sequence risk in the market environment we're in now. But otherwise I'm with you, when I retire I may well dump nearly all of my technology and go back to stone tablets, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes I get so tired of it. Ironically, though, my work environment is pretty good, it's everything we're doing in tech outside my office work that gets me down.
> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted
I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback.
And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1]
I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work.
[1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I find AI to be very effective. It can do nearly all coding tasks many OOMs faster than I can. And I'm able to get it to produce high-quality code in the process. Using AI, our codebase actually has less tech debt than any time I can remember. I would be less effective if I wasn't using AI and if I wasn't finding new ways to leverage it.
That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.
I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.
Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.
While the tinkerer in me would love to, the pragmatic side of me cannot ignore the speed boost, specially for prototyping programs.
If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.
At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.
And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.
Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business?
Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.
Of course they do. Generally the end result from this is bad - reduced in scope, buggy, and/or unstable. But that's an issue with communication/expectations/management. It'll keep happening either because of politics or the fact that a sub-par deliverable still meets the needs of the overall organization. Until it doesn't.
As Eric Schluntz from Anthropic put it (not verbatim):
If you're not using AI (I believe he was specifically referring to Vibe Coding), then you are the bottleneck.
Yeah, because someone who is trying to sell you something would NEVER try to convince you that you can't possibly hope to compete without buying their product. /s
You can still code entirely without AI or AI influence, so that's primarily why I say it's you. It may also, in fact, be burnout. It sounds like it to me. And it's okay to get back into coding if you ever feel like it.
I feel you. I've been coding for about 20 years and the last 2 years were an absolute downer, draining all the joy of programming by offloading the actuall puzzles to an ai third party thst i just navigate and correct. I am 20 times more productive but 20 times less happy
I'm not near retirement, but I have found that the side projects I work on have diminished quite a bit since AI took over coding. It used to be that writing a library for something like parsing ICal files was something I could spend time on, write, build out, and then other people could use. But now anyone can throw together a working version of it in a little bit. That's a good thing, but also it removes the fun of spending the time implementing it and creating something for others.
After 40+ years of coding, I couldn't be more happy about how AI has changed what I do. It got rid of the boring drudgery and grind and let me concentrate on the problem-solving, idea-generating parts.
Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.
Retired as well. Hated that dealing with AI was a big part of my job. Hated how half my time was spend clicking through portals, scrum boards, devops tooling. I just wanted to code.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.
I think you're getting unfairly downvoted. A lot of people, across all salary ranges, are just vaguely tired of constantly Providing Maximal Shareholder Value™ to their managers day in and day out, having that One Purpose dominate their lives, and at the end of each day looking up and seeing nothing tangible to show for what they've done.
Yep, this is the right answer. Everything is max money always, and you can't have nice things any more, you can only have things that extract all the value they can out of you.
I have definitely found my enjoyment of coding in my spare time is lessened now that AI is on the scene. I know very few if any were going to use the code, but it felt like working on a classic car, the act of working on it was fun even if the final results seem like the effort could have been used more productively.
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
I think part of the problem is that source code is always in flux. So to think of the satisfaction of completing a project seems difficult to imagine.
Big corporations invent new “features” and then axe them, even if the products are delightful; venture capitalists obsessed with building to exit on profit alone; open source developers trying to make a name for themselves by building something in Rust to improve performance by 5%.
Compare that to something like architecture or woodworking, gardening, baking, painting—creating real tangible things.
My recommendation is combine the two: use arduinos and/or raspberry PI to automate water delivery in your garden. Stuff like that that you can experience the value at first-hand. :)
It’s both, IMO from your brief comment, LLMs made you think it’s all troublesome endeavor because it outputs spaghetti code. No one likes hunting through spaghetti code and fixing it. Nobody wants to fill their plate with seconds immediately.
Mess around with a poc and try not using the LLM to get started (use a project scaffolding tool/code generator instead if you must). Start with some appetizers and a first course. Stop working on it even if you feel satisfied.
I like to try and get my pocs to a publishable state someone else can download and compile even if it’s wonky. That helps me bookend my work even if I don’t accomplish all the goals.
I most recently made a poc with nuklear ui and libuvc make a small app that displays my camera feed. I pushed it up, the camera frames have some green flicker but it works. I did more research and found out there are better libraries than libuvc for this kind of thing. Now I have another prototype to make for my ideas. And a base to clone if I need some starter template.
Mad respect for his work. Love his writing. But no, i'm not buying the story of going offline, especially not with a trending hackernews post and a typewritten letter to the internet. When one is done with something, they're done. Cold turkey. like "Fck this sht, i'm out". If someone notices that you are missing, they'll ask, and you can give them your spiel about being AI-Amish or whatever.
Even if you ignore all that, I think you just need a break, rest, recover, find something else in life and move on. The whole thing about "life was better in the past" is just plain non-sense, simply because the past, for all we know, extends to infinity. Why 1980 and not 1890? or 1590? the inquisition? maybe the crusades? or maybe the pharohs? If you believe in biblical tales then how about being in the great flood? or being one of the pharoh soldiers that die after the sea moses split closes on them? or one of the skulls in gengis khan's tower of skulls?
You can read Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" and get a good sense of how far along have we come.
This was well written but it does sort of read as a guy bragging about his wealth and creativity. Good for him but when I leave tech I'm going to be a little less bombastic about it.
100%. I get it -- I'm _also_ burned out on social media, AI, screens, the treadmill of the tech industry, etc.
But you can just stop doing those specific things. Delete your social media accounts. Put a screen time timer on your phone. Continue to work on your hobby projects or work projects without AI. There is a middle ground without going full "1980s tech Amish life conversion". Email, text messaging, Maps, basic websites, etc are all still super useful and generally non-harmful. You can still perfectly-well enjoy analog hobbies like typewriters, vinyl, film photography, etc _alongside_ common-sense modern tech.
And you look dumb to anyone paying attention when you launch a multi-pronged social media moment to tell the world that you don't think social media is worth using. It's kind of sad, like someone making a huge deal about "this is my L A S T cigarette everyone!", "this is my L A S T drink!" but all their friends are kind of cringing inside.
Also sad that he feels the need for online promotion of his paper zine about fully offline life.
For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care?
He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it.
Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still make a huge impact. Either way I respect his decision and hope he finds peace offline. TBH I’m a little jealous.
I met Chad during the gittip years, and one of my life goals now is to go find him in the offline world some day and sit around an open fire at night to share stories. :)
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
Chad taught me programming when I was a child, and introduced me to a professor I then went on to work for. Sadly I haven't kept up with him, but I second his impact: both big and small, he's a brilliant and caring guy.
yup, Chad is super authentic, WYSIWYG. Truly a loss for Open Source and tech in general.
I wish him well and I don't blame him at all. He already gave more of himself to advancing OSS sustainability than probably anyone else on the planet (might be room for debate, but I can't think of who else is even in the discussion).
Yep. Chad is great. Although, if anyone were to lead a cult, I figure it would be Chad, hopefully he doesn’t accidentally charisma himself into a cult leader situation.
Well he does say in the letter he wants to be part of an offline-only community, and is starting a magazine centered around it combined with Orthodox Christianity... this after talking about a community in India that kills outsiders and wanting to be like the Amish. Seems cult-adjacent
Eastern Orthodoxy is the oldest branch of Christianity. Which means it's the furthest thing from "cult-adjacent." You want to know what is actually "cult-adjacent"? People who are associated with Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, or your local Church of Cosmic Vibrations.
Funny, 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 the past 4 years, a series of small games that I have been itching to work on, then, of course, the lifelong project of living in a rural house. Stretch goal if I win the lottery: build a solar farm.
Maybe I will be so lucky never to have had to use LLMs in my work. You guys have fun without me. :-P
Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal.
The two years are going to fly by.
EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.
Seconded, though from a different angle. In my experience, it's surprisingly hard to live frugally when you don't have a job; my spending actually went up at first because I had all of this free time for activities I didn't have before. Started doing more hobbies, going for trips around town, generally participated in the economy more than I could when 8 hours of my day were spoken for. What I thought was a year of runway was probably closer to 3-6 months.
My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
On the other end, I live very frugally and when I spent six months without work I calculated how much my savings would last with my no job level of spending and it was 21 years. So anyone who wants to learn to live frugally would be wise to start doing so while still working, because that's when it's the easiest.
I imagine politically it will be like during the pandemic. The government goes full socialist to prevent riots and revolution -- they are going to print lots of money. It is going to be chaotic period. It is already starting and the best thing people can do is make sure they are employed, developing skills, and not spending savings. You want to make it to the other side of this.
I have a very niche set of skills so I could up until 6 months ago pick up contract work anytime I needed. Despite being one of the best in the world at what I did, I can't compete anyone with $400 in tokens using Codex or Claude Code. I'm pivoting quickly but the sentiment is "Oh, shit, this is coming fast and heavy!"
People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
I live in a first-world European country where the average salary is about €25,000 per year. My mortgage estimate is less than €300/mo. I'm not that afraid of having to supplement my income if I need to. The world will still need cheap and experienced software engineers for a while.
> People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Quality of life in suburban America is incredibly high relative to a "first world" country with such a low average income. From what I have seen, most families in the "European periphery" still live in small Soviet-era apartment buildings, own one small car or no car at all, and are far from enjoying many other things taken for granted in America.
Of course you felt amazing living off US$1k/mo in Brazil - the average per capita household income in Brazil is less than US$450/mo and a salary of $700/mo puts you in the top 10% [0].
Basically, you enjoyed feeling rich in a country where the vast majority are getting screwed.
And this is what I as well as my SO's family (middle and working class Vietnamese in VN) hate about digital nomads - y'all don't realize that you end up perpetuating the same inequality you try to run away from, and feels deeply colonial in nature as the countries y'all end up in had histories of being colonized and stratified.
You get to travel everywhere because you have a strong passport. They don't because their passport is weak and their salaries are low.
You will always be promoted to the top of the social pecking order thanks to your passport. They will always be relegated to the bottom and attacked by politicans as "stealing jobs" or "changing demographics" thanks to their passport.
I'm probably being overly charitable, but I would have said the same thing except in a positive context, because I've wanted to do the same thing at times.
I think it's not a moral, but financial judgement. Unless an alternate income is achieved before that deadline, becoming destitute except for a small cottage is not a great prospect.
> a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years,
I don't want to step on your design process, but if you want to explore some microkernels to run beam, I can link you to mine and another one that I ran into recently. Asking before linking, because sometimes you'd rather not look.
1. Please do link your microkernel, I'm very curious to learn from other people working in this space
2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy.
I haven't studied Tyn, I think from the high level we both have the same goals; enough kernel to run BEAM, and then BEAM does the rest. I wrote in C because learning Rust and bare metal OS stuff at the same time seemed like too much. Crazierl does much less in my kernel; my kernel handles time keeping, memory paging, interrupts, fallback console output, and a simple read only filesystem. Tyn includes device drivers and tcp/ip in the kernel as well. Crazierl runs BEAM compiled for FreeBSD and Tyn runs BEAM compiled for Linux (musl). Crazierl is x86 32-bit, Tyn is x86 64-bit.
IMHO, regardless of what your eventual target is, I would consider running on x86 with bios boot, because it means you can run in v86, which is handy for sending links to demos.
I think building a multiboot capable OS and relying on other people's loaders is a good step to reduce effort.
Starting with serial console also helps a little. VGA text isn't too bad, but UEFI (or other) framebuffer means you need a font renderer and all that. That might be fun and interesting, but it doesn't need to be in the critical path.
If you want to run on hardware, test frequently. Most of the emulators aren't super accurate in early boot, and let you get away with stuff that won't run on hardware. Serial console helps here, because on a pc, writing to the serial port is easy and your output will stay in the terminal even if the pc reboots.
Fully automated PXE boot is helpful too, if you get into a boot loop, it just keeps pulling the latest, and you can push a new binary and wait for the output without having to touch the device under test. Also handy once you get it working a bit... just reboot to pull in new code.
I built an x86 kernel 25 years ago at this point, this time around I chose RISC-V because it's much simpler to get it running, and speed of iteration is paramount on a prototype. There's less documentation but much less cruft. I eventually would like to try porting it to x86, and also to run the same programs — unmodified — on Linux. My first prototype was on Linux actually, but trying to figure out how to fit userspace preemptive scheduling with async IO/io_uring and the complexities of signal handling was literally more complicated than just writing a kernel.
Thank you for the links! I'll have a look when I have a moment in the next weeks and I might send you an email to discuss this further
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 then. It's a strange one.
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 this to say, a person trained to work for someone else 40 hours a week for all their adult life is not able to self-direct and find meaning without a lot of introspection and readjusting.
Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
I would (genuinely) be interested in a follow up on how that works out for them. I've "threatened" to do this many times, but my partner points out that if I thought tech management was full of BS, wait until I am getting ordered about by retail industry management while working the shop floor, dead on my feet, penalised for taking too long a toilet break. I think reality could come down hard here.
From 2024-2025 I worked as a firefighter instructor while running my own tech business, and after two years I decided I was done instructing. I could not handle working on my feet in the pouring rain, getting endlessly hassled for doing a task by the book but not the way the lead instructor likes it done, and then having to spend my lunch break listening to sexist and racist "humor" from my coworkers. Also getting exposed to seriously toxic materials at a radioactive building. Coworkers who all had the thinnest skin and most sensitive egos I've ever seen. All to get paid less in an 8 hour day than I make an hour at my business. It just wasn't worth it, even though I loved being there for the students and helping them grow. When I realized I could make more growing organic veggies in my yard than I could at the training center, I made the call to quit.
I have worked retail before, and to add onto the things you put it was the lack of problem solving for me that was absolutely mind numbing. Sure there were the little "problems" to solve of shelving, stock order, tidiness etc but it doesn't push the brain (and maybe they're done with that part, which is fair), but until you've experienced it I would be very surprised if this person finds retail better than tech.
Even just having to clock in on time is something many tech folk don't really have to bear.
But I don't think it's charitable to assume the author doesn't understand what he is getting himself into. I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt and increase my admiration for his commitment accordingly.
> I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
This is a nice understatement. What we see here is privilege at work and phrasing it in a likable manner. "Tech" folks appear to be particularly vulnerable to this type of framing.
>that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
that's pretty presumptuous I think. He says in the piece he is an Orthodox Christian who wants to build a offline community in Pennsylvania where he lives. The average salary at HD is 70k, that's the household income in the state.
I know a bunch of Orthodox folks in the US and their idea of a reasonable lifestyle doesn't include two Teslas and three holidays, they do just fine on less than that without a tech cushion.
It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech that some people seem convinced they cannot live 'reasonable lives' without earning more than 95% of the population.
> I know a bunch of Orthodox folks in the US and their idea of a reasonable lifestyle doesn't include two Teslas and three holidays, they do just fine on less than that without a tech cushion.
I'm not talking about Teslas and holidays. Where I am, an equivalent job would really be living on the edges in terms of the basics: rent, groceries, healthcare, energy, saving for retirement.
> It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech...
It's tiring to me that tech workers really have no idea how well they live compared to people working retail full time - to the extend that it gets romanticised like this. It's incredibly patronising. Which is why I would be interested in a follow up on wether the reality matched the "dream".
>It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech that some people seem convinced they cannot live 'reasonable lives' without earning more than 95% of the population.
Fair, but another way of looking at it is - since the 1980s the income - cost of living gap has steadily increased, such that "median income" translates to a much more frugal lifestyle than the name implies, to put it euphemistically. Its not like people work multiple blue collar jobs because they want/love to.
Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!
I think it is fair to dog on this for being a bit performative, like announcing you are blocking someone or quiting XYZ social media by posting on that social media. I do give some grace for trying to make an offline magazine/newsletter because I'd like to see more of that in the world, especially passion projects in general. All that to say, I think the attempt to be offline or more disconnected from some of these services is ultimately a healthy habit and is noble self improvement goal in itself. In the same way, trying and failing to quit cigarettes is ultimately healthier than not trying to quit smoking cigarettes. (I am biased; I think the way he formatted the post is quite aesthetic for what it is and would enjoy more analog to mellow out my life)
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 preserving a valuable way of life, they're primitive hunter-gathering barbarians, and anybody can "return" to that way of life any time they want by taking a one-way plane ticket and camping out somewhere where they cannot be found.
Additionally, the fact that this announcement is a scan of a typewritten letter, despite the fact that he has communicated in text-form on BlueSky since the letter's authoring, feels a tad performative to me.
>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
This feels like a purposeful misreading. The author is using hyperbole to vent about their feelings on where we are right now in tech. The idea being there will still be some vestiges of humanity left who can live without any of the advancements from the Industrial Revolution onward because it may all disappear in a calamity.
