Memes

This is mostly true, but farming/ranching is constant work once you have even a modest amount of land and livestock.

I grew up in a low-net-worth family, working on a farm that has been in our hands since 1873. I worked 3 jobs while studying my butt off, and eventually got a degree in Electrical Engineering with a Computer Science minor. I was recruited into various government programs and defense contracting companies, made my way to consumer electronics and medical device companies, then finally free- and open-source hardware/software. I now gratefully hold a very prestigious position while living full-time in my RV while prepping a fully self-sustainable homestead back on my family's ranch.

There is no substitute for the beauty of nature in the small amount of time we're able to appreciate it. That said, there are many many many to enjoy nature without sacrificing vacations for the vocation of fixing fence, herding cattle, plowing fields, eradicating invasive species, calling the game warden on poachers, fixing fence....

I have dreamed of this life since before I was in tech.

I was born in a passive-solar, earth-sheltered house that my dad designed and built himself. Instead of a stack of Playboys he had Mother Earth News in the back of the closet. My parents owned one of the first Priuseseses in the US.

For a wonderful few years I had this life. I raised pigs and chickens and managed my property. I got into the best shape of my life, physically and mentally, and just stepping out of my front door made me feel more alive than I've felt since I had to move back to the burbs. (I don't think people realize how little oxygen they get in urban and suburban environments.)

Though I am stuck in the suburbs for now I am determined to get back to that. I would rather wake up to a hungry pig tearing apart its enclosure than to another fucking meeting.

I farm now, but I still run my own infra and build apps. I just do it in the winter when I have nothing else to do.

And I don't miss the users. One. Single. Bit.

30+ years experience with computing, and I hate them.

They only ever do what you tell them to, and they’re not even doing that anymore.

Depends on the person and what they've dealt with. I've worked IT since '99, but I'm not really burnt out. There are definitely things I dislike, but I still enjoy tech, I still enjoy gaming, and I'm still interested in future tech, even if I do agree I don't like the direction it's going in.

Part of it is that I seem to have a pretty decent burnout warning sensor, and I just stop whatever no work thing moving me that way for a while. Yes I like games, but I like reading, I like climbing, I like biking, I like photography, I like nature, I like the stars, etc.

Another reason may be that while I dislike the way some tech is going, I have other worries about either nontech stuff or just the main reason tech stuff is going in wrong directions, and those worry me more, so tech can still be an escape from worse worries.

My original plan when going to IT university was to make 1 money-milking website and move to a forest in middle of nowhere...

Surprised no one pointed out that it is a screenshot from the movie oblivion. If you have not seen oblivion, go watch it. It has an excellent soundtrack by M83

Not far off. I wouldn't do well with owning and maintaining a farm, but damn do I yearn for a career change often

If I had to start over I'd probably start with a plumbers apprenticeship. I like the work, and there's something to be said about having "completed" a job at the end of a day that you don't really get even if you close a feature.

The issue isn't the tech itsefl but the corporate world and its effects throughout society.

There is a lot of cool tech, but used for the most asinine products. 2015-2016 was especially terrible with the accessibility of IoT. Everyone and their mother had a Kickstarter with a common everyday item with wireless capability tacked into it.

No, my bottle doesn't need Bluetooth.

Nah, I like PC gaming too much to want that. What I want is to be free of capitalism.

I love growing things and I also love tinkering, building, finding new gadgets.

Have been a techie all my life so far, will be a techie until I die.

People that get tired of tech jobs, might not be because of tech, rather the people they have worked with and the unrelenting pull of a capitalist society.

It tends to be more “I want a thing that just works.” rather than no technology, but yes.

Self-hosting services that are reliable and don’t get in my way, not using cloud-connected smart devices, running Linux instead of Windows, etc.

Was working on a PhD in CS focused on industrial cybersecurity, though current events involving the three letter agency that funded my research lead to me crashing out and now I'm trying to get into law school and do immigration law. Far too frail and pasty to buy a farm though

Time for this classic

I grew up on a farm, hell no. If you think farming is going to be any different you’re delusional. It’s also full of physical labor that takes a toll on you.

But give it a go if you want just don’t think farming or ranching is simpler it’s not. And now you alone take on the responsibility of managing many lives be they plants or animals.

Yes it’s rewarding keeping a baby calf alive in -30 weather but be prepared to wake up every couple hours to keep watch on the animals. Also say goodbye to vacations. Without a family member or 5 to help out it’s hard to take a vacation without worrying that coyotes got into the chicken coop or other shenanigans.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General's Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

The tech may be ancient for us, but it's a superb book.

As a long time tech user within about 5 years of retirement, I don't quite agree with this for a couple of reasons. Tech is fine if its tech that serves me. I'm certainly not going to be doing JIRA updates in retirement, but I'll absolutely use a web browser, word processor, and probably a coding environment for my own personal projects. Retrocomputing is much more appealing to me too.

Also, I think most folks in IT have no idea how hard farming actually is, both mental and physically. Farming is really hard work, and having to manage some of the same annoying things we deal with in IT such as following complicated regulations, dealing with asinine people in power over you, and delivery dates.

The problem with tech is that you aren't usually doing the thing that made you want to go into tech. For me this was creating things and solving interesting problems. Most of my days are meetings, dealing with clueless people and having to deal with leadership and product team changes that ruin already completed work. Thankfully being at large tech companies has enabled me to hopefully retire in my early 40s. I can then continue with tech in a way that is meaningful to me while also spending a lot more time outside. The PNW is beautiful and I intend to see much more of it .

Definitely not everyone :) I am bad at agriculture, even worse at raising animals, so computer it is for quite a long while from now. But I would really appreciate an opportunity to just sit by the sea and stare at it for days on end

I prefer cabin in the woods, but my paycheck says small house in a shitty neighborhood.

I was a nix admin. For two decades. Printers are banned in my house. My only IoT device is a Roku stick. I have 6 geese, 4 ducks, 14 chickens, too many cats, one acre, a number of raised beds, fruit trees and grape vines. I'm now a handyman.

I fit the profile.

I work in tech and a lot of my interests are geared around computers. I have other interests as well, and also enjoy being outdoors, but can’t imagine never wanting to see a computer again.

Honestly it's just the Internet. Tech is fucking awesome, as long as it's decoupled from anything and anyone else trying to control, monitor, impose, or otherwise fuck with the tech that's mine, bought or built fairly. And also the untold psychological torture the Internet is just constantly inflicting on us.

It was a thing in Ukraine during the 2020-2021 boom. the sheer amount of engineers who saved up enough money to buy a house in the nearby village communities before the 2022 invasion was legit insane. part of that was remote work, part of that was interest in growing your own things. i remember talking to one NLP engineer who legit planned an apple garden and wanted to transition into that business domain over time. in some other cases, folks wanted to have self-reliant sustainability (yeah, we kinda had doomsday preppers).

In IT for over 30 years… 💯 %

Lie.

It's the fucking users i want away from

Can confirm. I’ve been working in tech for 16 years. I now own a house in the forest.

Yes and no. Just like John Wick still had his hitman tools hidden in his house, tech workers who say they want to buy a farm and be a luddite will not be able to resist having a hidden server closet in their farmhouse.

Well, it's driven me to Debian.