It's not that it has strictly to do with being outside or away from the computer (that's nice though) but for me it's that you still get to build and be proud of what you've done.

When I do work away from the computer and more in farm/homestead situations, I'm still drawn to using technology to solve problems (e.g. Automating certain tasks with microcontrollers), so it's not a rejection of my $job.

I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.

Have to disagree with the article though, I don't think it has anything to do with a mythos.

Are you saying this from experience homesteading? Or from imagining what homesteading is like?

Once you get past the storybook fantasy version of homesteading, a lot of it is drudgery and unwelcome surprises. You may love finding and fixing problems now, but when the problems are coming faster than you can fix them, each one requires a lot of labor (or cash) to fix, and you haven't touched your fun project for months because you're too busy putting out critical fires, it doesn't seem so fun any more.

Of course farming and carpentry will be more fun to a software engineer who is doing it as a hobby or in retirement, than the work they did in their job. Even if you “switch” to it as a source of income, it is far different to have another career and set of skills to fall back on, than to be doing it out of necessity.

I'm sure doing homesteading at the fringes of Canada is different than doing it in the middle of Europe.

I think that for certain individuals that sort of mythological status ascribed to being a frontiersman or a person who can do everything themselves definitely influences how they perceive a potential job or method of living.

Thanks for reading though!!

The difference is doing it out of necessity vs. doing it out of choice. Nobody fetishizes being worked to the bone in grinding poverty. Tech people are by and large well-educated and comfortable and dream of a utopia where they can be close to nature and do tasks that feel meaningful and human in an of themselves (vs. hyper-abstracted acronym-laden functional teams value-adds that often only provide the indirect satisfaction of "I'm doing my job and my boss is happy"). "I made a chair" and "I grew some carrots" are instantly relatable and valuable to anyone.

Source: I quit my tech job and moved to the woods 8 years ago, but would only do so because I don't need to worry about grinding a survival out of it.

I came to understand the "purposelessness" of my career very early on; when I decommissioned a bare metal server from a datacenter after finishing the deploy of it's replacement and realised that the old server was the first unit I'd racked when I started in the position 4 years ago.

That was ~20 years ago. Nothing I've had a hand in building / maintaining has "survived" for more than ~7 years.

My Dad worked to build houses. Prior to my IT career I'd laboured for him and played my small part in the creation of many homes around where I grew up. They'll be there for a hundred years maybe.

Quitting the ephemeral world of IT to work on building a homestead and creating tangible things that directly keep humans alive seems like an obvious calling to me.

The constant evolution of "tech" is a blessing and a curse.

In fact, I'm also very grateful that I got to try a wide range of shitty manual labor job as a student. So many people would kill for a cushy office job.

EDIT: Might I also add, I think some engineers - especially those that have reached FIRE, enjoy the idea of LARPing a homestead / farming life. If you have enough money to not feel the stress, you can have a smaller farm.

The harsh reality is that operating a small farm can be brutal. You're at the very bottom of the food-chain, as far as the agricultural business goes.

They still had some dairy cows though.. and I still remember (over 30 years later!) the almost physical wall of smell that assaulted you going into that barn when it was all closed up because it was -20ºF outside. Nothing romantic about that!

I think programmers - good ones at least - like building things, like seeing things go. We care deeply about what we can make in the world. We are in a OODA loop, where we put in effort, fix things, and they get better.

But often building stuff becomes jammed up, organizationally. There's other people injecting priorities and concerns. There's a whole org, that's utterly dependent on us, that thinks it want things, but don't understand what we are bargaining over, doesn't have the essential capabilities to see the truths, affinities, struggles, and joys we feel. We're on our own island of empathy with products. And the outcome is always so unknown, riding this organization ship.

The idea of going out there homesteading speaks, to me, to a desire to have a loop where there's less people injecting themselves. A very recent highlight from Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich, 1973) comes to mind,

"Survival, justice, and self-defined work. I take these to be fundamental to any convivial society."

