“The smartest engineers I know are burned out and starting vegetable gardens”
twitter.comI'm definitely not the smartest guy in the room by any stretch, ever, but as a decade+ practicing attorney myself and everyone I know have this same mindset. I even love my job much more than most of my peers. But the bureaucracy, nitpicking, bad attitudes that flow over from peoples' personal lives in to work, petty vindictiveness over perceived slights, frequent unpreparedness of peers and judges and outright hatred people have for one side or the other have me hellbent on extracting myself from the work force as soon as possible. And, again, I really like work. But if everyone is going to be cantankerous asses I would rather just be self-sustaining and live a solitary life with books and dogs. So many people just make professional work environments insufferable far too often.
All the things you mention are 100% true.
That said, how you react, internalize your interactions, and feel at the end of the day is completely within your control. Not to say you shouldn’t abandon everything and go for the quiet life, but that should come from a place of genuine desire, not because you are tired of a shitty work environment. I struggle with this too and sometimes need to reflect if I’m making a particular decision because of external pressures or because I really want to pursue it.
I'll add - self proclaimed gatekeepers and self-absorbed "leaders" make hypocrisy obvious, leading to a lack of motivation.
organizations have a very hard time keeping legitemacy/integrity. there's rarely real pressure to right wrongs, to get the workforce feeling invested in the org.
the Gervais principle is an all too often true framing but with organizations getting bigger and bigger, more massive conglomerates taking the lions share of business, the distance grows. and i personally think more people are awakening to the ridiculousness of the situation. Adam Curtis calls this having to accept & pretend while seeing the slow motion catastrophe "Hyper Normalization."
personally i want to think enabling smaller group empowerment is helpful, as is creating a more dynamic less static set of pairings for people. putting people on multiple groups may alao help. all this goea against the managerial desire for certainty, predictability, the push to de-risk. personally i'd like some orgs to show the bravery to try something, anything else.
I am not an attorney myself. But I have noticed that people working in law tends to rank their happiness/satisfaction levels lower that people in most other industries. Law seems to attract a large percentage of narcissistic/sociopathic individuals. Is that your impression as well?
humanity is truly a jungle
Not a new thing by any stretch, though maybe more widespread these days as more people have the money to quit work and don't need to actually earn money as farmers. Back in the pre-Obama era, one of my girlfriends moved to California for grad school from the Pennsylvania Amish country, where her dad was a former electrical engineer who decided he hated it and would rather be a farmer. His was the only non-Amish farm in the county, but he used his engineering skills to run the entire operation on waste vegetable oil, disconnected from the grid, and he obtained all of his fuel for free from the Philadelphia restaurants he sold his vegetables to. I still remember and envy staying there for a week, the way he threw away no food, instead collecting all waste and giving it to his chickens, and they in turn gave him fresh eggs every day. Having that kind of symbiotic relationship with animals seemed almost magical. I love my cats, but all they do is consume and make messes for me to clean up. He had cats too, but they spent all day in the woods, slept in his barn, and killed all of the mice for him!
reminds me a little of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast_(novel)
A common mistake around that kind of statement is that people infer that it means actually going to an agricultural lifestyle and just any other farmer and hanging the keyboard for good.
In practice, they'll start automating/building/designing new things after a few weeks. It's not a mindset that you can easily escape. They'll build a greenhouse and think about how cool it would be to setup automated watering, controlled airflow, autofeeders, etc... These things are doable for cheap. They absolutely won't stop being engineers, they'll just be engineers working on a different set of problems.
Its why I like travelling/hiking/skiing. A shit ton of puzzles to solve with delicious treats, treatments, and experiences to reward your success. Something about solving problems in the warm sun, or a calming snow fall, is very fulfilling, the multisensory experience is refreshing.
(Assuming this is sarcasm)
I am not saying that you can't take a break and do stuff that has nothing to do with problem solving. My point is that once you've built that mindset of system thinking and automating tasks, combined with skills that allow you to actually implement the routines needed for a given task, you will find it hard to not optimize daily toil.
