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.
How can one continue living in a small apartment with lead and asbestos hazards is beyond me.
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)
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
"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?
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...)
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.
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...
Textbook FIRE strategy.
He did work toward it by saving and living frugally.
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.
I suspect the best solution will be architectural, which promises to be a pain.
The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.
So being financial independent even if undecided on what you want to build is still way better.
Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend
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
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.
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.
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.
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
It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.
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.
No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.
Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
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.
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.
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).
I’m sorry, what? Have you been paying any attention at all to the state of the industry lately?
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.
They're getting outcompeted.
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.
Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.
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 will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
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.
Some people will just risk doing without. Most will be fine; that's how insurance works.
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.
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 this process (either the cognitive work to come up with them, or the typing work to bring them to life) takes away most of my fun.
Or is this just everywhere now?
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...
Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.
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.
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 had that shortly after ChatGPT came out, but as nobody was using it, 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.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
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. :)
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
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.
“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).
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 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).
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
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
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...
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.
My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
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.
I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, I appreciate you noting their name as it gave me something to google/learn.
What I was speaking about was more the claim that the author had veered into fanaticism. That doesn't seem true.
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.
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.
Right now we are in a very unstable place but it might not be permanent!
* 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
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.
21 days left. I don't plan to look back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1jgcfx9/pe...
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.
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.
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...
Healthy and stable relationships sre built on care and being good people, not what you're job provides.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
Also, how did he post this if he isn't using the Internet?
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 unable to find the video, but here is an interesting story: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/02/25/172886170/a-co...
The entire local Amish community now comes and helps him tend his property, raised him a barn.
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 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.
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.
<joke> I just hope he doesn't start mailing packages to people in the tech industry in the next few years.</joke>
But it's not responsive! Hadn't he heard of mobile-first? ;)
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."
Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.
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
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.
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 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 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.
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'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.
The hardest part will be beating all the competition for the job.
People want to drive the Zamboni. It’s one of the coolest jobs out there.
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
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.
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.
But if you haven't ever composed on the OG desktop, you should give it a type.
I've not a new 'retirement' plan to voluntarily be stuck in the '80s.
>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.
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.
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;
- 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 )
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.
Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.
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.
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.
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.
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.
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.
"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.