>taking a one-way plane ticket and camping out somewhere where they cannot be found.
Camping isn't building a sustainable human community. Trust me. We go camping in the White Mountains every summer and I can tell you based on the campground bathrooms alone that is not a society.
> Camping isn't building a sustainable human community. Trust me.
My point is that if the Sentinelese were gone, the primitive lifestyle would not forever be lost to time. If somebody finds enough people willing to join them, it would be possible to found an off-grid commune somewhere.
> We go camping in the White Mountains every summer and I can tell you based on the campground bathrooms alone that is not a society.
I doubt anybody going camping in the White Mountains intends to found a society.
Regardless whether or not it was rhetorical, I found it off-putting, especially when the Amish (a far superior example of the point he is trying to convey) are mentioned in the same article.
If I were more -- or even at all -- versed in the geopolitics of the Andaman Islands, I may have found it more off-putting than I did. That's a fair enough point. If you're offended by this, that's understandable and I don't blame you.
What I was speaking about was more the claim that the author had veered into fanaticism. That doesn't seem true. He's working at Home Depot not becoming a hunter-gatherer let alone murdering anybody.
despite the fact that he has communicated in text-form on BlueSky since the letter's authoring
Lol thanks, that answers my question. Whenever these "I'm leaving tech" posts come up I'm amused that the website is still online, they're still tweeting, and there's no indication that they've left anything at all. Our society rewards speaking out too much. It's especially difficult to stop if a big part of your existence is networking, and this guy seems to be all about networking.
This resonates with me as well. For more reasons than one: with the rise of AI (Mythos is but a pale forerunner) digital security — and by extension, digital privacy — has ceased to exist. The bomber will always win. The only way to win is not to play.
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
I am not sure anything is scaring anyone into urgency as long as breaches are no great issue for the company (in contrast to their customers and/or affected third parties).
Also, more secure code might be performing better, it might also perform worse. I am not sure the concepts are completely orthogonal, but there is at least no clear causality.
This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him.
Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside because he doesn't have a robot bodyguard. His UBI would have paid him to stay inside and stare at the wall, but he won't sign up for that cause it requires a smartphone and an identity implant. Probably wind up homeless with a handwritten sign, "Destroy All Clankers! Anything (without an embedded microchip) helps."
If things get as much as 10% as chaotic as you predict, there will be massive turmoil and the "Destroy all Clankers" party will actually be the one in charge.
Yeah, except we'll be a colony of China and those T800s will be on every street corner cause we didn't want to build datacenters and couldn't find a place to do yucky unaesthetically pleasing stuff like refining rare earth minerals and other primary industries anywhere that wasn't China.
Exactly. People make this technology with impunity. If they felt repercussions for working with the “bad guys”, it would give them pause before accepting a job with Flock, Andruil, Anthropic, etc.
burglars generally don't need technology and this likely won't change soon
with tracking in laptops/phones/airtags/etc it's more likely to be the enemy than the tool or even the object of acquisition
even in 2026 the most sophisticated stuff we get are wifi jammers and keyfob intercepts and that's still like the top <1% of sophistication, most of petty theft is all the classic smash and grab because desperate people don't have the bandwidth for sophistication
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 boilerplate it took to actually build something. I've always enjoyed having extensive breadth about many languages in addition to the few that I had extreme depth in.
In other words, I don't feel AI has taken something I love away, but has removed barriers to finally build solutions in a way that maps perfectly with my brain.
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.
thank you for this. what a sacred journey you're embarking on. i hope to follow you - talking with a close friend now about becoming an elevator mechanic. my wife is pregnant so i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand. i think the world you envision is possible, and closer.
Do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
There is no profession better matching what women in western countries expect from a co-parent than tech. The money first and foremost, but the flexibility to work (more accurately, pretend to work) remotely, too.
Let me reiterate:
For your marriage, do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
This would be ideal, but practically speaking, it will only become harder to switch careers and make up the income gap as I get older (i'm 30) and more people leave tech for less volatile industries. Plus, I don't think we'll be one and done re: kids. I don't think waiting is necessarily a smart long-term move given rising anti-tech sentiment among workers, even if it would be better to wait until the perfect age from a lifestyle perspective. This is just my opinion.
I guess it depends on how the pay actually compares.
If the tech salary is more than the trade salary, every year you hold on is more runway for the eventual transition. Even if it takes you longer to get into the new thing because you were slow jumping ship, the extra runway might cover the difference.
Obviously I've had similar thoughts to the ones you're having. But this is a pretty cushy gig and I don't think leaving it before they make me is the right decision.
Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
If u lost your job already, u didn't choosingly give up a stable(don't know u, so guessing) job as the other person alludes (don't know their situation so people guessing here).
So if u had a stable good paying job, giving it up to start something new while having a new kid can be very hard .. but doable. Still I'll advised.
If u lost your job, based on job market, career switch makes total sense as you need to help provide and a career switch may provide a better or stable opp.
Many people have successful home life/family life with no financial stability or even a job altogether...
> Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
that's true, and also why it's prudent to not go around giving unsolicited family advice to strangers.
also it's why, when you're talking about one particular woman you've never met, you should keep the demographic insights you think you have about her to yourself.
important context for me is that layoffs keep eating my company every 6 months or so, meanwhile the due date is fast approaching. treading shark-infested waters
If you start a post talking about what you think western women value and then continue with the idea that women just want to be taken care of by a man, their partner your world view is distorted by garbage information.
Healthy and stable relationships sre built on care and being good people, not what you're job provides.
> my wife is pregnant
>> You're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income.
I would say your priorities and what you value are about to radically change. Parenthood is very instinctual, you'll work so much harder and struggle and worry so much more than you ever have but you'll find so much more joy than you ever thought existed at the same time. Once you hold your child for the first time the only thing that will matter will be your family and that will drive your decision making from there forward.
>once you have kids shit gets real and room for idealism shrinks fast
I get what you mean, but if there's any part of me I want to pass onto my daughter, it's my idealism. What would be the point? "Hey, I would like to get involved in this 'Next Generation of Humanity' project because I love people and think we are wonderful and can do anything. Before I go having a kid though, let me actively forget all that!"
> you're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income
would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
> These two sentences are completely independent of each other.
They are two separate thoughts. Two thoughts that are separate can exist in one comment. They are just next to each other. The profession that comes close to tech salaries is elevator mechanic. The poetry is for my heart, which is related to this guy's post, in which he talks about leaving tech for the sake of his heart.
Not only are you a downer, but you have a highly unusual approach to parsing information.
Typically two sentences directly following one another are related. You are missing a paragraph to separate your completely unrelated thoughts. The person you are replying to has a normal way of passing information. You need to work on how you present your information.
Aren't they related in the sense that they're not tech/SaaS/software related? "I'm looking into being an elevator mechanic; I need the money because my wife is pregnant." and then "I'm writing poetry by hand." Like, their life is going in a non-tech direction?
> would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
There is lots of stable software work outside of SaaS. Not exciting but reliable and pays decently. That's what might take priority when you start a family.
Why is it a sacred journey? They are quitting a job at Sentry and taking one a Home Depot. As much as I value the role that Home Depot plays in society I'd never use the word "sacred" to describe the work, nor the work at any other job.
I guess it depends on what sacred means to you. i'm not a religious person, so my definition is entirely personal, but i consider honoring yourself even when it looks like a failure to others, or even when it doesnt give you money/power etc. to be a holy act.
brother I've thought about the tech to blue collar transition too. for me, I would choose plumbing or electrical, but it seems like 4 years of low apprentice wages are unavoidable.
I overlapped a bit with Chad in 2015, as he was navigating a professional transition. I wasn't in an especially high role back then- just a guy in the back of the room.
In the times I saw him since, I consistently saw someone who thought hard every day about how to help others, and didn't lose sight of the human element. Sentry worked hard to create a viable business, without losing sight of open source goals. (you can see some of his efforts at https://blog.sentry.io/authors/chad-whitacre/ )
I tell my younger colleagues to do the best work they can sustainably do... but too often in this field, the big roles become too intense to be sustained forever. I hope his new role shows him the same warmth and support that he tried to put out there for others.
Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intuition led me down the right road at the right time. Always trust your gut.
I have 3 weeks left, but outside of work I've already been divorced from anything technological invented this century. I've been living in a log cabin in the woods for over a quarter century. This essay does hit home.
I think we're going to see a ton of this in the coming years. A return to the 60s/70s when people were going off the grid, moving to a farm, or just disconnecting
People have always done this, and always will. I don't think we'll see a lot more of it. I haven't met a lot of people who are actually happy living a very simple frugal life for very long. Maybe it will be a fad for a while, or people will do it as a sabbatical type of thing to recharge but really committing to it forever?
Then the younger generation who have never known life without AI will be entering the workforce (whatever that looks like in 10 years time), and it will just be normal.
I'm trying to figure out where the best place to do this sort of thing is, looking a few years ahead. Currently feels like the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York hits a good combination of available farmland, affordable prices, acceptable weather (I went to school near there), and so on. I love the West Coast but it's all too damn expensive.
If you are that pedantic you could also ask if he is living without a mobile phone, without a car and without any modern electrical appliance phoning home. So, probably him being offline is not to be taken quite so seriously.
I manage the Google Maps listings for two local Amish businesses, as well as send the occasional e-mail for them when a supplier or other business reason requires they use e-mail.
They offered to pay me for my time, but I refused as I'm happy to help my neighbors. They seemed pretty uncomfortable with me helping without anything in return, so they pay me back in discounted products or labor of their own.
I am not sure what is forbidden. There was a YT video about computer they were using for business. It was stripped down OS (windows xp?) that only had office apps, or something like that.
I'm not sure if payment is involved, but I've heard Orthodox Jews can and do seek non-Jewish help when they need e.g. light switches toggled on the Sabbath.
Software dev is so much infested with mediocre people who follow any line dictated by management and politics and force others to do it.
If CEOs were smart, they'd use the AI craze to identify the AI boosters and then fire them all. This will increase productivity and save them way more money than a Clown Code subscription.
I'd say that it's very natural to want to retire after 40 years of doing anything. You reach your various ceilings. You have most of your enthusiasm spent, most tasty bits of your area of expertise picked and consumed, seen many sad things repeating over and over, etc, etc. And any major new development may be disheartening, whatever it may be.
I think this is fine. A person, having worked for so long and successfully on something, has every right to call it quits and switch to something else. Something fresh and different. Godspeed!
I finally pulled the trigger after being in tech for 21 years. 10 years at a FAANG.
I simply can’t handle the performative Machiavellian culture anymore.
I could play that game for longer, but I don’t want to. All I want is to build cool and ambitious things without any of the theatrics.
I don’t want to go offline. I just want to live a normal, modern, and peaceful life. I would go nuts without all of the comfort of modern tech, especially the high speed broadband.
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 I find to be relatively easy after 20 years in industry, but figuring out how to teach it effectively? That's really, really difficult. Such a great challenge to be able to sink my teeth into—so rewarding. And it's for a good cause.
I'm not opposed to going back to industry work. I'd probably use genAI to get a bunch to get stuff done, too, even though I don't use it for my personal projects. But it would have to be some work that I believed in, that was doing some good in the world. I can imagine working for the county, say, or for a non-profit.
I love the website design. I had considered at one point blogging in illuminated manuscript, and if I can figure a good way to format/compress page scans for my blog, I will follow in the OP's footsteps.
I love my current job, but also part of me thinks a Garbage Man would provide a cool experience. (I'm ok with the stinkiness). I just think about careening through the city at the crack of dawn, exploring every nook of my city. That or group fitness instructor.
I fell off the OSS ideological wagon around the same time, and probably for the same reason.
When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.
Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.
That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.
I feel all of these things too. I'm 42 and started working right out of high school. Unfortunately I was dumb, didn't save money or pursue high earnings until 6 years ago when I joined big tech. I live in HCOL area, and realistically have 10 or maybe even 20 years left before I can even start thinking about retirement.
Trying to figure out how to make this sustainable.
It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.
It would be hard to give up on tech as I genuinely enjoy building, watching systems come alive, figuring out the puzzles through when they break. I do like the term Neo-Amish though and definitely relate.
I do recommend people get outside activities to balance things out - just walking my dog 1-2 miles a day is like therapy for me (and a good way to get unblocked and energized with a new idea).
I retired to the country, where any friends are 50 miles away, and most don't even reply to emails and messages.
I still want to utilize some free wikis and such to help share ideas.
There are simple things that can improve life for people, especially seniors, that are very low tech, and that's the rub.
Low tech things mean taking action, getting away from the screen, where SO WE THINK, magic happens when we create some new fantabulous code gizmo.
Maybe just bringing a pizza to someone, inventing some gadget to read invisible labels and expiry dates on food, or making an exoskeleton for someone with back pain will do more good than some AI that writes exciting posts on social media, or better, counters some other AI that is coming for your money and creative mind.
We are all overthinking everything, when simple, human problems are neglected in some race to an unknown "endpoint" that is illusory and ever-moving.
It is amusing and depressing to see so many people exit tech. I remember this happened in similar “vibes/strides around 08 and then for Covid, which ironically doubled down on remote work. And now for AI.
It really paints a projection on how much time we all really have in this world and this segment of work.
At best I wonder, do “I” have another 10 - 15 years left in tech?
Do you?
Agreed with the other comments on financial freedom. It does feel that tech is one of the last bastions remaining where you can really solidify being an autodidact to have an exit of your choosing.
I read somewhere that the average developer only has 7 years of experience. This should be a fairly sobering warning to anyone getting into tech that you should be saving every penny and planning your next career move. I know so many people who have burned out, gotten so stale they can't find work, or both. I've been in the industry for 19 years now and so few of my former coworkers are still in the field. I never planned I'd make it this far, so I'm making hay while the sun shines.
The problem isn't tech, it's the management/executive layer behind the firehose of VC bullshit and the consultant class of MBAs allowing decision making without consequence. We need to step up and kick all of these idiots out of the industry - not step or shy away. They're expecting techies to be soft and not to confront them using word games. Be as elitist and forward as you need to survive - but I plan on spending the next decade fiercely attacking the cancer... "Show me the money - or shut the fuck up". I can easily act more impatient than they can.
You’re not wrong, but an MBA helped me understand management better and “bridge the gap” between tech and management.
There is often a disconnect between both sides.
While anyone can learn the language of business, an MBA helps in understand their side, by teaching how executives think, evaluate risk, and make decisions.
A respected MBA also provides credibility, making it easier to translate technical ideas into business outcomes and gain support from leadership, etc etc etc.
The real value isn’t the mba itself, but learning to operate in both worlds. There is so much gray and fun things to can do once you see and can communicate both sides.
Tech-management arbitrage. That layer you describe is just talking another language, that most people in tech just don’t know. They also control the money.
I'll never give up tech. It's a passion I've had since childhood, and a large part of what keeps me going in society is seeing the lights of the eyes brighten when someone discovers something new with technology that genuinely makes their life that much better than it was a moment ago. Not merely the flame of some dopamine hit of something shiny, but that genuine, "Thank you for helping me save an hour of my time/cross this chore off my list forever/give me back time, to live my life" sense.
The fact so many of us are burning out so hard, so fast, so thoroughly despite tech being a passion genuinely worries me. These are otherwise brilliant people, well-read, modest intellectuals that are just sick of this anti-human society we've built, with the constant braying by Capitalist and Industrialist leaders that this thing is necessary or you will be left behind, in lieu of natural discovery and adoption and integration into our lives. We bought into it initially and for so long, even as time after time after time it proved to be empty, or shallow, or vapid, or hollow. Never life-changing, never society-changing, always enriching those with far too much by taking from those with far too little.
I wish the OP well. I think we all need more offline time, if just to remind ourselves what the role of technology was always meant to be within it.
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.
This is great. I’ve been thinking to set up an HF radio rig to talk to friends and strangers that are real people. Maybe the LLMs flood the internet with enough trash and we go back to more voice comms
A lot of these "I'm leaving, everybody, see? I'm really going now, OK. Did you hear that? I'm really leaving" posts are just a form of virtue signalling or likes-farming, viz. the flood of such posts on what used to be Twitter when Musk took over. The majority of those who claimed to leave were back within a few weeks to months to get their fix. Most of these posts are characterised by the poster not having any positive plans for the future beyond whatever they claim to leave behind, just complaints about whatever caused them to write those posts.
This post here does not seem to be like that. I suspect he's really planning on taking a hiatus from the 'net, something like a sabbatical at least. I do think he'll eventually return to the 'net in some form and he might even become active in whatever the free software world has morphed into by then but he does seem to have positive plans for the future. He's starting a magazine centred around an Orthodox Christian community, something which can provide the same type of fulfilment as working on free software projects can.