Via https://bsky.app/profile/gordon.bsky.social/post/3ll5hgh3el2...

I gotta admit, that on a day where it's just about chasing some elusive bug or bugs, even I say to myself: "What the hell did I do today?" even though I might have spent 8-10 solid hours actively working. If the bug is hard enough to find I feel like I accomplished nothing nor have anything to show for it.

And sometimes, when you add to the fact that as devs we have all these perks in the office like free snacks, being able to go out for lunch, free sodas, free coffee, or WFH etc. and for what? We accomplished nothing!

Conversely, you might meet blue collar workers who has to, absolutely has to commute to a job site (no WFH for them), busts their rear to get something real and tangible done. Like for example, setting up electrical, or building a frame, or fixing a major plumbing issue, or doing drywall, or painting an entire house, or doing an entire roof in the heat etc. And sometimes these people barely get their bathroom, lunch and/or coffee breaks. It really makes us seem spoiled in comparison.

And yes, I know that it's kinda denigrating to use the word "real" to describe anything but software, but, what I mean, is that most non-software people only understand finished and shipped software as real. They don't that understand DB schemas, software specs, MVPs, for example, etc. is also real as well. And they certainly don't understand time spent on thinking about data structures and algorithms as anything real or tangible. Especially if you spend most time planning properly before you code.

Anyways, we want to prove, at least to ourselves, that we can actually create something that everyone can see, touch, feel, pick up, eat, stand on, sit on, etc. And we want to prove that we can have same high standards and craftsmanship this kind of work that we have for code.

Yeah, some of us have a chip on our shoulder about that.

When I was growing up, the metric for having done something were things like: All the hay is baled and we moved it all into a loft, or we finished shingling the roof.

Working in a technical position, it feels much vaguer. Maybe I finished a project, but then again, maybe there's a bug, and I'm back working on what I thought was done. Maybe I made a tool accessible online, but now there's a new tech stack and my tool is irrelevant unless I update it. It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't.

It's interesting that it feels like that though, because I certainly didn't have to throw hay only one time, and I didn't have to scrape paint from a wall only one time. I suppose I'm interested in why it feels more real and less repetitive, and maybe part of that is what you point out, that people outside of the field just don't understand what the work that tech workers do consists of in actuality.

I feel this every time I touch CSS. Sometimes I spend hours just fiddling with it, and my code commit is a few characters. And what's worse, it's the thing I stumbled on in the first 10 minutes of debugging, but that, for some reason, never worked that I tried again out of desperation, after not getting anything else to work (an hour later) and that I'm now trying again for some reason. Yet, for some reason, it works this time. CSS makes me feel stupid.

- Simplify (whether or not this is misguided, it's part of the appeal).

- Autonomy. Being able to, even partially, move off-grid decreases your reliance on society.

- Physical / nature. Sitting at a desk all day definitely has a toll.

There's several No true Scotsman comments here, but IMO there's nothing wrong with attempting this lifestyle. If someone decides (and can afford) to live more simply, it doesn't bother me any. Good for them!

I think the negativity might be because every frikin' one of them tries to turn into a snake oil selling influencer, and we're just seeing influencer fatigue setting in.

"Plato saw Diogenes washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, 'Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn't now be washing lettuces,' and that he with equal calmness made answer, 'If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn't have paid court to Dionysius."

I would rather posit that most tech jobs have a negative societal impact and it's difficult to find a company which isn't focusing on fucking the maximum amount of profit out of their customers while utilising the cheapest lubricant.

But there are a lot of tech jobs that aren't like that as well, and I think people have similar feelings about wanting to escape into a more natural world in those ones too. The sum total of which are positive and which are negative is certainly up for debate though. I actually have another post I started writing about the negative second-order effects of certain outcomes of software development in the last decade or so.