I am not saying that this applies to everyone, but it most definitely applies to everyone I know that decided to "give up and live on a farm".
i "retired" (read, burned out) after 15 years and a failed startup attempt. loafed around and partied for 3 or 4 years.
Bought the farm. Wanted a house but not enough money, so i got a job framing. within 6 months i hired a guy i was working with and started a business framing houses just this january.
Its a lot of kinesthetic learning (and i was never in good shape let alone an athlete) which was a total 180 from what ive done my whole life.
And im now in the best shape of my life, went from hypertensive 130/80 and 80-90 pulse to 121/71 with a resting bp in the high 50s. and i started doing strength training, which is necessary to excel.
i guess it was time for a change of pace. and to round myself out. im going for the whole Renaissance man thing. Ive picked up so many skills and hobbies since i left the industry.
i still code for fun, and looking to automate some processes on the farm one day soon. namely watering.
Office Space
I'm 55 now and I'm working on a side gig that's 'skillful manual labor' and I get a lot of satisfaction from the work and from becoming (let's hope) one of the best in the world at the thing.
cf, "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work" by M. Crawford
To me, that book comes across pretty preachy and doesn't offer little in nuance between knowledge work and manual labor, a la starting a motorcycle repair business badly. It also had this "guy switches careers and needs to write a book to justify it" feel.
But I also consider Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance pretty mediocre, while others consider it life changing, so not sure how valid my opinion is.
The reviews don't particularly look good. Do you recommend it?
Thanks for the book reference. I will check it out.
The deeper I get into software engineering the more I want to cut myself off from the internet entirely when I retire. Realistically, I doubt you can do it 100%, but I wonder how far you can go without using any internet.
It's Zoom. I'm convinced. Sure there are some people that have always been remote, but I think two years of isolation has caused a cultural infection that is difficult to isolate but absolutely present.
Humans need to be around other humans, and not just their family. At my work we are trying to get team meetups scheduled for roughly April/May. I was worried people aren't ready, but turns out they are actually hungry for it.
I don’t think it’s that. I’ve been working remotely for nearly a decade now and the real problems were there before: competence and reachability.
Competence, or lack thereof is easier to hide or write off now. People aren’t always reactive or reachable.
As for being around other humans, I love that. But not colleagues. I have separate friends. You need the context switch away.
You are probably both correct, for your own situation and personality.
Please don't assume there is one universal truth that needs to be forced on others
I'll reply to you instead of the parent.
The parent has always worked remotely and has chosen that.
Everyone the past two years worked remotely and a majority NOT choose it and did not prepare either. Sure, some people turn out to prefer it. But my point is that it's unnatural and unhealthy to force any large cohort into a particular system. So we are in agreement.
For me, exactly the other way. Isolating has allowed me to understand that I don't need that connection anywhere as much as I thought I did. Like most short-lived endorphin rushes, if you go without for a few months, you find the urge fades. The pandemic has taught me that being a remote hermit is a viable option for my happiness.
> He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
From Soul of A New Machine (1981). Personal opinion, but would that we have a little (lot) more collectivism, find more ways to work together towards ends, versus saving up enough to fuck off & start our own gardens.
When my mother died I went out that day to walk, eat lunch, and keep my head straight.
It was surreal. It was like everyone was walking around in a dreamstate, unaware they would die, of the mortality of life. I'll never forget that sensation, how everyday life and consumption and entertainment and routine lull you, distract you, from the inevitabilities of life.
COVID was a fundamental disruption to life. ALmost a million Americans are dead. Not a lot by historical standards of plague, but still... a threat. And now the cold war rears its head and nuclear armageddon.
As I offhanded remarked once in a bathroom in bar that for some reason had an attendant who was discussing moving apartments, "Ah, moving is a time for reflection".
And that has been what the last couple years has been: times for reflection. A collective illusion shattered, or at least disrupted.