This really resonates. I'm a dev/sysadmin/whatever with 15+ years of experience and I've been seriously considering applying for a job at my local Tractor Supply.
I've been having trouble finding consistent work for the last year but was recently accepted into a recruitment network. Almost every posting on the network's job board is for AI/agentic bullshit (many of them in defense contexts) and I just can't bring myself to apply for any of them. I won't be able to fake the required enthusiasm. I've been through 4/5/6? hype cycles over the course of my career and I'm just over it all. Maybe the AI bubble will burst? Maybe it won't? Either way, it takes the fun out of what I've enjoyed doing -- even if it's because it's all anyone wants to talk about. Layer all of the surveillance* and age verification crap on top of that and ... I want off this train.
*Anecdote: I was a chaperone on an elementary school field tried yesterday and there were >8 cameras on the bus. This amount of surveillance and accompanying normalization of it hasn't prevented or even helped rectify multiple incidents my child has had while riding on school buses. So, all of the downsides and no upsides.
I was about to comment something like "happy for OP, he's very fortunate to have enough to be able to simply retire" when I read the bit about Home Depot.
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
I love learning about computers, programming, and math so much. I actually got into tech as a career pretty late. For many years I worked as a art fabricator/carpenter in the art world.
I only got good enough at programming to get a job in tech because I became obsessed with the Curry-Howard Correspondence as a backdoor into learning math.
I've always had a wide array of interests. I live on a half acre property with a giant garden and a shop that is bigger then my actual house. I've always split my free time between exploring and learning about computers, gardening, radios, and carpentry, fixing old machines, etc.
The shift in my lived work experience with AI has substantially demotivated me from programming and computers in my free time. A million times over I would rather pull weeds or clean my Bridgeport mill.
I've always wished I could go back to a 1990s experience where the computer lived in the den, the internet was only somewhat monetized, the future was utopian.
OP's plan to fallback to 1980s era technology is appealing but also somewhat depressing. Not only do I really like and enjoy learning about computers, but also making this kind of individualistic decision doesn't really get us to a better place as a society.
I wish we had heeded the warnings of researchers like Sherry Turkle who identified the impacts of technology on the individual as far back as the 1980s.
I would go offline but never retire from tech, I would miss music terribly. I would also move all my ebooks over to an e-reader and that's it. If I can live somewhere offline with my music player and e-reader that's fine.
Damn, I am a beginner in my coding journey, and even I fell the fatigue - the fear that no matter what I do , it can be easily replicated with AI, I now have to think extra hard to make sure that a new project I am embarking on cannot be easily vibe coded in a weekend, it exhausting - I feel the spirit of coding, building together is dying as everyone wants to monetize and sell to PE firms, everyone wants a million or billion $ valuation, is open source and community dead ?
60/yo and still loving it. I get burned out every couple of years but new technology always refreshes my admiration for the field I chose. It never ceases to amaze me the capacity to reinvent itself, from the early days of dbase and clipper, it came the dial up internet, the craze of FrontPage and webmasters, the move to client/server, Python, Ruby, Go, then mobile apps, Swift, Java, Kotlin, then back to basics with Node and PostgreSQL, painful deviations like React, Tailwinds, NextJS, I've learned them all. And now we're finally here, in front of us, the promised land, AI, the final frontier, one of the most beautiful pieces of technology my wrinkled eyes have ever seen. I am more excited than ever.
See, through the years I've left behind an immense graveyard of dead projects I never had the time to finish and now they're all rising from the dead at the same time, like a really bad zombies movie, like MJ's thriller video, all dancing to the tune of AI, all coming alive in minutes because of AI.
This is it, Valhalla, Elysium, Paradise, here we are, I am already dead and I don't know it, but I love it.
I've been smartphone free for over 5 years now. It's been liberating, but its just not enough. I still use my computer to doomscroll for an hour or 2 a day. It takes me hours of hiking alone in the woods afterwards too unwind all the stress and distraction that comes with being connected.
Ironically right around February I started to have similar thoughts as Chad, that perhaps I should become Neo Amish as he calls it. Like Chad, I like disconnected, non-AI technology just fine. But anything that spies on me or tries to modify my behavior needs to go.
Maybe I'll mail Chad a letter and see if he wants to be my penpal.
Chad has been one of the strongest voices in the open source community for the past few years. When we were building tools for OSS developers we valued his opinion highly.
This is the final nail for me, that something is rotten in the state of open source.
There's the "old guard" of open source, who seem to spend most of their time arguing about semantics, governance, and the nth kubernetes telemetry solution.
So where is the "new guard"? There's been a lot of interesting work in open source AI, but it seems to me like a championed effort cannot exist without a new paradigm around collaboration and monetization. More and more, we see the new guard question or outright deny new contributors due to AI slop PRs and issues continue to pile up.
There desperately needs to be a sexy revitalization of open source, starting with young developers. I thought it would be from the YC-esque startups of the world, who use open source as a way to garner legitimacy, good will, and a top-of-funnel upselling motion.
"Trad" open source is greying - and the new wave is more of a ripple. It has no shared identity, and no champion.
Or profession is very young and what annoys me the most: i can do my job only on a computer and i'm very good in knowing how to use it and i also use it for everything.
Privat and work has merged into being in front of a screen.
The joke of starting a bakery or doing other manual labor jobs is quite common.
It might just be time for this to transform.
I would retire yesterday if i could afford it though.
- Artha: All sorts of wealth including material and non-material like friends, health etc. Needed for a good life.
- Dharma: Rules/Regulations/Laws/Ethics/Morals which make coexistence in a society possible.
- Kama: All sorts of pleasures that one seeks for enjoyment. Many equate only this to the goal of life.
- Moksa (optional): Cultivating a mindset which supersedes and transcends the above three thus "freeing oneself" from the unending "wheel of life".
- Brahmacharya: From Childhood to Adulthood (before puberty) which is the Student stage. During this stage you focus on studying and learning various subjects/arts. Since both mind and body are still developing, self-control and discipline w.r.t. various harmful external influences are emphasized. The goal is the development of a healthy mind and body.
- Grihastha: The married Householder stage with Wife and Children. The Grihastha is considered the central pillar of society since everything else depends on him. He generates wealth, enjoys all sorts of pleasures and lives within a social law framework for peaceful coexistence.
- Vanaprastha: The retired householder stage who has successfully raised his children i.e. put them through brahmacharya and into grihastha stage. He now removes himself from much active duty in society thus making room for the next generation to step-in and develop. He curbs his desires/wants (since both body and mind are ageing) and acts mostly as an adviser to the next generation.
- Sannyasa (optional): This is a completely different stage/way of life whose only goal is Moksa. A person can move to this stage from any of the above stages. Most of the ordinary rules/laws/practices of society are not applicable here.
3) Finally, your "duty" aka Karma in Society. In today's world, we generally equate this with work which enables us to earn our livelihoods. This should be in harmony with the Goals and Stages of Life i.e. at each stage the mix of goals and emphasis on them are different.
Understand your current stage in life, Manage/Control your goals w.r.t. that stage and Adjust your duty accordingly for a Happy and Fulfilled Life.
While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.
I do find occasional pleasure in personal projects, creating exotic programming languages that are not text-based, compilers and stuff like that, but otherwise coding work makes me wanna puke.
Good luck with what you're doing. It feels like everyone's shipping more but thinking less and with open source you really feel it with the PRs and issues. All the best!
I find it intellectually alarming (but not surprising) that someone would say something like "[the north sentinelese tribe] are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday".
"way of life" is doing a lot of obscuring here.
It took centuries of hard work to leave that behind.
It's insurance. The same way you don't want to go too far with germline editing. There are genetic variations that you might need to save your species some day. The cost of that is people suffer.
We may need a close connection to that way of life again and not have to relearn it from scratch.
This strikes me more as one of those things that is shocking to hear but not incorrect. People get more upset that someone said it without actually having a counterargument.
He's not saying that we _should_ live that way but that we might need to.
I think you're underestimating how much we simply don't know about how to live that primitively. Maybe you could do it in small groups of people. Maybe up to a dozen. Most experiments at this fail hilariously early by the way.
Can you do it and sustain hundreds of people? I doubt it.
At least they're here to be potentially observed. You don't have to _totally_ wing it. People living like that through history had bigger day to day survival concerns than documenting the finer details of sustaining their continued existence to us.
The last closest analog we have to them would be the Hadza people and they've had agriculture since 500 CE...
It has been said that hunter gatherers spend a lot less time working and a lot more time just hanging out and socializing than agriculturalists. It would be nice if we could use all of our modern technology to get back to that kind of work/life balance.
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.
While I share the sentiment, this feels like an extreme, nuclear reaction which might be irreversible. I understand the fatigue, and resentment, but if you are about to be a family, you are going to find that typewriters aren't the acceptable mode of communication nowadays, and that you need some money to raise children.
Even if you are already wealthy and don't actually need to work anymore, going off the grid completely is still the wrong move. There's a lot of ways to spend less time online, improve your privacy and reduce tracking, and still benefit from some of the actual, real advantages of tech.
And the last and maybe most important thing is, we are currently on a roller coaster of disruption and frankly some daunting prospects - but we don't know what's right around the next turn. What the development landscape might be like in a few years, or maybe what kind of new problems will emerge that are not yet clear.
The right move is to take some time off, clear your head and decide if you stopped liking tech altogether, or you just needed a break. If you still like problem solving, limit your AI use, stay effective and skillful, and find ways to enjoy your skill.
I've never met an engineer who actually stopped enjoying problem solving.
The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it.
AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.
Nah, I think AI has fundamentally changed the perception of the value of most tech labour in the eyes of the people running the show.
The end result of it is that the average dev position becomes seen as dispensable, competition goes up, workload goes up, compensation stagnates.
Being able to escape the rat race and retire is a privilege though. The rest of the rats gotta keep running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
I plan to do the same eventually. I want to buy a shop and become a mechanic, primarily flipping cars, and doing actual repairs for a fair price. I need to get to the point where the business venture only needs to do a bit better than break even, and I'll quit this industry. After more than 20 years in tech, I've done a lot of cool things with smart people, but almost none of what I built still exists (every tech stack is a Ship of Theseus) and AI is just making working in corporate miserable.
I personally like using AI tools and experimenting with local models, but I hate being subjected to the output of AI from other people. There's such a large competency gap that exists in the human operators, and AI does not ameliorate it, it makes it worse, but so many have drank the koolaid that it solves everything and eliminates that gap. I won't become a luddite, I will still build technical things at home, but I miss being able to see the tangible fruits of my labor and getting an honest thank you from another human being I've helped out through my work. I miss the permanence of physical things. I'm also tired of arguing with people who think their incompetence + AI outranks my competence and expertise.
my wife wants to open a used book store and I want to open a coffee shop inside of it in some nice college town somewhere. That's one of our options once we're empty nesters and the retirements are funded (~9 years hopefully). We would only need to operate at cost so it wouldn't really be a business, more like a hobby.
did Chad, or whoever posted this for him, post this as a jpg with no alt text? wow, thought Chad was a bit better than that (I can't even read this thing easily and im not considered to be visually impaired)
"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"
yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.
what's the point in posting scan (?) of paper online instead of just publishing it normal way, so people can adjust font and actually read it? especially since you are anyway at computer and posting it on website and bsky
Am I the only person in this thread who thought this might be a joke? The job at Home Depot in particular, and this bit:
> I haven't used a phone or the Internet in my personal life since February 6. To communicate, I use the USPS, or maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat. I love it. I want to be part of a society of people likewise inclined.
I'm not at all certain though. Chad posted it on LinkedIn and Bluesky, so if it is a joke he's definitely committing to the bit.
> I don't not want to be someone who helps lay the groundwork for the remnant. I'm going to call it the remnant, a remnant of humanity that doesn't take the bargain. I have no idea what's next. Alright, we're starting Gift magazine. Whoa. I went to Penguin Bookstore. I got an address book, and I got a ridiculous planner. And we got our P.O. Box. Box 200. Oh, and I also switched to paper billing. Paper bank statements at Dollar Bank. Puzzle gaming. Figuring out the offline.
> Long story short, I’ve decided to dial back my engagement with mainstream technology, and to launch a print magazine called Gift to network with like-minded individuals.
So I'm sold, there's humor in the presentation, but it's a real decision.
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 doing this forever. I would never imagine I would get burned out in the long run. I would never imagine I would think about retiring early because tech was so fun to me.
The reality is that money and savings give you optionality. It allows you to work without worrying day to day. You never know when the next wave of AI or BS is going to hit. That's when having that optionality is really important.
I have seen so many of my peers making very high tech income but also living the American opulent life, spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area to impress their friends. Today they have no choice than continue working for another 30 years. Today I can have a simple life and retire almost anywhere in the world.
Decide what is important to you. I guarante that buying the multi-million dollar home is not worth the extra 30 years of grinding.
It comes down to perspective tbh. For someone who's worked hard labor throughout their life, the cushy tech job you get is actually worth doing forever. But for people who have never experienced that, I can see why retiring early makes sense, but honestly most of us get to work from home and do our jobs on the computer, which doesn't require much. It's still an amazing career to be in IMO
I've worked in food service, landscaping and factory jobs. You're right, the tech job does feel super cushy after gigs like that. But I'm about 25 years in on the tech industry now and I feel the same GP. At some point, you can't avoid the politics and corp BS and it wears you down. Everything is relative. Now that I have the means to say "I don't have to or want to do this anymore" I'll be checking out after this year. It's been a good run.
I went from big tech to a team of four at a small org. To work uninhibited and with close to zero speed bumps from management has been life changing for me and my stress levels. We all have each other's backs and there is none of that "West Coast Nice" stuff going on.
I worked manufacturing in my younger days and also spent some time in the Marines, so I feel ya on the cushy tech jobs... But I'd just about rather go back to Iraq before I go back to corporate culture.
Do you have a plan other than “wait for the money to evaporate”?
Wait for the money to evaporate ... more slowly than your remaining lifespan (and dying happy in your own bed for example) is one definition of winning.
You also don't need the politics and corp bs. I worked as a contractor for tiny little orgs doing good things for ~11 years - basically 2-5 people, almost no BS, good money, tons of time flexibility.
I shifted away to get more predictability and less accounting/biz management stuff. Maybe the party has ended, but I bet there's still some ability to freelance for small orgs? Alternatively working for small yet sustainable companies should be similarly lean.
I find the BS really ramps up with the size of the org. Small orgs obviously have their own problems (and often create problems that don't need to exist), but pick your poison.
I have this idea that AI might actually be a real enabler for small or 1-man teams if you find the right niche. I haven't acted on it yet, but I expect a lot of folks are doing that right now.
15 years in running a tiny micro agency (me and my wife), working with non profits. Still looking ok right now, and I still love it and my clients who are ace. I’m mainly a PM though with hacker-developer tendencies. Hoping my sector hold together for another 10 years. I’m 53 so that’ll do it. We’ve been relatively sensible over the years, good work / life balance and our children (now adult and left home) know who we are. So that’s the main job done :-)
Agreed this is one way to go. But tbh, I'm not sure if I've lost the passion for tech as much as rather spend my time doing other things like be with my kids, travel, ect. Also, take better care of my health and be more active. We'll see if there's a desire to keep the sword sharp but I don't expect that for some time after I retire.
I have had multiple years of good times like those. But eventually it always comes to an end from my experience. Usually because the business is not doing as well eventually.
I think you can get lucky and be in those good environments for longer (looks like you got lucky for 11 years) but by the nature of capitalism and competition those things never really last.
Oh it's definitely sink or swim, and you always have to be setting up the next thing while working on your current thing. It's a big part of why I got out - I'm much happier with a more stable situation. It's all about tradeoffs, how much you can stand the stink of corporate BS vs the downsides above.
And I will admit that the mid 2000's to roughly 2020 was a pretty good time to be in that mode. I haven't freelanced since 2019 so I might just be talking about good times that are gone now - it does seem like a tough world out there right now, but I bet there's still plenty of niches to be found.
exactly! after a certain time, you get to a new normal and you want something new or better in life. nothing wrong with that though.
Why not check out now? Why after this year ? You supposedly have the means to do so now , so why not exit now?
You won’t exit after this year. You’ll keep pushing it out.
Everyone always need twice as much as they have to retire. Most people will also never do it.
Reading the FIRE subreddit I have realized that most people like the fantasy of retiring more than actually retiring. A lot of them wouldn't actually know what to do without the daily societal pressure to grind. Life is tough when you are out of the beaten path and need to figure out how to fill your days apparently.