A few years ago something snapped and I started cancelling things like landscapers. Even trivial crap like mowing my own lawn and cooking my own meals is, on average, significantly more rewarding than sitting at a computer all day. There is definitely a psychological impact to letting other parties manage large aspects of your residence.

If "shower thoughts" are helpful to you, try a few hours of hard labor in the sun. You may be amazed to discover how far the spectrum of background metal processing capabilities extends. Any notion that time spent at the computer is proportional to progress with code/work/etc. is absolutely insane to me. It's almost as if you get more things done on the computer the less you use it.

> so few Americans are familiar with the actual work behind jobs in the agricultural sector or related ones, I would argue that for many Americans the reality of this type of work is almost indistinguishable from fables or myth in their psychological context, due to lack of exposure. Due to that seeming separation from their mental context of what work is, it enhances the feeling of escapism which this work-fantasy provides

These fantasies always seem perplexing to those of us who grew up with exposure to actual farming life. Running a modern farm is hard work. Taking it a step further to the idea of homesteading would bring unthinkable amounts of labor, difficulty, and a realization that the old office job wasn't so bad after all.

Of the few people who actually pursue these fantasies, it usually takes the form of a hobby farm or some backyard gardening with ample injections of cash to keep things moving.

I think when you're someone who grew up with exposure to the lifestyle of farming, it gets easier to see that the escapism is possible because of how rare it is for people to interact with people whose main employment is farming on a regular basis.

It is honestly pretty interesting from a historical perspective to think about what this means as a shift in the populace's opinion towards certain kinds of work, because we're really entering unforeseen territory in US history where no one will even really understand first-hand what a version of the US where the vast majority of humans living there are engaged in agricultural labor on a regular basis lookd like, if that makes sense.

Sure you save money by milking your cow, but how much is one vet visit? Unless it's in your blood, trying to go from techies to farmers is just stupid.

Edit to add: one of the principal differences between software and farming is we are one "git checkout" away from having another chance to fix it. In agriculture, you get another chance... next year.

Eventually, you get tired of it. Doing something simple becomes ever more attractive. Me, I still teach tech, but I also build stone walls.

It's not so much about ownership, but about operating on concrete things that you can point to, instead of spinning up virtual machines in the cloud.

Building software without agile or tickets or meetings feels just as good. It's what I've been doing for the last five years. It feels nice again.

There are a multitude of reasons why one might not like being a programmer, but most of them have nothing to do with programming itself. It's other people. Other engineers or managers or parasites. People who think antisocial behavior is okay, or worse, that it's the way to get ahead in life.

Toxic people make everything suck. I worked extremely hard to stop being even a little toxic. I wish more people would realize how their behavior affects others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tjic

I like reading discussion on this topic. Not that I've ever seriously considered this, but still interesting to read about.

I wouldn't say it will suck the life out of you. I suppose that depends on your personality. But I'd agree that there's more physical labor involved, even today with modern machines, than most people fantasizing about the idea probably realize.

But even knowing how hard the work can be, there are days when I step away from the keyboard at 5pm and head out to shovel manure or harvest crops for a few hours with a lighter mood than I had all day, because there's something "real" about it that's refreshing after a day of working with the unreal.

So I get why people dream about it. I'd just warn them to spend a week or two's vacation as an "intern" on a farm to see what it's like before quitting the keyboard job and buying 40 acres.

Metaphorically, farming can be far less life-sucking. There is something refreshing about just getting stuff done without any of the corporate BS to navigate. I just think that a lot of people in the tech industry aren't seeing the downsides, and only see the ways in which it's better than their career.

Is it though? It's not like the repetitive work of milking cows or shoveling manure every day is any less of a drudgery than office work.

And, if anything, farmers hereabouts seem to be more prone to the sort of self-destructive behaviours you'd expect from people who's life lacks meaning. Drinking all you've earned for example. Or getting into fights over nothing in particular.