It's funny though, you can't make people realize this. If I and to you a week prior and yelled "you're going to die, you're a mortal and life is fleeting!" you'd just look at me like I'm crazy and go back to work. It seems like people can't get to that point until they've worked themselves tired, and earned a bit of money.
After Diocletian abdicated he grew cabbages. Maybe high pressure jobs just make people want to be outside and watch something grow. Instead of you know, spending a bunch of energy for little meaningful return in the end. Farming is the acceptance of nihilism without hedonism i guess.
Very relatable. I've started to put more of my tech related side projects on the back burner and got into working on restoring / upgrading a old truck I got at the beginning of the pandemic.
What kind of truck?
I always tell people that I'm going to quit and become a farmer. I might tell the joke enough times that it becomes true.
Yeah, but then you will get burned out from farming some day. It's what you make of it. Lot of stress in farming when your goal is profit instead of a hobby garden.
My $0.02: people are at least 60% of what makes your day job good or bad, given adequate compensation that is. Maybe try companies that are not in tech but need your talent? Go where you're celebrated, not tolerated and all that. Good boss+Coworkers+environment+pay = doesn't matter that much what you're actually doing.
Also, I was like you and others in my 20's. New career, new country, new state. Maybe become a hermit in antarctica? You get the sentiment, but I no longer feel that way, I started accepting wherever you go, not a whole lot changes that matters. Alwayd gotta take in the good with the bad. The grass is greener on the other side, but maybe unlike the current grass it is itchy when you try to walk or picnic on it.
> Lot of stress in farming when your goal is profit
Aye, there's the problem.
Almost like supporting the lavish lifestyles and endless waste of worthless middlemen sucks whether you're on a tractor, behind a lathe, or sitting at a keyboard
On a farm you're alone most of the time. No meetings. Not really any middle management. I grew up on a farm. It's damn hard work and I would never go back to that. But there is appeal in not having to be constantly coordinated, poorly, with other people.
I meant the razor thin margins due to centrally controlled food distribution and sales, and dealing with shit like computers on a tractor that have a tantrum if you replace an oil filter yourself.
Shit be physically hard and long hours, but the people responsible for it also being precarious, low income, and incredibly financially stressful are the same people that make the other stuff awful.
> dealing with shit like computers on a tractor that have a tantrum
The completely obvious solution is to not buy those tractors.
Being alone loses its appeal fast, especially if you're also alone after work or you only have spouse+kids
It sucks only if you care about that. Depends on the person a lot. I like what I do, it's almost an escape from the nightmares of life. I also don't have to be stressed all the time about paying bills. Not caring as cliché as it is, is truly freeing. I learn about cool stuff when not working or just watch netflix or something.
I wouldn't even say "when your goal is profit." I'd say "when your goal is a full plate." Growing food in quantities anywhere approaching what you can buy at the supermarket for a few dollars is remarkably hard. The number of cases of "I worked for months on those pepper plants and I got eight small peppers" or "my carrots are so small they are completely unusable" is high.
The key problem is people pushing themselves too hard. Or working for companies that exploit them. It is OK for a while but psychologically damaging long term.
Apparently the founder of Heroku went into Olive farming. https://www.wired.com/2012/09/heroku-2/
I had a friend in IT saying this this literally 20 years ago, although we didn't know the burnout word back then. I couldn't understand it at the time. But I learned, and am now retired. I occasionally get a twinge of something about not grabbing a huge FANG paycheck for a year or 5, but remind myself that money is a tool, not the goal.
I'm definitely not in the smartest engineer camp but took a break this last summer to grow tomatoes. Very therapeutic.
I'm in this tweet and I'm not sure I like it. But I have to say my veggie patch is pretty dope at the moment
The X are doing Y thing is always perpetuated by people doing Y who want to claim they’re X.
Personally, the smartest engineers I know are eating an Envy apple. They’re also a bit sleepy. They will wake up at seven tomorrow.
Farmers want to claim they are engineers?
Haha! Engineers who have given up on engineering like to think they are “the smartest engineers”.
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
I'll never work for a manager again.