TBH I think most people's lives are on autopilot and I can't blame them. This is what late stage capitalism has endoctrinated into our culture. I was one of them until some events made me look critically at retirement. After crunching the numbers I could have retired years ago. Sticking it out a bit longer to squash the rest of the concerns my spouse has.
As you can imagine, it's a planning heavy decision. I came off parental leave earlier this year and prior to that my wife and I talked about me not going back. However, we decided to delay until my next vesting later this year and to see how the midterms play out with this clown car of an administration and the potential impacts on healthcare. Barring anything catastrophic, it's happening this year. Parental leave already gave me a taste of the life I'd rather have.
Same boat, my son was born in October last year and have been back at work since February and I am already completely overwhelmed. Our plan is to wait for the second child and get another paternity leave and then I will fuck off from any corporate/enterprise job and try to do my own thing first and we'll live off menial jobs + the income from the couple of apartments we have on AirBnB.
I am not planning to stay out of tech altogether though, at least long term.
Happy journey friend. Enjoy those kiddos
I also worked hard labour at the start of my career.
They are not really comparable and are exhausting in a different way. Tech makes me mentally exhausted fighting things out of my control. Hard labour made me physically exhausted but I felt more in control of my life. I didn't need to do any performative tasks. Once the day was over, it was over.
Just different type of exhaustions. Grass is always greener on the other side I know
It's an amazing career because of the pay, not because of how American workers are relating to their hours. Kids out of college joining startups may be working harder than... just about everyone in America, really.
I worked 10 years in commercial fishing before getting into tech.
Although now sometimes I yearn for a solid day of physical labor out on the ocean.
But yeah, grass is definitely greener on this side. I can always go shovel dirt o a saturday.
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 that at those layers, talking about the misalignment to the layer above is a great way to get canned. A decade or that, and the company is a zombie.
I've enjoyed tech in environments where there was alignment, and in a few cases it made me serious money, which is why I have said optionality myself. But nowadays AI has led to much higher capital costs to do innovative things, so the number of companies with the right size and potential has shrunk, and that makes fulfilling careers far less likely.
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.
This has been me as well. While I don't think my time is quite up, I have heard the call of the sea. Grey ships are waiting.
There have been times in the last decade where I wished I had chosen a profession that lets me stay offline more. Ironically, AI has given me more enthusiasm for tech than I've had in years, which seems opposite to most people's experience.
You know, I think the experiences you are describing are the norm for non-tech corporate jobs. Now with AI as an excuse, management is now subjecting the tech positions the same as the non-tech workers and it stings. Tech people were previously treated far better than the average corporate workers, and started after the tech hiring boom from Covid.
Quite right. I bemoan shortsightedness of managerial types often, but too many fellow techies had assume that gravy ride will last forever. In eyes of management we have not the same leverage now.
I feel the same way. I feel sad though that it's over and I never accomplished what I wanted to.
But for the last 20 years my priority has been my family. Pickups and Dropoffs to school, sports, activities, and doctor appointments.
At least I was able to give them a good life.
Living in the United States, my retirement plan is "MAID"
MAID as in Medical Aid in Dying? Why would you do that?
I'm coming up on 40 years with the last 17 at the same company. I'm so burnt out that I resemble a charcoal briquette.
I could and did live frugally before I had kids.
How can one continue living in a small apartment with lead and asbestos hazards is beyond me.
I have asbestos in this modest[0] house: it's not any sort of a problem. (Lead only in my soldering kit in significant quantities so far as I know...)
I always have been fairly frugal and am in semi-retirement now from the residues of my last two small start-ups (to which COVID was unkind, so died simultaneously!).
My extended family has/had big houses, including one in which a famous film was set it seems, but I see those as mainly expensive liabilities. Never owned a car. Etc etc.
[0] As described by a visiting Secretary of State!
There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house.
I read on HN all the time that once you have kid it is unavoidable to spend 300k$ a year. But yet 99.9% of the world and the US manages to raise kids with a fraction of that income and they turn out mostly fine. (Before you ask, yes I have kids and yes we still live simply)
The mental gymnastics I've seen kids enable is Olympic level. Need to upgrade to a bigger house, need to upgrade the car to a SUV, need keep traveling 2-3 times a year, need to sign up for some crazy sports league and coach which means domestic flights and hotels every other week.
Have seen that as well. Kids is the convenient excuse to go spending. Marketers have well understood that for multiple decades.
Meanwhile I would bet there is an inverse correlation between spending for the kids and kids happiness.
Friend had a baby.
She went out and bought a massive Cadillac Escalade.
To haul around a 10 pound infant.
I had a compact Honda SUV. I got rear ended by a ford pick up truck. My vehicle was totaled. The truck barely had a ding.
Child had TBI. Years of physical therapy and regional center, who knows if it was a full recovery.
You’re fucking right I bought a gas guzzling beast after that.
American trucks are an arms race. You need one to protect the occupants from the other trucks on the road, unless someone legislates to stop all of you from driving them.
> There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house.
That's exaggerating a bit, but some places near offices are kind of that way. (Why I love working remote, which absolutely increases the spectrum of choices.)
Many of the homes in the world were built when lead and/or asbestos were in use. Asbestos isn't much of a concern if you don't disturb it - don't let your kids play in the attic or tear out the drywall, and you should be fine. Don't let them lick the paint, and you're probably good. Or paint over it / get it remediated - it doesn't have to be a deal killer.
I certainly agree that it'd be hard to have kids in a small space though, I definitely appreciate having more room - especially with a WFH setup.
Some people need to touch fire to know the feeling of getting burned.
I was one of those people.
Excellent tech income; zero savings other than a 401(k) I barely contributed into.
After an amazing meal at a burger place several years ago, I asked my wife about upgrading to a Model S. She figuratively sat me down (after we literally sat into the seats of our Model 3) and was more straight-forward with me than she had ever been prior to that moment.
"How much do we have saved? Oh, _we_ have basically nothing? Yeah, so I'm not saying no, but you need to fix that before we discuss this again."
I took it defensively in the moment, but not for long because I knew she was right. Building that nest egg became priority #1 since that talk.
That was in 2023. I saved a lot since then. It felt VERY VERY GOOD to look at my savings and say "You know, I could fuck right off for six months if I wanted to. I won't, but I could!" It completely changed my priorities at work.
Now, I've had to drain my savings twice now: once to secure a down payment for our house, and again for a major repair of said home (b/c I am strongly against treating our home as a credit card). Regardless, I chip away a good amount into several savings accounts every two weeks and am expecting to regrow the account within the next year. I can't wait to feel that feeling again!
As someone who took that time off, don’t. Not unless you have a solid re-entry plan. The money was nice for raising our daughter but I’m out of runway and no way to recover. Do well at your job and be thankful to live such a luxurious life.
You've had to drain your savings twice since 2023?
Very good advice. I was at it for 40 years, actually did some MUMPS (for those of you who watched The Audacity), as well as every tech from the old days, even some hardware, and kept current and on the very edge up until the end. I also loved it and thought I would do it forever, I felt so grateful that my hobby and passion as also my career, and very well paying (eventually, back then no one thought it would be a career).
I retired 10 years ago when I had enough (money) and had enough (of the industry). Always lived below my means. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in the industry for the past 10 years.
As far as the nonsense that is pushed top down, it is not so simple. I was at/near the top. I know what was happening, what I was doing, but everyone has a boss, even the boss. The industry is too important, too big, too critical for it not to be run by human nature. So glad I got out when I did.
I'm not sure it's human nature as much as it is a system that compresses everything into finance.
I feel like I could still endure this AI hype cycle a bit, that things will eventually stabilize to some point I’m comfortable with, agents already seem kinda cool after the psychosis wears off.
But the next big disruptive thing like this, that will probably be my last straw. Not sure what it will be, but when it comes, I’ll just know. Maybe it will be developers installing neuralink type devices or something into their brains to have some kind of “organic interface” or something using their thoughts to build prompts or whatever. You will have to have it just to stay competitive in the industry.
I will check out.
such a wonderful advice, this resonates a lot with me. I know i would ignore it when i needed to hear it though
I would take this advice a bit further even -- I don't think savings alone is the key, because inflation and de-dollarization are exponentially eroding purchasing power. The key is ownership of income-producing assets. In late-stage capitalism, the vast majority of people who work in exchange for wages will be members of the debt class; workers who manage to escape debt will still be living on a knife's edge where you can be laid off at any moment regardless of how well your company is doing. The only people living with stability will be those whose lives are paid for by the assets they own, rather than by the hours they sell.
A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one that would be pleasant to live in.
There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on?
It sounds like a return to the way things have been for a long time. Our post-WWII abundance has been a bit of an aberration compared to most of our history.
I'm not saying it's good, I think it's very concerning and potentially very destabilizing. But it is the way things are right now. It's also possible to be on the wealth-producing side and not see your savings disappear into the ether while still providing things of value to people that appreciate it. "rent-seeking" is a real thing, and much of finance doesn't actually provide any real value to society, but this isn't a simple black and white dichotomy across the have's and have-nots.
We ought to find ways out of this mess, ideally something that doesn't involve communism and the typical humanitarian nightmares that usually come along with it.
> aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on
Self-perpetuating generational wealth is not a zero-sum game if said wealth is put to good work.
Having wealth morally obligates its holder to put it to use to benefit others. I think we all intuitively understand this; it's the impulse behind calls to "tax the rich!"
People the last 500 years who put wealth to good use, even in modest proportions, are part of the reason western culture is so rich. We would not have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven today if someone hadn't employed them (though I do decry the relative poverty some composers lived in and some OSS maintainers currently live in - come on, people). And modern infrastructure wouldn't exist if capitalists hadn't at one time thought it worthwhile to invest in railroads.
If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.
Easier said than done, no asset producing income will do so indefinitely without a lot work/investments.
My S&P 500 fund has done this and will continue to do this without any work or investments of time.
Did they say it was easy? It's still the right thing to aim for, even if it is a lot of work.
This really just sounds like a return to slavery via indentured servitude. If the working class is the debt class, someone owns that debt as an “income-producing asset”.
This whole thing is eye-searingly performative. Whether or not he follows through and goes dark after this, this farewell is just so ridiculous.
Claims to have not used the internet or a phone since February, does all communication via USPS, declares that AI and social media make him hate himself... But somehow is continuing to post on Bluesky, continuing to update his blog, continuing to post YouTube videos, continuing to solicit donations on GoFundMe for personal matters. The account that posted this link to HN is brand new and this is the only submission -- hmm...
If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.
Need to tie off some loose ends first? Write a paper letter to your IRL inner circle and/or business partners. Get it copied at Kinkos. Call people (use a land line if you need) and talk to them about it.
Just this last time (you swear!) you absolutely must announce this at internet scale? Then walk the walk and minimize the tech involved by typing out your farewell in plain text and posting it directly. Y'know, like we did pre-AI, pre-social media. Don't pull out a typewriter, write a sappy "Dear Internet" letter, add a bunch of likely-pre-planned "edits" in red pen, pull out your digital camera, take a photo, transfer it to your laptop, carefully adjust and crop, then finally combine it into a multimedia update that you go out of your way to promote across multiple social media channels. This announcement has obviously been tailored for maximum social media engagement -- supposedly the thing they are making a principled stand in opposition to.
Go a bit outside and touch some grass
so much conjecture in your post
> If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.
says who? you?
>says who? you?
Yes, says exactly them.
You have a problem with people's own opinions in their own comments? Should they somehow reflect your opinion instead?
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 and there's no way to really argue against that. Do I think he's karma-obsessed and drooling over engagement dashboards? No. And maybe that's what you mean.
But you have to be willfully naive to deny the irony in deploying numerous completely unnecessary layers of tech, over numerous social media channels, to let everyone know that you no longer want tech and social media in your life.
I don't really see the problem of proliferating a message one finds sufficiently important to as many places as one has reach.
It's a bit performative to say "x is my last day" when there is a ton of evidence to the contrary.
I agree with you, it's more that... it is performative in itself.
If you are somewhat of a public figure and working in a leadership role at a company, I think it's more sensible to put out a widely-seen public announcement about where you are going next, than to just disappear.
Well, at least the way he handless the typewriter and scribbles seems somewhat performative. If it's just a draft version, he seems capable of handling the typing hammers very professionally, adding online corrections staying within margins.
Seems way more seasoned in typing, than most typist of those days. And yet, he can't find the time or patience to retype the piece without typos as a final version?
I don't know the man and don't doubt his sincerity. I even agree with most of what he's saying. But it's pretty obvious imo that this is all somewhat performative.
Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade. He said he has been offline in his personal life since February, not his professional life. His BlueSky is professional. He quit his job and will be offline completely following the handover.
> His BlueSky is professional.
It's plainly not.
https://bsky.app/profile/chadwhitacre.com/post/3mmvzmugfqk2g "my good friend Dana could really use some help paying for major dental work. <gofundme link>"
His latest YouTube post, from 2 weeks after the alleged go-dark date, is also all about his personal plan to walk away from tech. Needed to make sure there is a GoPro in his face while he talks about how low-tech he yearns to be. Needs to make sure everyone on the internet sees HD digital footage of him tapping on a typewriter, carving a stamp by hand, and switching to paper bank statements.
> Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade
I don't doubt it. I also don't doubt the claims in other comments that he has made incredible contributions to open source, is a good, kind person, and so forth. He deserves immense credit for these things.
None of that negates the fact that this is an incredibly performative and hypocritical way to make this particular transition. Defending it by pointing out his other virtues is just a reverse ad hominem.
You initially suggested that there was something suspicious about this being posted on HN. If you want to walk that back, okay, but doesn't that poorly judged initial sentiment undermine your cynicism?
Yes, of course this is "performative". Publishing is performance. Chad is, obviously, performing for his audience in sharing this, he wants to get his perspective out into the world.
Given Chad's decade plus of leading by example, embracing his ideals, it is important to know that he is a person of integrity when reading his words. Could this be a grand lie to some strange end? Sure, I guess, but everyone who knows Chad knows that he is exactly the type of person to mean everything in this letter in earnest.
His blog was part of his job. His job was an open source advocate, he was responsible for talking about open source. He posted on BlueSky in his role as an advocate for open source. Adding in a GoFundMe link that someone emailed to him on a post that got a bunch of attention doesn't undermine his point, at all.
A "hypocritical way to make this particular transition"? He's not advocating for you to make the same transition. He's not espousing moral superiority because he made this transition and you didn't. Life is messy, complicated, difficult, it's not "hypocritical" to... have a BlueSky account as part of your job while announcing you're stepping away from technology.
https://openpath.quest/2024/welcome-to-open-path/
"I work for Sentry, and my job requires me to be a “thought leader,” so I need a platform."
I’ve noticed HN becoming a cynical black hole lately. Any contrarian opinion is pushed back with a lot of force and grayed out, like yours. I thought about upvoting you but I’ll just leave a comment agreeing with you. Fighting against people determined to see the worst in every situation is exhausting.
We're IT people, we often work 14 hours a day. How does that not mix into your personal life?
Working 14 hours a day isn't normal. From an IT person who works 8 hours a day.
Think it might be normal for the HN crowd, founders etc.
a distinction without a difference.
I 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 don’t miss tech.
Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)
I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.
But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff.
Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.
Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.
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 take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.
I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.
Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.
Good for you. It’s so exhausting dealing with these people who are constantly chasing a fantasy that through some process, or through sheer force of will, we can achieve a system where all the feature work gets done super quickly and we never have to pause or slow down to handle engineering concerns because they simply don’t exist.
The only thing worse is when they expect you to do all the above after they cut your budget in half. I'm so sick of hearing "Do more with less."
"Yes we want you to build a faster-than-light spaceship. Your energy budget is this candle."
Why do we give managerial control to insane people?
I think to paraphrase Plato's Republic, who else would want it?
>> 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...)
I somewhat recently had a conversation about how we were going to start being more "strict" about how we do Agile (with a straight face). And they were right!
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.
Any tips on finding this again? I had a great situation turn sour in exactly this way once growth and leadership change came.
nothing tactical from me, but I've fostered a strategic approach over the years that's lead to a deep appreciation for the real-time experience. You can probably recognize when it's good (and bad) once you've worked for a while, and you really need to consciously pause and remark "If this isn't nice, what is?"^1 at those times when it is good.
A decade of consulting had me always ready to wrap my engagement at the end of any day, and (for better and worse) I carried this with me to future jobs. I always miss (at least some of) the people, but never the situation when it turns sour and I leave. The good news: you often get a chance to work with the good ones again (even if that's because you entice them away to your next gig).