I definitely wouldn't tell a tech guy with no farming experience to just jump into it. Get a few chickens or something, and see what it's like to depend on you for food and water every day, whether it's 100 degrees or a blizzard that day. Or plant a 10x10 garden in your backyard and see what it's like to pull weeds in July heat.

And don't expect to make money (or even break even) at it. Farming today only makes money if you go large-scale, which isn't what anyone dreams about, or if you find a niche and are really good at marketing something like artisan cheese. Even people who know what they're doing struggle to make that work.

For many, the "homesteading" labor is an fulfilling and concrete complement to lucrative but abstract desk work, not a replacement.

It takes the place of idle hobbies like consuming more media on screens, lifting abitrary weights or running in place on a treadmill, etc

It's natural to assume we'd be pretty deeply wired to productively tend to our own lives and our own well-being in very concrete way, and many people who intentionally take up neglected homesteading tasks at their own pace and convenience often find it ameliorates many of the odd feelings of depression, anxiety, restlessness, etc that hung over them previously.

We probably shouldn't be doing anything in particular all day, but doing concrete productive things in a world where so many things are abstract and alienating can provide great balance.

Every industry that has suffered from over production ends up cheapening and removing significant elements of artisanal beauty. If the AI hype is to be believed we are in the cusp of that for software engineering and just about any other knowledge work for that matter.

Fields -> factory -> office -> ?

Second, even if my job gets destroyed by changing tech that doesn't make farming an attractive option. It's dangerous, it wears your body down super hard, and the pay is garbage (which isn't very just tbh, but economics rarely are). I don't know what I'll do if my career goes up in a poof of smoke next year, but farming will be very low on the list no matter what I do.

As AI takes over creative work, we won’t need humans to sit at a desk, so they can be employed in subsistence farming while AI VCs make record profits.

After some point you'd rather you didn't have to do that 9-5 at all and become depressed a bit by the fact you have to spend so much time a day on something that doesn't fundamentally concern you and you don't therefore fundamentally care about. The fact it takes up your time and energy, and you don't get to get out of it until you are old and worn out unless you hit some lottery in the meanwhile.

The author gives strong wordcel vibes, it's sad to read tbh.

And no real insult taken if you see me as being pretty verbal, I am, though I can rotate a shape too as evidenced through my job.

Most programmers don’t really seem to understand that programming isn’t really their job. It’s an illusion. Their job is to create value to the shareholders. That’s not really that much fun, and once the joy of writing and reading code is slowly squeezed away from their position is when those with sanity still intact start thinking “Man, I ought to get the fuck up out of here and find a real job or something.” The really lucky ones are outdoorsy folks that can afford to do the homesteading thing, or are willing to forego the immense compensation that tech work so often allures them with.

Just my two cents. I was blessed to retire in my thirties, so I could be entirely out of touch, though I hear many things.

It's the people we work with and for that turn the job into a dismal grind.

The goal of capitalism is to get enough money to live on the revenue of your own wisely-invested capital instead of providing the wage labor paid for by other people's capital.

Why is farming or woodworking seen as less alienating than being at a computer?

And why does it feel so impossible for us to form the communities that would give us the kind of meaning that we really seem to desire when we're working in these sorts of positions? It seems almost universal that working at a computer means we feel isolated, even when we talk in meetings all day.

I think the nature part makes sense, after all, being in a field is certainly more natural than an office, but I think lots of farming is actually pretty lonely from when I've done it, with the exception of animals. But when thinking about the profession, it just feels more social. There's something there about the way we view types of work and their importance, almost metaphysically speaking.

Also have never probably experienced harvesting things in the heat. It fucking sucks.

Cows also don't care how bad the weather is, you still need to wake up at 5 am and feed and water them :)

Doesn’t the Financial Times periodically run a column called “How to Spend It”?

A hobby farm sounds like a lovely and wholesome alternative to some of the luxury pursuits they outline.