^1 https://archive.org/details/ifthisisntnicewh0000vonn/mode/2u...
> [...] nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly [...]
Textbook FIRE strategy.
I'd say it's missing the FI part and the RE part of the FIRE strategy. Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it. The reason regular saving and regular humble living look a lot like FIRE saving and FIRE humble living is that an average person can only do so much to increase their net worth, so the possible variance between any two people is very limited.
> Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it.
He did work toward it by saving and living frugally.
"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?
> "Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about.
As someone who has successfully FIREd, I would disagree. If you are fortunate to be in a successful tech career and have a like-minded spouse, you don't need to do anything extreme to be able to FIRE. We only own one home that is comfortable but not impressive; we take care of our cars and drive them 10+ years; we leaned into hobbies that are cheap or money-saving (cooking, gardening, hiking, biking) and didn't get into owning boats or taking trips with first-class airfare and all-inclusive resorts.
I would say we "live humbly" and therefore had savings that covered expenses well before the age of 65. Part of our motivation was early retirement, but you can be doing the same thing without intent to retire early.
If it gets you to the point that you could retire early, then you were following a FIRE strategy, even if you weren't doing it with that goal in mind.
Well, I'm also FIREd, and obviously I'd disagree with your disagreement :)
I do agree you don't need to do anything extreme, personally I basically stumbled upon financial independence, I was just doing what I thought was fun, turned out it was profitable as well, and here we are with 24/7 freetime for ~50 more years or whatever.
But when I talk with peers who are all into aiming for "FIRE", then that's very different from the experience I had actually achieving it, I haven't though about retirement a single time, and obviously don't relate at all to these people who think about "reduce expenses and maximize savings", but I'd still relate to "lived humbly", fwiw.
"reduce expenses and maximize savings" simply means spend less than you earn. Live below your means. We call that 'living humbly' in the modern world, when you're not buying the latest phone and watching the latest movie at $50 a pop.
I will admit, when it came to brainstorming sources of crashes with threads, AI has helped me find sources I hadn't considered (as a systems guy, multi threading real experience is something I am sprinting through)
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.
The best position anyone can be in 2026 is having financial freedom so you can leverage AI to build whatever you want.
The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.
Figuring out what you want to build isn't necessarily easy.
Being unemployed and unemployable with depleting savings is even less easy however.
So being financial independent even if undecided on what you want to build is still way better.
Which is why you need the financial freedom to spend time figuring it out.
Absolutely. AI lets you prototype much faster and financial freedom gives you time.
What does it even mean to say you want to build something but you don’t know what it is?
Building is fun, but deciding what to build can be difficult. "Maker ennui."
Man as a not (yet) greybeard, I wish we had more of them in the teams I've been on in the last ~10 years.
> Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.
Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend
Fwiw we hired a "gray head" earlier this year and it was a huge mistake. guy has solid Linux knowledge but has absolutely zero motivation to get work done. If you don't constantly prod him on his progress he will just sit there and stare at the code. No longer am I going to be dazzled by someones 30 year tech resume.
The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code
If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?
What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.
In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before
My strong feeling is that the firms who get too deep into this and have lost the ability to engage deeply with their minds (necessary requirement for imagination) are long term fooked and will get destroyed by those who preserved the ability to imagine and create and recognise the subtleties, nuances etc of product development.
The AI cartel's hope is that the market will stay irrational longer than the naysayers can stay solvent both financially and intellectually.
Putting it a different way, it won't matter if the firms who went too deep at the very beginning are fucked if the rational are forced to succumb to the market pressures created by the irrational and thus are reluctantly pushed to adopt AI-first workflows for appearance's sake in order to survive anyway. Because then everybody will be likewise fucked and completely dependent on AI, despite it being a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness of the systems under development. History has taught us that it is adoption dynamics not capability that determines the winning paradigm or technology (Betamax vs VHS is one historical example. Javascript vs everything else is another one).
(We know it's a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness because the entire coding agent paradigm turns the most knowledgeable programmer into a person "who doesn't know what they don't know" because development speed far exceeds their ability to reason about the codebase and the underlying SOTA models that they depend on to fix the bugs that the model itself has introduced are at best unreliable narrators with no objective evidence of correctness or deterministic behavior.)
Don't compare your inside to other people's outside.
great advice
I am not convinced that the "dark factory" / "gas town" people are actually shipping anything that isn't also part of the AI ecosystem. At least the noise/ship ratio is incredibly high.
What about shipping tweets and blog posts? Also team demos "how to use AI for basic imaginary hello-world scenarios".
The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence.
It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives
That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN.
It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.
I feel this so much. I woke up at 1am last night stressing about AI and my potential lack of productivity. 2am rolls around, and I could not get back to sleep so I worked till 4:30am. Slept fine till 7:00am. AI has been causing a lot of stress for me and many others lately. My biggest source of stress is what will AI transform the human work world into by the time my children need a job? Most of us live in a capitalist society so AI utopia is right off the table.
You are not crazy.
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.
> 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?
In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?
Asking for a friend.
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.
They started doing that tracking where I worked until last summer, stress so high, GERD kicked in worse than it'd ever been and that's going back to the 1980's. I retired, and I do thank God I was able to. I now just dabble every week or so in my personal side projects.
Garbage like this is why the tech industry desperately needs widespread unionization.
That's so stupid. Let the agent write code that will never be used then and you focus on the important code
My personal situation is unusual, but I don't see my coworkers being forced into AI. They also don't seem to be ignoring it, but they're also not using it very much afaik.
Some do try feeding it log based mysteries, which sometimes spots problems but usually not the one that was being investigated.
So far, all their attempts to write code with AI don't seem to have been worth the time. Although there's one report of good unit tests being generated.
I don't get much feedback on my open source projects, because the audience is limited, but I did get an annoying report recently where the reporter was using AI instead of their brain. AI took them (and me) through a pretty wild goose chase over a very simple reported error (unused variables in a couple places). Just remove them and carry on.
Yes: work for 90% of the world that isn't a purely tech company, but just need a working product delivered on time and at cost.
No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.
>is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022
Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.
> In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Working on my own product using Claude, I feel like front-end coding hasn’t changed much. It still requires a lot of manual tweaking and understanding users at a human level.
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
That's refreshing to read (frontend is my wheelhouse). I mostly agree. It seems like most people using AI treat FE as a solved problem, satisfied using tailwind and settling for "looks close enough".
I think there will always be space for good artisanal FE. This is a Ford Model T moment, the software production line has just been invented, but that didn’t stop smaller sports car manufacturers pushing the envelope.
There are spots and niches where you can do this but I expect them to dry up within a year.
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.
You can always start your own practice and ignore AI, if you're serious enough.
I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?
Having watched people use these kinds of tools, it feels like trying to tell an intern to do a project.
Except with an intern, hopefully there's personal development and you only have to be very specific a few times. And the intern's manager gets good feels for helping someone grow, and maybe it's a hiring pipeline.
If I'm going to have to do that for everything, I would rather just do the work myself.
I have seen some sessions with let's call it over agressive autocomplete... That's mildly tempting, but I'm happy with my disintegrated development environment, and it doesn't have any way to do autocomplete at all, so that's not happening for me either.
Current SOTA is far past "agressive autocomplete" at this point, more like ask for a PR for a small feature and its done... I guess for me the fun is you can build a lot yourself, without relying on others. I hear you for the social aspect though & thanks for sharing your pov.
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...
> the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen.
I’m sorry, what? Have you been paying any attention at all to the state of the industry lately?
I wasn't clear enough, I was replying to "you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off," in context I meant "mass layoff" as in "95% of everyone is out of a job permanently".
I’d probably let go of the employees who decline using agentic tools first, tbh. All things being equal.
And that's the problem.
The companies that agree with you will be at an interesting place when they have piles of AI slop code and no talented developers.
> have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy?
I haven't. But I found myself, to my surprise, not particularly interested in trying; which makes me wonder what motivates other developers if not peer pressure or demands for more productivity. I find coding interesting and fulfilling enough to do it on my own. I do ask LLMs questions from time to time, but for that, even a chatgpt or a gemini in a browser tab is enough.
The best experience I had so far is with code reviews, when the models pointed out my mistakes. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I would want them to write code for me.
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.
I'm banking on this. I don't really know anyone younger than me at the moment that writes C++. Best-case scenario I'll be in-demand. Worst-case when my grandchildren visit me at my cardboard box I can tell them spooky bedtime stories about SFINAE.
> are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago
They're getting outcompeted.
Are they? Have any examples?
Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago.
The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it.
He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.
Suddenly then all at once has been a common pattern for me too.
Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.
Congratulations! Tech doesn't have to be the end goal. Personally I can't wait to shake this industry and find a new path in retirement.
Thanks! I’m one of the lucky ones who really loved my career. I was lucky enough to avoid roles or companies that would suck the life out of me:-)
5/5 would recommend :-)
Man I really want to retire. I've gotten a couple stark reminders recently that life is fragile and short. I'm trapped by the golden handcuffs of the software industry, but I console myself by saying it's a means to an end (early retirement). I really hope that becomes possible in the near future, because whatever this is now is not sustainable.
I also can't wait for the day I retire, I got laid off recently, so that sets things back for me for now, but as soon as I get another job, it's all about saving to escape this damn rat race. I hope you can retire soon too.
From the flip side, 10 years in, I've been getting really into art.
It's not cheap, but it's easier to do my job with the thought that I have art this week and next week and maybe I'll get to teach it someday too.
It feels healthy to not let your work control your life after retirement. There's so much else out there to do.
Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI.
Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
>Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it.
And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...
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.
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.
Yes, that's a concern for me too, I'd like to retire early but healthcare has me wondering about getting a job as a teacher or something just to make sure I can afford it if I get cancer at 55.
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.
if you're in the US, ACA is an option, but it'll be expensive if you don't qualify for any subsidies.
I live in the UK :-)
Same age, but I gotta hang on a little longer. I'm a little too anxious about sequence risk in the market environment we're in now. But otherwise I'm with you, when I retire I may well dump nearly all of my technology and go back to stone tablets, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes I get so tired of it. Ironically, though, my work environment is pretty good, it's everything we're doing in tech outside my office work that gets me down.
> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted
I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback.
And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1]
I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work.
[1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.
Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I find AI to be very effective. It can do nearly all coding tasks many OOMs faster than I can. And I'm able to get it to produce high-quality code in the process. Using AI, our codebase actually has less tech debt than any time I can remember. I would be less effective if I wasn't using AI and if I wasn't finding new ways to leverage it.
That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.
I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.
Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.
While the tinkerer in me would love to, the pragmatic side of me cannot ignore the speed boost, specially for prototyping programs.
If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.
At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.
And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.
Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business?
Or is this just everywhere now?
Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.
How is that enforced though? At any normal workplace they will ask you "how long is this going to take"?
It depends on the management. Mine asks that, but others within my company get "this is going to be done by [DATE]".
And no one argues about unrealistic deadlines?
Of course they do. Generally the end result from this is bad - reduced in scope, buggy, and/or unstable. But that's an issue with communication/expectations/management. It'll keep happening either because of politics or the fact that a sub-par deliverable still meets the needs of the overall organization. Until it doesn't.
A few firings of those that do under this job market convince the rest not to.
Job market in Western Europe isn't doing so well right now. Better not make a big deal out of it.
It was being pushed hard by mgmt. Constant pushing, emails with “league tables” of most active users, “why is this taking so long?”.
Hard to not use it
That's so sad. Presumably they won't also be asking, "why is this breaking so often?"
As Eric Schluntz from Anthropic put it (not verbatim): If you're not using AI (I believe he was specifically referring to Vibe Coding), then you are the bottleneck.
That sounds like a good reason not to listen to advice from someone who works for Anthropic.
But the boomer C-suites will listen with awe to these salesmen
Token seller saying you should buy more tokens.
Yeah, because someone who is trying to sell you something would NEVER try to convince you that you can't possibly hope to compete without buying their product. /s
> Is that AI? Or is it me?
It's you. And that's fine.
You can still code entirely without AI or AI influence, so that's primarily why I say it's you. It may also, in fact, be burnout. It sounds like it to me. And it's okay to get back into coding if you ever feel like it.
You’re right - it’s me.
I used to code at home - chess engines mostly.
Maybe once the novelty of retirement wears off (and the autumn approaches), I’ll start coding again
Yeah, I was going to say this too.
I write code in my spare time for fun and hobby and personal skill development and I don't use AI at all. AI isn't ruining anything for me.
I feel you. I've been coding for about 20 years and the last 2 years were an absolute downer, draining all the joy of programming by offloading the actuall puzzles to an ai third party thst i just navigate and correct. I am 20 times more productive but 20 times less happy
I'm not near retirement, but I have found that the side projects I work on have diminished quite a bit since AI took over coding. It used to be that writing a library for something like parsing ICal files was something I could spend time on, write, build out, and then other people could use. But now anyone can throw together a working version of it in a little bit. That's a good thing, but also it removes the fun of spending the time implementing it and creating something for others.
This makes me think of how boxed cake recipes decided to leave out the eggs because people liked to still feel like they were "cooking" for people.
> 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?
I had that shortly after ChatGPT came out, but as nobody was using it for work, I don't think it was caused by AI.
Personally, I blame all the CV-driven development.
Playing with AI coding models can even give me a bit of the good times back.
After 40+ years of coding, I couldn't be more happy about how AI has changed what I do. It got rid of the boring drudgery and grind and let me concentrate on the problem-solving, idea-generating parts.
Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.
Retired as well. Hated that dealing with AI was a big part of my job. Hated how half my time was spend clicking through portals, scrum boards, devops tooling. I just wanted to code.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.
I think you're getting unfairly downvoted. A lot of people, across all salary ranges, are just vaguely tired of constantly Providing Maximal Shareholder Value™ to their managers day in and day out, having that One Purpose dominate their lives, and at the end of each day looking up and seeing nothing tangible to show for what they've done.
And being given an email and locked out of everything after a decade of doing so, on a whim, all because someone thought you were just an expense…
Its also the absolute assurance that we're all going to get screwed by a big crash circa 2028.
Shhh no class consciousness on HN allowed
Yep, this is the right answer. Everything is max money always, and you can't have nice things any more, you can only have things that extract all the value they can out of you.
Ive paraphrased it before and i’ll paraphrase it again
“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”
- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).
I have definitely found my enjoyment of coding in my spare time is lessened now that AI is on the scene. I know very few if any were going to use the code, but it felt like working on a classic car, the act of working on it was fun even if the final results seem like the effort could have been used more productively.
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
I made it 27 before I retired. I kind of wish I was older so I could have enjoyed more years of what was a fun career before it turned into... this.
More and more I'm finding myself saying: "I got into this career because I liked technology, computers, programming, and so on. Not whatever this is!"
I think part of the problem is that source code is always in flux. So to think of the satisfaction of completing a project seems difficult to imagine.
Big corporations invent new “features” and then axe them, even if the products are delightful; venture capitalists obsessed with building to exit on profit alone; open source developers trying to make a name for themselves by building something in Rust to improve performance by 5%.
Compare that to something like architecture or woodworking, gardening, baking, painting—creating real tangible things.
My recommendation is combine the two: use arduinos and/or raspberry PI to automate water delivery in your garden. Stuff like that that you can experience the value at first-hand. :)
It’s both, IMO from your brief comment, LLMs made you think it’s all troublesome endeavor because it outputs spaghetti code. No one likes hunting through spaghetti code and fixing it. Nobody wants to fill their plate with seconds immediately.
Mess around with a poc and try not using the LLM to get started (use a project scaffolding tool/code generator instead if you must). Start with some appetizers and a first course. Stop working on it even if you feel satisfied.
I like to try and get my pocs to a publishable state someone else can download and compile even if it’s wonky. That helps me bookend my work even if I don’t accomplish all the goals.
I most recently made a poc with nuklear ui and libuvc make a small app that displays my camera feed. I pushed it up, the camera frames have some green flicker but it works. I did more research and found out there are better libraries than libuvc for this kind of thing. Now I have another prototype to make for my ideas. And a base to clone if I need some starter template.
Mad respect for his work. Love his writing. But no, i'm not buying the story of going offline, especially not with a trending hackernews post and a typewritten letter to the internet. When one is done with something, they're done. Cold turkey. like "Fck this sht, i'm out". If someone notices that you are missing, they'll ask, and you can give them your spiel about being AI-Amish or whatever.
Even if you ignore all that, I think you just need a break, rest, recover, find something else in life and move on. The whole thing about "life was better in the past" is just plain non-sense, simply because the past, for all we know, extends to infinity. Why 1980 and not 1890? or 1590? the inquisition? maybe the crusades? or maybe the pharohs? If you believe in biblical tales then how about being in the great flood? or being one of the pharoh soldiers that die after the sea moses split closes on them? or one of the skulls in gengis khan's tower of skulls?
You can read Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" and get a good sense of how far along have we come.
This was well written but it does sort of read as a guy bragging about his wealth and creativity. Good for him but when I leave tech I'm going to be a little less bombastic about it.
100%. I get it -- I'm _also_ burned out on social media, AI, screens, the treadmill of the tech industry, etc.
But you can just stop doing those specific things. Delete your social media accounts. Put a screen time timer on your phone. Continue to work on your hobby projects or work projects without AI. There is a middle ground without going full "1980s tech Amish life conversion". Email, text messaging, Maps, basic websites, etc are all still super useful and generally non-harmful. You can still perfectly-well enjoy analog hobbies like typewriters, vinyl, film photography, etc _alongside_ common-sense modern tech.
And you look dumb to anyone paying attention when you launch a multi-pronged social media moment to tell the world that you don't think social media is worth using. It's kind of sad, like someone making a huge deal about "this is my L A S T cigarette everyone!", "this is my L A S T drink!" but all their friends are kind of cringing inside.
Also sad that he feels the need for online promotion of his paper zine about fully offline life.
For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care?
He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it.
Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still make a huge impact. Either way I respect his decision and hope he finds peace offline. TBH I’m a little jealous.
I met Chad during the gittip years, and one of my life goals now is to go find him in the offline world some day and sit around an open fire at night to share stories. :)
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
Chad taught me programming when I was a child, and introduced me to a professor I then went on to work for. Sadly I haven't kept up with him, but I second his impact: both big and small, he's a brilliant and caring guy.
Thanks for sharing. It helps after seeing so many edgy "don't let the door hit you on the way out" type replies.
yup, Chad is super authentic, WYSIWYG. Truly a loss for Open Source and tech in general.
I wish him well and I don't blame him at all. He already gave more of himself to advancing OSS sustainability than probably anyone else on the planet (might be room for debate, but I can't think of who else is even in the discussion).
This all makes me tremendously sad. I wish them well.
Yep. Chad is great. Although, if anyone were to lead a cult, I figure it would be Chad, hopefully he doesn’t accidentally charisma himself into a cult leader situation.
Well he does say in the letter he wants to be part of an offline-only community, and is starting a magazine centered around it combined with Orthodox Christianity... this after talking about a community in India that kills outsiders and wanting to be like the Amish. Seems cult-adjacent
death to the machine? https://deathtothemachine.com
Eastern Orthodoxy is the oldest branch of Christianity. Which means it's the furthest thing from "cult-adjacent." You want to know what is actually "cult-adjacent"? People who are associated with Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, or your local Church of Cosmic Vibrations.
Funny, 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 the past 4 years, a series of small games that I have been itching to work on, then, of course, the lifelong project of living in a rural house. Stretch goal if I win the lottery: build a solar farm.
Maybe I will be so lucky never to have had to use LLMs in my work. You guys have fun without me. :-P
> last me a year or two being frugal
Word of advice.
Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal.
The two years are going to fly by.
EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.
Seconded, though from a different angle. In my experience, it's surprisingly hard to live frugally when you don't have a job; my spending actually went up at first because I had all of this free time for activities I didn't have before. Started doing more hobbies, going for trips around town, generally participated in the economy more than I could when 8 hours of my day were spoken for. What I thought was a year of runway was probably closer to 3-6 months.
My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
On the other end, I live very frugally and when I spent six months without work I calculated how much my savings would last with my no job level of spending and it was 21 years. So anyone who wants to learn to live frugally would be wise to start doing so while still working, because that's when it's the easiest.
It's very possible in 2 or 3 years there won't be much of a job market remaining and the best thing you can do now is something you own.
I imagine politically it will be like during the pandemic. The government goes full socialist to prevent riots and revolution -- they are going to print lots of money. It is going to be chaotic period. It is already starting and the best thing people can do is make sure they are employed, developing skills, and not spending savings. You want to make it to the other side of this.
I have a very niche set of skills so I could up until 6 months ago pick up contract work anytime I needed. Despite being one of the best in the world at what I did, I can't compete anyone with $400 in tokens using Codex or Claude Code. I'm pivoting quickly but the sentiment is "Oh, shit, this is coming fast and heavy!"
Nothing like retiring with only 3 years worth of savings and no plan on what to do after that.
If you don't need to support a family and are unhappy otherwise, why not?
Sure it's not 'the smart thing to do' but if it makes you happy and you're still not far worse of than most people...
Because if you are unhappy now, just wait until you are homeless
there are in fact plenty of ways to earn enough money to get by on a simple lifestyle
People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
I live in a first-world European country where the average salary is about €25,000 per year. My mortgage estimate is less than €300/mo. I'm not that afraid of having to supplement my income if I need to. The world will still need cheap and experienced software engineers for a while.
> People in tech, especially from US, are so accustomed to spending $5,000/mo just to survive, that they cannot fathom one is able to live without having a tech job in San Francisco. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Quality of life in suburban America is incredibly high relative to a "first world" country with such a low average income. From what I have seen, most families in the "European periphery" still live in small Soviet-era apartment buildings, own one small car or no car at all, and are far from enjoying many other things taken for granted in America.
Yeah, I was just living off $1k/month in Brazil just to see if it was possible. It definitely is. And was in a beautiful, safe area.
Of course you felt amazing living off US$1k/mo in Brazil - the average per capita household income in Brazil is less than US$450/mo and a salary of $700/mo puts you in the top 10% [0].
Basically, you enjoyed feeling rich in a country where the vast majority are getting screwed.
And this is what I as well as my SO's family (middle and working class Vietnamese in VN) hate about digital nomads - y'all don't realize that you end up perpetuating the same inequality you try to run away from, and feels deeply colonial in nature as the countries y'all end up in had histories of being colonized and stratified.
You get to travel everywhere because you have a strong passport. They don't because their passport is weak and their salaries are low.
You will always be promoted to the top of the social pecking order thanks to your passport. They will always be relegated to the bottom and attacked by politicans as "stealing jobs" or "changing demographics" thanks to their passport.
[0] - https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2026/05/08/veja-quanto...
Definitely not my first rodeo, but feel free to gloat.
I'm probably being overly charitable, but I would have said the same thing except in a positive context, because I've wanted to do the same thing at times.
Feels like an unfair judgment of someone else's values, which have no obligation to match yours.
I think it's not a moral, but financial judgement. Unless an alternate income is achieved before that deadline, becoming destitute except for a small cottage is not a great prospect.
They didn't say that they are retiring, just that they are ending their career as a software engineer.
> a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years,
I don't want to step on your design process, but if you want to explore some microkernels to run beam, I can link you to mine and another one that I ran into recently. Asking before linking, because sometimes you'd rather not look.
1. Please do link your microkernel, I'm very curious to learn from other people working in this space
2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy.
Processes just export a
entrypoint instead of a main function. I just want to see where I can take this idea.Your idea sounds fun, too!
Here's my thing: Crazierl https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ demo (desktop recommended) at https://crazierl.org/demo/
Here's the other one: Tyn https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel
I haven't studied Tyn, I think from the high level we both have the same goals; enough kernel to run BEAM, and then BEAM does the rest. I wrote in C because learning Rust and bare metal OS stuff at the same time seemed like too much. Crazierl does much less in my kernel; my kernel handles time keeping, memory paging, interrupts, fallback console output, and a simple read only filesystem. Tyn includes device drivers and tcp/ip in the kernel as well. Crazierl runs BEAM compiled for FreeBSD and Tyn runs BEAM compiled for Linux (musl). Crazierl is x86 32-bit, Tyn is x86 64-bit.
IMHO, regardless of what your eventual target is, I would consider running on x86 with bios boot, because it means you can run in v86, which is handy for sending links to demos.
I think building a multiboot capable OS and relying on other people's loaders is a good step to reduce effort.
Starting with serial console also helps a little. VGA text isn't too bad, but UEFI (or other) framebuffer means you need a font renderer and all that. That might be fun and interesting, but it doesn't need to be in the critical path.
If you want to run on hardware, test frequently. Most of the emulators aren't super accurate in early boot, and let you get away with stuff that won't run on hardware. Serial console helps here, because on a pc, writing to the serial port is easy and your output will stay in the terminal even if the pc reboots.
Fully automated PXE boot is helpful too, if you get into a boot loop, it just keeps pulling the latest, and you can push a new binary and wait for the output without having to touch the device under test. Also handy once you get it working a bit... just reboot to pull in new code.
I built an x86 kernel 25 years ago at this point, this time around I chose RISC-V because it's much simpler to get it running, and speed of iteration is paramount on a prototype. There's less documentation but much less cruft. I eventually would like to try porting it to x86, and also to run the same programs — unmodified — on Linux. My first prototype was on Linux actually, but trying to figure out how to fit userspace preemptive scheduling with async IO/io_uring and the complexities of signal handling was literally more complicated than just writing a kernel.
Thank you for the links! I'll have a look when I have a moment in the next weeks and I might send you an email to discuss this further
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 then. It's a strange one.
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 this to say, a person trained to work for someone else 40 hours a week for all their adult life is not able to self-direct and find meaning without a lot of introspection and readjusting.
Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
I would (genuinely) be interested in a follow up on how that works out for them. I've "threatened" to do this many times, but my partner points out that if I thought tech management was full of BS, wait until I am getting ordered about by retail industry management while working the shop floor, dead on my feet, penalised for taking too long a toilet break. I think reality could come down hard here.
From 2024-2025 I worked as a firefighter instructor while running my own tech business, and after two years I decided I was done instructing. I could not handle working on my feet in the pouring rain, getting endlessly hassled for doing a task by the book but not the way the lead instructor likes it done, and then having to spend my lunch break listening to sexist and racist "humor" from my coworkers. Also getting exposed to seriously toxic materials at a radioactive building. Coworkers who all had the thinnest skin and most sensitive egos I've ever seen. All to get paid less in an 8 hour day than I make an hour at my business. It just wasn't worth it, even though I loved being there for the students and helping them grow. When I realized I could make more growing organic veggies in my yard than I could at the training center, I made the call to quit.
> I think reality could come down hard here.
I have worked retail before, and to add onto the things you put it was the lack of problem solving for me that was absolutely mind numbing. Sure there were the little "problems" to solve of shelving, stock order, tidiness etc but it doesn't push the brain (and maybe they're done with that part, which is fair), but until you've experienced it I would be very surprised if this person finds retail better than tech.
Even just having to clock in on time is something many tech folk don't really have to bear.
But I don't think it's charitable to assume the author doesn't understand what he is getting himself into. I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt and increase my admiration for his commitment accordingly.
> I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
This is a nice understatement. What we see here is privilege at work and phrasing it in a likable manner. "Tech" folks appear to be particularly vulnerable to this type of framing.
>that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
that's pretty presumptuous I think. He says in the piece he is an Orthodox Christian who wants to build a offline community in Pennsylvania where he lives. The average salary at HD is 70k, that's the household income in the state.
I know a bunch of Orthodox folks in the US and their idea of a reasonable lifestyle doesn't include two Teslas and three holidays, they do just fine on less than that without a tech cushion.
It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech that some people seem convinced they cannot live 'reasonable lives' without earning more than 95% of the population.
> I know a bunch of Orthodox folks in the US and their idea of a reasonable lifestyle doesn't include two Teslas and three holidays, they do just fine on less than that without a tech cushion.
I'm not talking about Teslas and holidays. Where I am, an equivalent job would really be living on the edges in terms of the basics: rent, groceries, healthcare, energy, saving for retirement.
> It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech...
It's tiring to me that tech workers really have no idea how well they live compared to people working retail full time - to the extend that it gets romanticised like this. It's incredibly patronising. Which is why I would be interested in a follow up on wether the reality matched the "dream".
>It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech that some people seem convinced they cannot live 'reasonable lives' without earning more than 95% of the population.
Fair, but another way of looking at it is - since the 1980s the income - cost of living gap has steadily increased, such that "median income" translates to a much more frugal lifestyle than the name implies, to put it euphemistically. Its not like people work multiple blue collar jobs because they want/love to.
Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!
I think it is fair to dog on this for being a bit performative, like announcing you are blocking someone or quiting XYZ social media by posting on that social media. I do give some grace for trying to make an offline magazine/newsletter because I'd like to see more of that in the world, especially passion projects in general. All that to say, I think the attempt to be offline or more disconnected from some of these services is ultimately a healthy habit and is noble self improvement goal in itself. In the same way, trying and failing to quit cigarettes is ultimately healthier than not trying to quit smoking cigarettes. (I am biased; I think the way he formatted the post is quite aesthetic for what it is and would enjoy more analog to mellow out my life)
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 preserving a valuable way of life, they're primitive hunter-gathering barbarians, and anybody can "return" to that way of life any time they want by taking a one-way plane ticket and camping out somewhere where they cannot be found.
Additionally, the fact that this announcement is a scan of a typewritten letter, despite the fact that he has communicated in text-form on BlueSky since the letter's authoring, feels a tad performative to me.
>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
This feels like a purposeful misreading. The author is using hyperbole to vent about their feelings on where we are right now in tech. The idea being there will still be some vestiges of humanity left who can live without any of the advancements from the Industrial Revolution onward because it may all disappear in a calamity.
>taking a one-way plane ticket and camping out somewhere where they cannot be found.
Camping isn't building a sustainable human community. Trust me. We go camping in the White Mountains every summer and I can tell you based on the campground bathrooms alone that is not a society.
> Camping isn't building a sustainable human community. Trust me.
My point is that if the Sentinelese were gone, the primitive lifestyle would not forever be lost to time. If somebody finds enough people willing to join them, it would be possible to found an off-grid commune somewhere.
> We go camping in the White Mountains every summer and I can tell you based on the campground bathrooms alone that is not a society.
I doubt anybody going camping in the White Mountains intends to found a society.
I took it as rhetorical, not a literal call for violence.
That said, I appreciate you noting their name as it gave me something to google/learn.
Regardless whether or not it was rhetorical, I found it off-putting, especially when the Amish (a far superior example of the point he is trying to convey) are mentioned in the same article.
If I were more -- or even at all -- versed in the geopolitics of the Andaman Islands, I may have found it more off-putting than I did. That's a fair enough point. If you're offended by this, that's understandable and I don't blame you.
What I was speaking about was more the claim that the author had veered into fanaticism. That doesn't seem true. He's working at Home Depot not becoming a hunter-gatherer let alone murdering anybody.
>barbarians
I didn't realize people still used this word to apply to human beings.
Can you think of an appropriate application of the word "barbarian" that doesn't refer to humans?
> friendly neighborhood murderers
despite the fact that he has communicated in text-form on BlueSky since the letter's authoring
Lol thanks, that answers my question. Whenever these "I'm leaving tech" posts come up I'm amused that the website is still online, they're still tweeting, and there's no indication that they've left anything at all. Our society rewards speaking out too much. It's especially difficult to stop if a big part of your existence is networking, and this guy seems to be all about networking.
Just look at all those socials:
https://chadwhitacre.com/
This resonates with me as well. For more reasons than one: with the rise of AI (Mythos is but a pale forerunner) digital security — and by extension, digital privacy — has ceased to exist. The bomber will always win. The only way to win is not to play.
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
I am not sure anything is scaring anyone into urgency as long as breaches are no great issue for the company (in contrast to their customers and/or affected third parties).
Also, more secure code might be performing better, it might also perform worse. I am not sure the concepts are completely orthogonal, but there is at least no clear causality.
That's an optimistic take I haven't heard before, love the idea a lot. Wake me up when we get there though...
This end state isn’t guaranteed to be clear people need to go out and work on it.
This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him.
Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside because he doesn't have a robot bodyguard. His UBI would have paid him to stay inside and stare at the wall, but he won't sign up for that cause it requires a smartphone and an identity implant. Probably wind up homeless with a handwritten sign, "Destroy All Clankers! Anything (without an embedded microchip) helps."
What a wild dystopic vision of the future you have.
What's worth stealing, to a dude with a robot?
Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.
A cheap drone makes casing burglary targets much easier
Wait till there are organ harvesting bots. Only half joking, I am afraid.
Funny you should mention robots burglars. I just read this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093
Ta da, this is the kind of future that will become the actual one, to everyone's surprise in the comment section.
So exactly as we "modern" people are to the Amish, yet the Amish persist in its way of life.
I'm with the Tal Shiar on this one
Violence is always an option. In many cases, it's the only real option.
If things get as much as 10% as chaotic as you predict, there will be massive turmoil and the "Destroy all Clankers" party will actually be the one in charge.
Yeah, except we'll be a colony of China and those T800s will be on every street corner cause we didn't want to build datacenters and couldn't find a place to do yucky unaesthetically pleasing stuff like refining rare earth minerals and other primary industries anywhere that wasn't China.
Those industries have been reshoring for more than 5 years.
"Predictions are difficult. Especially about the future."
We have a choice right now on whether that world exists or not
Exactly. People make this technology with impunity. If they felt repercussions for working with the “bad guys”, it would give them pause before accepting a job with Flock, Andruil, Anthropic, etc.
burglars generally don't need technology and this likely won't change soon
with tracking in laptops/phones/airtags/etc it's more likely to be the enemy than the tool or even the object of acquisition
even in 2026 the most sophisticated stuff we get are wifi jammers and keyfob intercepts and that's still like the top <1% of sophistication, most of petty theft is all the classic smash and grab because desperate people don't have the bandwidth for sophistication
relevant: https://xkcd.com/538/
I'm sure we'll get hackers trying to hack your home assistant bot to steal your credit card numbers though
The ideal career path
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1jgcfx9/pe...
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 boilerplate it took to actually build something. I've always enjoyed having extensive breadth about many languages in addition to the few that I had extreme depth in.
In other words, I don't feel AI has taken something I love away, but has removed barriers to finally build solutions in a way that maps perfectly with my brain.
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.
thank you for this. what a sacred journey you're embarking on. i hope to follow you - talking with a close friend now about becoming an elevator mechanic. my wife is pregnant so i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand. i think the world you envision is possible, and closer.
Do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
There is no profession better matching what women in western countries expect from a co-parent than tech. The money first and foremost, but the flexibility to work (more accurately, pretend to work) remotely, too.
Let me reiterate:
For your marriage, do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
As someone who changed careers as my youngest was born - hard agree.
This would be ideal, but practically speaking, it will only become harder to switch careers and make up the income gap as I get older (i'm 30) and more people leave tech for less volatile industries. Plus, I don't think we'll be one and done re: kids. I don't think waiting is necessarily a smart long-term move given rising anti-tech sentiment among workers, even if it would be better to wait until the perfect age from a lifestyle perspective. This is just my opinion.
I guess it depends on how the pay actually compares.
If the tech salary is more than the trade salary, every year you hold on is more runway for the eventual transition. Even if it takes you longer to get into the new thing because you were slow jumping ship, the extra runway might cover the difference.
Obviously I've had similar thoughts to the ones you're having. But this is a pretty cushy gig and I don't think leaving it before they make me is the right decision.
Incel logic for relationships. This isn't how people actually work. Lost my job, considering career switch, marriage and baby are fine
Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
If u lost your job already, u didn't choosingly give up a stable(don't know u, so guessing) job as the other person alludes (don't know their situation so people guessing here).
So if u had a stable good paying job, giving it up to start something new while having a new kid can be very hard .. but doable. Still I'll advised.
If u lost your job, based on job market, career switch makes total sense as you need to help provide and a career switch may provide a better or stable opp.
Many people have successful home life/family life with no financial stability or even a job altogether...
> Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
that's true, and also why it's prudent to not go around giving unsolicited family advice to strangers.
also it's why, when you're talking about one particular woman you've never met, you should keep the demographic insights you think you have about her to yourself.
important context for me is that layoffs keep eating my company every 6 months or so, meanwhile the due date is fast approaching. treading shark-infested waters
If you start a post talking about what you think western women value and then continue with the idea that women just want to be taken care of by a man, their partner your world view is distorted by garbage information.
Healthy and stable relationships sre built on care and being good people, not what you're job provides.
> continue with the idea that women just want to be taken care of by a man
I don't think I took this position!
> my wife is pregnant
You're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income.
> i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand.
These two sentences are completely independent of each other.
Sorry to be a downer, but once you have kids shit gets real and room for idealism shrinks fast.
> my wife is pregnant >> You're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income.
I would say your priorities and what you value are about to radically change. Parenthood is very instinctual, you'll work so much harder and struggle and worry so much more than you ever have but you'll find so much more joy than you ever thought existed at the same time. Once you hold your child for the first time the only thing that will matter will be your family and that will drive your decision making from there forward.
>once you have kids shit gets real and room for idealism shrinks fast
I get what you mean, but if there's any part of me I want to pass onto my daughter, it's my idealism. What would be the point? "Hey, I would like to get involved in this 'Next Generation of Humanity' project because I love people and think we are wonderful and can do anything. Before I go having a kid though, let me actively forget all that!"
> you're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income
would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
> These two sentences are completely independent of each other.
They are two separate thoughts. Two thoughts that are separate can exist in one comment. They are just next to each other. The profession that comes close to tech salaries is elevator mechanic. The poetry is for my heart, which is related to this guy's post, in which he talks about leaving tech for the sake of his heart.
Not only are you a downer, but you have a highly unusual approach to parsing information.
Typically two sentences directly following one another are related. You are missing a paragraph to separate your completely unrelated thoughts. The person you are replying to has a normal way of passing information. You need to work on how you present your information.
Aren't they related in the sense that they're not tech/SaaS/software related? "I'm looking into being an elevator mechanic; I need the money because my wife is pregnant." and then "I'm writing poetry by hand." Like, their life is going in a non-tech direction?
> would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
There is lots of stable software work outside of SaaS. Not exciting but reliable and pays decently. That's what might take priority when you start a family.
Why is it a sacred journey? They are quitting a job at Sentry and taking one a Home Depot. As much as I value the role that Home Depot plays in society I'd never use the word "sacred" to describe the work, nor the work at any other job.
I guess it depends on what sacred means to you. i'm not a religious person, so my definition is entirely personal, but i consider honoring yourself even when it looks like a failure to others, or even when it doesnt give you money/power etc. to be a holy act.
I am reminded of the lesson "Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is a shithead.", from the Principia Discordia.
https://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/12.php
brother I've thought about the tech to blue collar transition too. for me, I would choose plumbing or electrical, but it seems like 4 years of low apprentice wages are unavoidable.
I overlapped a bit with Chad in 2015, as he was navigating a professional transition. I wasn't in an especially high role back then- just a guy in the back of the room.
In the times I saw him since, I consistently saw someone who thought hard every day about how to help others, and didn't lose sight of the human element. Sentry worked hard to create a viable business, without losing sight of open source goals. (you can see some of his efforts at https://blog.sentry.io/authors/chad-whitacre/ )
I tell my younger colleagues to do the best work they can sustainably do... but too often in this field, the big roles become too intense to be sustained forever. I hope his new role shows him the same warmth and support that he tried to put out there for others.
Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intuition led me down the right road at the right time. Always trust your gut.
Note to readers: I had very bad results with trusting my gut.
I have 3 weeks left, but outside of work I've already been divorced from anything technological invented this century. I've been living in a log cabin in the woods for over a quarter century. This essay does hit home.
21 days left. I don't plan to look back.
First of all, congratulations!
Second, I'm fascinated by this. If you don't mind my asking, what kind of work do you do in tech? And do you have a family (spouse, kids, etc)?
I'd just be curious to hear anything else you'd like to share about your lifestyle.
I think we're going to see a ton of this in the coming years. A return to the 60s/70s when people were going off the grid, moving to a farm, or just disconnecting
People have always done this, and always will. I don't think we'll see a lot more of it. I haven't met a lot of people who are actually happy living a very simple frugal life for very long. Maybe it will be a fad for a while, or people will do it as a sabbatical type of thing to recharge but really committing to it forever?
Then the younger generation who have never known life without AI will be entering the workforce (whatever that looks like in 10 years time), and it will just be normal.
I'm trying to figure out where the best place to do this sort of thing is, looking a few years ahead. Currently feels like the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York hits a good combination of available farmland, affordable prices, acceptable weather (I went to school near there), and so on. I love the West Coast but it's all too damn expensive.
Whether man belongs into the city or wilderness is a question as old as humanity. It was pondered 4,000 years ago in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
You should read the book "Walden". The guy is also leaves society to live closer to nature for more or less similar reasons. But then in 1845.
It's good to keep in mind while reading Walden that Thoreau was basically a trust fund baby.
Yeah I know, and his mom did his dirty laundry. Still a comfy read!
Fair play to the chap, it was refreshing to read a scan of a letter typed from a typewriter.
<joke> I just hope he doesn't start mailing packages to people in the tech industry in the next few years.</joke>
> refreshing to read a scan of a letter typed from a typewrite
But it's not responsive! Hadn't he heard of mobile-first? ;)
Chad is one of the kindest souls I've ever met. Good luck off the grid!
Also, how did he post this if he isn't using the Internet?
If you are that pedantic you could also ask if he is living without a mobile phone, without a car and without any modern electrical appliance phoning home. So, probably him being offline is not to be taken quite so seriously.
Probably had a friend do it for him
Do the Amish pay non-Amish to do forbidden things for them? Asking for a friend.
I manage the Google Maps listings for two local Amish businesses, as well as send the occasional e-mail for them when a supplier or other business reason requires they use e-mail.
They offered to pay me for my time, but I refused as I'm happy to help my neighbors. They seemed pretty uncomfortable with me helping without anything in return, so they pay me back in discounted products or labor of their own.
I'm not sure about "forbidden" per se but they definitely make accommodations for various things, e.g. riding as passengers in cars for long trips.
I am not sure what is forbidden. There was a YT video about computer they were using for business. It was stripped down OS (windows xp?) that only had office apps, or something like that.
I am unable to find the video, but here is an interesting story: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/02/25/172886170/a-co...
I'm not sure if payment is involved, but I've heard Orthodox Jews can and do seek non-Jewish help when they need e.g. light switches toggled on the Sabbath.
Shabbos goy. Pete Hamill was one, and tells a good story. Snow in August, I believe, is based on his experiences.
Yes. They pay folks to drive them around.
A friend of mine encountered a wrecked buggy on the road and drove the Amish family inside it to the hospital and saved lives.
The entire local Amish community now comes and helps him tend his property, raised him a barn.
It’s like helping a crow by giving it some food, but way cooler.
Software dev is so much infested with mediocre people who follow any line dictated by management and politics and force others to do it.
If CEOs were smart, they'd use the AI craze to identify the AI boosters and then fire them all. This will increase productivity and save them way more money than a Clown Code subscription.
I'd say that it's very natural to want to retire after 40 years of doing anything. You reach your various ceilings. You have most of your enthusiasm spent, most tasty bits of your area of expertise picked and consumed, seen many sad things repeating over and over, etc, etc. And any major new development may be disheartening, whatever it may be.
I think this is fine. A person, having worked for so long and successfully on something, has every right to call it quits and switch to something else. Something fresh and different. Godspeed!
I finally pulled the trigger after being in tech for 21 years. 10 years at a FAANG.
I simply can’t handle the performative Machiavellian culture anymore.
I could play that game for longer, but I don’t want to. All I want is to build cool and ambitious things without any of the theatrics.
I don’t want to go offline. I just want to live a normal, modern, and peaceful life. I would go nuts without all of the comfort of modern tech, especially the high speed broadband.
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 I find to be relatively easy after 20 years in industry, but figuring out how to teach it effectively? That's really, really difficult. Such a great challenge to be able to sink my teeth into—so rewarding. And it's for a good cause.
I'm not opposed to going back to industry work. I'd probably use genAI to get a bunch to get stuff done, too, even though I don't use it for my personal projects. But it would have to be some work that I believed in, that was doing some good in the world. I can imagine working for the county, say, or for a non-profit.
How did you transition from tech to teaching?
This reminded me of a fellow SRE that I met on my first day of onboarding at Google.
I don't remember which team he got matched with, but he was definitely going on to do hardcore SRE stuff.
He didn't have a smartphone. Just a little dumb flip-phone that's so difficult to come by these days.
This was in 2015. That blew my mind.
He absolutely knew what was coming. Just like the author of this really nice letter.
I wish him the best of luck in his new lo-fi life. Don't forget to get a rifle to shoot your printer with!
I love the website design. I had considered at one point blogging in illuminated manuscript, and if I can figure a good way to format/compress page scans for my blog, I will follow in the OP's footsteps.
I love my current job, but also part of me thinks a Garbage Man would provide a cool experience. (I'm ok with the stinkiness). I just think about careening through the city at the crack of dawn, exploring every nook of my city. That or group fitness instructor.
Only on HN would anyone romanticize garbage collection as a career.
My uncle worked as a garbage man earlier in life. He said he quit the day the trash stopped smelling bad to him.
I fell off the OSS ideological wagon around the same time, and probably for the same reason.
When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.
Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.
That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.
I feel all of these things too. I'm 42 and started working right out of high school. Unfortunately I was dumb, didn't save money or pursue high earnings until 6 years ago when I joined big tech. I live in HCOL area, and realistically have 10 or maybe even 20 years left before I can even start thinking about retirement.
Trying to figure out how to make this sustainable.
52-62 seems like a normal, or better than normal, retirement target, no?
I think I was lucky enough to start out in the 80’s.
But seriously, didn’t really start making big money until about 25 years ago, and bailed heavily into my pension fund.
The tech industry is constant change, but the change in the last 10 years or so has been fairly shitty to be frank.
Hopefully, this AI bubble bursts and maybe there’s a few years of sanity in the tech industry.
I'm so offline I announce my offlineness to the internet.
I'd retire yesterday if I could afford it. Maybe in 10-15 years. Have a once-a-day NNCP feed rather than total disconnection.
It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.
You can ask your favourite LLM to write all the fiction you desire.
It would be hard to give up on tech as I genuinely enjoy building, watching systems come alive, figuring out the puzzles through when they break. I do like the term Neo-Amish though and definitely relate.
I do recommend people get outside activities to balance things out - just walking my dog 1-2 miles a day is like therapy for me (and a good way to get unblocked and energized with a new idea).
I retired to the country, where any friends are 50 miles away, and most don't even reply to emails and messages.
I still want to utilize some free wikis and such to help share ideas.
There are simple things that can improve life for people, especially seniors, that are very low tech, and that's the rub.
Low tech things mean taking action, getting away from the screen, where SO WE THINK, magic happens when we create some new fantabulous code gizmo.
Maybe just bringing a pizza to someone, inventing some gadget to read invisible labels and expiry dates on food, or making an exoskeleton for someone with back pain will do more good than some AI that writes exciting posts on social media, or better, counters some other AI that is coming for your money and creative mind.
We are all overthinking everything, when simple, human problems are neglected in some race to an unknown "endpoint" that is illusory and ever-moving.
It is amusing and depressing to see so many people exit tech. I remember this happened in similar “vibes/strides around 08 and then for Covid, which ironically doubled down on remote work. And now for AI.
It really paints a projection on how much time we all really have in this world and this segment of work.
At best I wonder, do “I” have another 10 - 15 years left in tech?
Do you?
Agreed with the other comments on financial freedom. It does feel that tech is one of the last bastions remaining where you can really solidify being an autodidact to have an exit of your choosing.
I read somewhere that the average developer only has 7 years of experience. This should be a fairly sobering warning to anyone getting into tech that you should be saving every penny and planning your next career move. I know so many people who have burned out, gotten so stale they can't find work, or both. I've been in the industry for 19 years now and so few of my former coworkers are still in the field. I never planned I'd make it this far, so I'm making hay while the sun shines.
The problem isn't tech, it's the management/executive layer behind the firehose of VC bullshit and the consultant class of MBAs allowing decision making without consequence. We need to step up and kick all of these idiots out of the industry - not step or shy away. They're expecting techies to be soft and not to confront them using word games. Be as elitist and forward as you need to survive - but I plan on spending the next decade fiercely attacking the cancer... "Show me the money - or shut the fuck up". I can easily act more impatient than they can.
You’re not wrong, but an MBA helped me understand management better and “bridge the gap” between tech and management.
There is often a disconnect between both sides.
While anyone can learn the language of business, an MBA helps in understand their side, by teaching how executives think, evaluate risk, and make decisions.
A respected MBA also provides credibility, making it easier to translate technical ideas into business outcomes and gain support from leadership, etc etc etc.
The real value isn’t the mba itself, but learning to operate in both worlds. There is so much gray and fun things to can do once you see and can communicate both sides.
Tech-management arbitrage. That layer you describe is just talking another language, that most people in tech just don’t know. They also control the money.
I dream of being the Zamboni driver for my town's arena. I have a plan I'm successfully executing to get to be that before I'm 50.
The hardest part will be beating all the competition for the job.
There's no such thing as a zomboni roomba?
I f*** hope not.
People want to drive the Zamboni. It’s one of the coolest jobs out there.
I'll never give up tech. It's a passion I've had since childhood, and a large part of what keeps me going in society is seeing the lights of the eyes brighten when someone discovers something new with technology that genuinely makes their life that much better than it was a moment ago. Not merely the flame of some dopamine hit of something shiny, but that genuine, "Thank you for helping me save an hour of my time/cross this chore off my list forever/give me back time, to live my life" sense.
The fact so many of us are burning out so hard, so fast, so thoroughly despite tech being a passion genuinely worries me. These are otherwise brilliant people, well-read, modest intellectuals that are just sick of this anti-human society we've built, with the constant braying by Capitalist and Industrialist leaders that this thing is necessary or you will be left behind, in lieu of natural discovery and adoption and integration into our lives. We bought into it initially and for so long, even as time after time after time it proved to be empty, or shallow, or vapid, or hollow. Never life-changing, never society-changing, always enriching those with far too much by taking from those with far too little.
I wish the OP well. I think we all need more offline time, if just to remind ourselves what the role of technology was always meant to be within it.
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.
This is great. I’ve been thinking to set up an HF radio rig to talk to friends and strangers that are real people. Maybe the LLMs flood the internet with enough trash and we go back to more voice comms
i got 9.5 years. 9.5 years and then I'm finally climbing off the stage, picking up my tips, and my dancing days are over. i'm counting it down.
Best of luck to him, I hope he finds what he's looking for!
What's not completely clear from the post is what he dislikes with AI / technology. Does someone know?
Lol, had to tell the internet on his way out huh. He'll be back of course as he clearly values the internet and makes it part of his ego.
A lot of these "I'm leaving, everybody, see? I'm really going now, OK. Did you hear that? I'm really leaving" posts are just a form of virtue signalling or likes-farming, viz. the flood of such posts on what used to be Twitter when Musk took over. The majority of those who claimed to leave were back within a few weeks to months to get their fix. Most of these posts are characterised by the poster not having any positive plans for the future beyond whatever they claim to leave behind, just complaints about whatever caused them to write those posts.
This post here does not seem to be like that. I suspect he's really planning on taking a hiatus from the 'net, something like a sabbatical at least. I do think he'll eventually return to the 'net in some form and he might even become active in whatever the free software world has morphed into by then but he does seem to have positive plans for the future. He's starting a magazine centred around an Orthodox Christian community, something which can provide the same type of fulfilment as working on free software projects can.
As an open source maintainer, it was important not to just drop off the planet and have people think he died or something. He's got torches to pass.
You, sir, are a fish. Good luck on the path!
This really resonates. I'm a dev/sysadmin/whatever with 15+ years of experience and I've been seriously considering applying for a job at my local Tractor Supply.
I've been having trouble finding consistent work for the last year but was recently accepted into a recruitment network. Almost every posting on the network's job board is for AI/agentic bullshit (many of them in defense contexts) and I just can't bring myself to apply for any of them. I won't be able to fake the required enthusiasm. I've been through 4/5/6? hype cycles over the course of my career and I'm just over it all. Maybe the AI bubble will burst? Maybe it won't? Either way, it takes the fun out of what I've enjoyed doing -- even if it's because it's all anyone wants to talk about. Layer all of the surveillance* and age verification crap on top of that and ... I want off this train.
*Anecdote: I was a chaperone on an elementary school field tried yesterday and there were >8 cameras on the bus. This amount of surveillance and accompanying normalization of it hasn't prevented or even helped rectify multiple incidents my child has had while riding on school buses. So, all of the downsides and no upsides.
This is so camp.
Been thinking the same lately…
I was about to comment something like "happy for OP, he's very fortunate to have enough to be able to simply retire" when I read the bit about Home Depot.
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
I love learning about computers, programming, and math so much. I actually got into tech as a career pretty late. For many years I worked as a art fabricator/carpenter in the art world.
I only got good enough at programming to get a job in tech because I became obsessed with the Curry-Howard Correspondence as a backdoor into learning math.
I've always had a wide array of interests. I live on a half acre property with a giant garden and a shop that is bigger then my actual house. I've always split my free time between exploring and learning about computers, gardening, radios, and carpentry, fixing old machines, etc.
The shift in my lived work experience with AI has substantially demotivated me from programming and computers in my free time. A million times over I would rather pull weeds or clean my Bridgeport mill.
I've always wished I could go back to a 1990s experience where the computer lived in the den, the internet was only somewhat monetized, the future was utopian.
OP's plan to fallback to 1980s era technology is appealing but also somewhat depressing. Not only do I really like and enjoy learning about computers, but also making this kind of individualistic decision doesn't really get us to a better place as a society.
I wish we had heeded the warnings of researchers like Sherry Turkle who identified the impacts of technology on the individual as far back as the 1980s.
I would go offline but never retire from tech, I would miss music terribly. I would also move all my ebooks over to an e-reader and that's it. If I can live somewhere offline with my music player and e-reader that's fine.
> 1980. Neo-Amish.
I've not a new 'retirement' plan to voluntarily be stuck in the '80s.
Damn, I am a beginner in my coding journey, and even I fell the fatigue - the fear that no matter what I do , it can be easily replicated with AI, I now have to think extra hard to make sure that a new project I am embarking on cannot be easily vibe coded in a weekend, it exhausting - I feel the spirit of coding, building together is dying as everyone wants to monetize and sell to PE firms, everyone wants a million or billion $ valuation, is open source and community dead ?
If this is viral marketing for a typewriter company, it's genius.
Last manufacturer closed shop late-2010s (Indian).
But if you haven't ever composed on the OG desktop, you should give it a type.
Echoes of _The Soul of a New Machine_
>I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
If memory serves, the note left by a burnt-out engineer on their workstation when they left abruptly.
60/yo and still loving it. I get burned out every couple of years but new technology always refreshes my admiration for the field I chose. It never ceases to amaze me the capacity to reinvent itself, from the early days of dbase and clipper, it came the dial up internet, the craze of FrontPage and webmasters, the move to client/server, Python, Ruby, Go, then mobile apps, Swift, Java, Kotlin, then back to basics with Node and PostgreSQL, painful deviations like React, Tailwinds, NextJS, I've learned them all. And now we're finally here, in front of us, the promised land, AI, the final frontier, one of the most beautiful pieces of technology my wrinkled eyes have ever seen. I am more excited than ever.
See, through the years I've left behind an immense graveyard of dead projects I never had the time to finish and now they're all rising from the dead at the same time, like a really bad zombies movie, like MJ's thriller video, all dancing to the tune of AI, all coming alive in minutes because of AI.
This is it, Valhalla, Elysium, Paradise, here we are, I am already dead and I don't know it, but I love it.
Then they came for the programmers but there were no one to come for because they all have taken up farming.
I think about this a lot but I also kind of feel like I'll never truly be able to retire in a way that matters.
"maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat." XD
I feel this
update after reading the comments: a good portion of the HN community is so f*ing judgmental
I would follow him if I could. Most of my colleagues as well.
I've been smartphone free for over 5 years now. It's been liberating, but its just not enough. I still use my computer to doomscroll for an hour or 2 a day. It takes me hours of hiking alone in the woods afterwards too unwind all the stress and distraction that comes with being connected.
Ironically right around February I started to have similar thoughts as Chad, that perhaps I should become Neo Amish as he calls it. Like Chad, I like disconnected, non-AI technology just fine. But anything that spies on me or tries to modify my behavior needs to go.
Maybe I'll mail Chad a letter and see if he wants to be my penpal.
Chad has been one of the strongest voices in the open source community for the past few years. When we were building tools for OSS developers we valued his opinion highly.
This is the final nail for me, that something is rotten in the state of open source.
There's the "old guard" of open source, who seem to spend most of their time arguing about semantics, governance, and the nth kubernetes telemetry solution.
So where is the "new guard"? There's been a lot of interesting work in open source AI, but it seems to me like a championed effort cannot exist without a new paradigm around collaboration and monetization. More and more, we see the new guard question or outright deny new contributors due to AI slop PRs and issues continue to pile up.
There desperately needs to be a sexy revitalization of open source, starting with young developers. I thought it would be from the YC-esque startups of the world, who use open source as a way to garner legitimacy, good will, and a top-of-funnel upselling motion.
"Trad" open source is greying - and the new wave is more of a ripple. It has no shared identity, and no champion.
To the OP...
Best wishes. You are an inspiration.
I'm curious about one thing thouhg:
Or profession is very young and what annoys me the most: i can do my job only on a computer and i'm very good in knowing how to use it and i also use it for everything.
Privat and work has merged into being in front of a screen.
The joke of starting a bakery or doing other manual labor jobs is quite common.
It might just be time for this to transform.
I would retire yesterday if i could afford it though.
This is a great choice
Folks might find the following beautiful framework from Indian Philosophy very useful here.
One's Life is structured w.r.t. three axes;
1) The Goals of Life aka Purusartha - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puru%E1%B9%A3%C4%81rtha They are;
2) The Stages of Life aka Asrama - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%C5%9Brama_(stage) They are; 3) Finally, your "duty" aka Karma in Society. In today's world, we generally equate this with work which enables us to earn our livelihoods. This should be in harmony with the Goals and Stages of Life i.e. at each stage the mix of goals and emphasis on them are different.Understand your current stage in life, Manage/Control your goals w.r.t. that stage and Adjust your duty accordingly for a Happy and Fulfilled Life.
Reminds me the Three Body Problem book and the scientists suddenly killing themselves because they cannot see any point to doing science any longer.
While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.
Every convert to Orthodoxy I've seen in the US is like this. Converts to Catholicism, too, but definitely not cradle Catholics.
Must be nice.
I wish I could do the same.
I wish I could retire...
I feel like there's honestly a space for "Greybeards Inc".
Maybe a consultancy of people who have seen and done it all before - Very selective of their clients.
I am very fatigued by tech and AI too.
I do find occasional pleasure in personal projects, creating exotic programming languages that are not text-based, compilers and stuff like that, but otherwise coding work makes me wanna puke.
This isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure.
wait home depot is hiring??
Even good ideas can be ridiculous if you take it 100% radically literal.
Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.
Good luck with what you're doing. It feels like everyone's shipping more but thinking less and with open source you really feel it with the PRs and issues. All the best!
Legend
I am clearly in the minority in these parts.
I find it intellectually alarming (but not surprising) that someone would say something like "[the north sentinelese tribe] are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday".
"way of life" is doing a lot of obscuring here.
It took centuries of hard work to leave that behind.
It's insurance. The same way you don't want to go too far with germline editing. There are genetic variations that you might need to save your species some day. The cost of that is people suffer.
We may need a close connection to that way of life again and not have to relearn it from scratch.
This strikes me more as one of those things that is shocking to hear but not incorrect. People get more upset that someone said it without actually having a counterargument.
He's not saying that we _should_ live that way but that we might need to.
I understand the value of things like a seed bank.
But in no way is "their knowledge" (which I think is an overly generous use of that term) - acting in the role of a knowledge seed bank.
I think you're underestimating how much we simply don't know about how to live that primitively. Maybe you could do it in small groups of people. Maybe up to a dozen. Most experiments at this fail hilariously early by the way.
Can you do it and sustain hundreds of people? I doubt it. At least they're here to be potentially observed. You don't have to _totally_ wing it. People living like that through history had bigger day to day survival concerns than documenting the finer details of sustaining their continued existence to us.
The last closest analog we have to them would be the Hadza people and they've had agriculture since 500 CE...
It has been said that hunter gatherers spend a lot less time working and a lot more time just hanging out and socializing than agriculturalists. It would be nice if we could use all of our modern technology to get back to that kind of work/life balance.
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.
Huh. I never thought so many people would be against work/life balance and spending time in nature
Godspeed.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315784
Text inside images is not a11y. That's a paddlin'.
I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.
Yup, I was interested what he has to say, but when I saw the scan I've lost my interest.
Same. The format was a big turn off.
While I share the sentiment, this feels like an extreme, nuclear reaction which might be irreversible. I understand the fatigue, and resentment, but if you are about to be a family, you are going to find that typewriters aren't the acceptable mode of communication nowadays, and that you need some money to raise children.
Even if you are already wealthy and don't actually need to work anymore, going off the grid completely is still the wrong move. There's a lot of ways to spend less time online, improve your privacy and reduce tracking, and still benefit from some of the actual, real advantages of tech.
And the last and maybe most important thing is, we are currently on a roller coaster of disruption and frankly some daunting prospects - but we don't know what's right around the next turn. What the development landscape might be like in a few years, or maybe what kind of new problems will emerge that are not yet clear.
The right move is to take some time off, clear your head and decide if you stopped liking tech altogether, or you just needed a break. If you still like problem solving, limit your AI use, stay effective and skillful, and find ways to enjoy your skill.
I've never met an engineer who actually stopped enjoying problem solving.
Very nice performative piece.
The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it.
AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.
Nah, I think AI has fundamentally changed the perception of the value of most tech labour in the eyes of the people running the show.
The end result of it is that the average dev position becomes seen as dispensable, competition goes up, workload goes up, compensation stagnates.
Being able to escape the rat race and retire is a privilege though. The rest of the rats gotta keep running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
I retired due to not only AI, but other reasons this industry has become something I don't like.
I'm fortunate with regards to the timing and being able to do it, but if I could have a job like the one I had ten years ago I'd still be working.
Having the ability to "retire" has nothing to do with AI. *Wanting* to retire has a lot to do with AI.
It can be both.
I mean, were phones in 1980 considered dystopian?
I plan to do the same eventually. I want to buy a shop and become a mechanic, primarily flipping cars, and doing actual repairs for a fair price. I need to get to the point where the business venture only needs to do a bit better than break even, and I'll quit this industry. After more than 20 years in tech, I've done a lot of cool things with smart people, but almost none of what I built still exists (every tech stack is a Ship of Theseus) and AI is just making working in corporate miserable.
I personally like using AI tools and experimenting with local models, but I hate being subjected to the output of AI from other people. There's such a large competency gap that exists in the human operators, and AI does not ameliorate it, it makes it worse, but so many have drank the koolaid that it solves everything and eliminates that gap. I won't become a luddite, I will still build technical things at home, but I miss being able to see the tangible fruits of my labor and getting an honest thank you from another human being I've helped out through my work. I miss the permanence of physical things. I'm also tired of arguing with people who think their incompetence + AI outranks my competence and expertise.
my wife wants to open a used book store and I want to open a coffee shop inside of it in some nice college town somewhere. That's one of our options once we're empty nesters and the retirements are funded (~9 years hopefully). We would only need to operate at cost so it wouldn't really be a business, more like a hobby.
weird boomer flex but okay
did Chad, or whoever posted this for him, post this as a jpg with no alt text? wow, thought Chad was a bit better than that (I can't even read this thing easily and im not considered to be visually impaired)
"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"
yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.
what's the point in posting scan (?) of paper online instead of just publishing it normal way, so people can adjust font and actually read it? especially since you are anyway at computer and posting it on website and bsky
and why announce to the world your noble cause. why not just do it.
Am I the only person in this thread who thought this might be a joke? The job at Home Depot in particular, and this bit:
> I haven't used a phone or the Internet in my personal life since February 6. To communicate, I use the USPS, or maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat. I love it. I want to be part of a society of people likewise inclined.
I'm not at all certain though. Chad posted it on LinkedIn and Bluesky, so if it is a joke he's definitely committing to the bit.
Here's Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, the person Chad names as taking over the Open Source Pledge, posting about it - https://bsky.app/profile/vlad.website/post/3mmw3jigagk2q - which makes it seem more real.
Update: more evidence in-favor of "not a joke" is this 19th Feb 2026 video from Chad's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc - at 16:22
> I don't not want to be someone who helps lay the groundwork for the remnant. I'm going to call it the remnant, a remnant of humanity that doesn't take the bargain. I have no idea what's next. Alright, we're starting Gift magazine. Whoa. I went to Penguin Bookstore. I got an address book, and I got a ridiculous planner. And we got our P.O. Box. Box 200. Oh, and I also switched to paper billing. Paper bank statements at Dollar Bank. Puzzle gaming. Figuring out the offline.
Update 2: here's a blog entry from 19th Feb that accompanied that video: https://openpath.quest/2026/spitting-out-the-agentic-kool-ai...
> Long story short, I’ve decided to dial back my engagement with mainstream technology, and to launch a print magazine called Gift to network with like-minded individuals.
So I'm sold, there's humor in the presentation, but it's a real decision.
Have you ever met Chad? I have no doubt this is sincere.
I have, and he struck me as someone with a quirky sense of humor.
Hence my uncertainty - I'm not saying "this is obviously a joke", I'm saying "is there a chance this could be a joke?"
(See updates to my original comment, I now suspect it is not a joke having watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc )