Cottagecore Programmers

That's my bad! Thank you for the correction.

It is an incredible comment, haha, as you can tell I still think about it semi-regularly. Incredible that the issue is still open as well.

Best of luck with the dining table! I took a good look through your site while I was looking back up that thread that I remembered and your pieces look great. Actually, if you're in the Upper Valley, you probably aren't far at all from where I grew up. It's over near Windsor, around Mt. Ascutney.

Edit: If you or your partner like knitting, I'm sure I could prevail upon my parents to offer some of our yarn to you as a gift for the inspiration!

> it was hard for a professional working there to describe to their kids what exactly they do all day

I work remotely, and my four year old daughter asked me this morning “How does you being upstairs all day give us food?” At dinner time she always asks me “What did you do at work today?”

It’s a very odd experience trying to describe (justify?) the purpose of Zoom meetings and typing on a computer all day to a little person, and the more I attempted to come up with a coherent and reasonable explanation, the less defensible it sounded to myself as I spoke out loud. Tech is quite a strange industry to be in.

I assume said YouTube channel is funded by the revenue they get from said YouTube channel. An individual trying to replicate their efforts would likely have a different experience.

It's the ol' "person selling you X didn't get rich from X, they got rich selling people X".

>community nature of naval shipyards

I'm guessing from the other thread, this was way back in Rickover's youth as well? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450884

That's exactly it. If you have to actually do this for survival or to make functional products at the pace of making a profit it's no longer "wistful and whimsical". These fetishes come from living in a time where industry and automation has dealt with most of our problems and we can romanticize hand work, etc.

I have wondered how people who have spent their career jumping from runway to runway feel when they look back over their shoulder and only see plane wrecks at the end of derelict runways. Perhaps they made a ton of money, but it has to hurt on some level to have never seen your work amount to something.

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

The companies? The websites? Google, for example, has been in existence since 1998. If you're working on a farm, the crops don't live longer than a year. The livestock longer than that, but probably not decades - my (limited) understanding is that most cows are slaughtered around age 2 or 3. But the farm itself can, in certain circumstances, last for generations.

If you're talking houses, sure, solid walls can last decades, centuries, millennia even (cf the Pyramids). However, I think this is because stone is particularly durable. Roofs, windows, doors, anything that isn't made of really good masonry will tend to decay much quicker than that. Even states like the Roman Republic and Empire (which had probably a good ~2000 year run if we count from 509BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453) will eventually crumble and fall.

Now a tech company is a newer type of institution than a farm, but some of them are quite old - GE was founded in 1892. IBM was founded in 1911. We can also take Bell telephone and Standard Oil, both of whom were broken up by anti-trust cases, but whose descendants still live on today, as other examples of tech companies that have had lifespans similar to or greater than houses or farms.

Of course, I understand that "I built some software/racked some servers for a company 20 years ago and they're still business" isn't the same as "I put the bricks in that wall twenty years ago and the house is still there". So I agree that the individual artifacts we create in the tech industry are somewhat fleeting, compared to things made of metal and stone, even if, compared to things like music or other performing arts, where the song disappears the minute you stop playing, software running on computers is relatively lasting. And artifacts created with software, while they are a relatively new thing, may prove quite durable. Films made with Final Cut, or songs made with Pro Tools, or heck, even video games like Doom, may prove to outlast every house that you ever worked on. It's possible that 200 years from now, people will still be watching YouTube videos made today, even if, in a Ship of Theseus like fashion, every line of code and every server that YouTube is currently using has been replaced since then.

I'm not sure how deeply involved you've gotten into homesteading, and whether you are doing anything in the IT world, but if you are still a bit connected to IT then I'd suggest scratching an itch you have with software. Perhaps something that connects your homesteading to IT, so you are able to use your knowledge from both?

I've worked for smaller companies, and have software I started in 2009 that I am still working on, literally up to 15 minutes ago. I enjoy working with the client, because they are building in an area that seems to be untapped for potential. I've moved across two programming languages, and two database systems, to keep the software running, and feel that my personal investment and belief in what my client is doing has helped push me in a direction where I am almost tied to this software as my client. It's a good feeling, and think perhaps you need a project like that for yourself. The benefit is that you are also homesteading, so you could learn IoT software for your homestead, even starting off with something simple like watching temperatures at night, or reading humidity readings to decide whether to water areas of your garden/food source.

I grew up with grandparents that lived off the land, mostly pushed from them growing up during the Great Depression. I wish I had known to ask more questions of them while they were around, but I did pick up a strong work ethic, along with what I picked up from my parents. Having a project that you enjoy goes a very long way towards keeping an interest in anything, whether it's IT or gardening of vegetables, flowers, or raising animals for meat or labor (or pleasure, but figured that fell outside of homesteading).

You wouldn't say that manufacturing tires is purposeless just because the tires need to be replaced in a few years. They were able to accomplish a lot of transportation while they lasted.

You wouldn't say that making a sandwich is pointless just because you'll need another one tomorrow. It let you survive and gave you the energy to do things.

The purpose of a server is what it was able to do for people while it lasted. The fact that it won't last forever doesn't take away that purpose.

> 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.

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.

That's fair, I think there are some people (like that initial hn post I reference) who such as yourself really are just people who really enjoy that sort of lifestyle. But I also think that societally we put a lot of value and for lack of a better word, "coolness factor" on manual labor. You could imagine in certain time periods and cultures that something like working in a field wouldn't be viewed positively at all, and maybe something like writing poetry is seen as a very masculine and rugged endeavor.

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!!

Yeah it seems like everyone's definition of homesteading is on a bit of a spectrum. Don't get me wrong - throwing a bunch of arduinos/microcontrollers together to automate stuff is very fun but when I personally think of homesteading it's about self-sufficiency through agriculture.

In conversations with the IT world, I have definitely found a pretty high level of romanticism" often associated with the idea of leaving the modern world behind, going off-grid and running a farm.

It dovetails with the same kind of naive transcendentalism that espouses that natural = good, a simpler kind of living, etc.

a friend recently described bouldering - which I understand is also fairly popular with engineers - as something to the effect of "solving problems in a physical space with your body". this seems not dissimilar

My dad built houses. Sometimes, like another poster here, I think about how his work will be around for decades if not centuries (they were nice houses). I think about how I might feel if I had kept his business going, maybe worked to expand it. Then I think about being 16, leaving the house at six to go pour concrete piers and being exhausted and caked in mud and cement by lunchtime. And how it felt a lot less exciting on the first Friday than it did on the first Monday.

Similar story here. My grandparents had a farm and had cows (dairy). Even by the time I was around, they had mostly wound down operations and had semi-retired.

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!

None of my family worked on a farm. But, literally one time I went to visit a friend whose family farmed. We all spent some time digging up some kind of root vegetable. It was fun because it was with friends but also, it would absolutely suck to do for a living, haha.

What gets me about the homesteading fantasy: it’s, like, so incredibly easy to disabuse oneself of the notion that digging up tubers is a good time.

>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.

Working a couple warehouse jobs when in college provided me with some valuable perspective.

I think this is it. And I suspect most of these folks don't honestly believe they want to actually run acres and acres of farmland as a commercial enterprise.

But speaking as someone who has a small herd of sheep, a few pigs every year and processes his own 50~ meat birds on the property every year. I know how much it sucks to watch a lamb and mother die in childbirth. I know the itch of thousands of hay cuts after clearing a field of bales and putting them up.

And I also have a 2g fiber line to my house and work a tech job remotely for my primary income. My desire to do the land things is not based on mythology. It's because the food tastes better when I helped raise it. It's a slight independence from some of the modern just-in-time food conveniences. It also means I have to work with my neighbors, cause who else is gonna help you cull a dying sheep in a pouring rain and put it down and get it in the compost?

I don't do these things because they're easy. I do them because I feel a little more alive once it's over and I've shared a difficult moment, or a delicious meal with a friend or my children.

Now that you mention it, I have always enjoyed that general feeling of resourcefulness. I've talked about this with other people, but given my fairly eclectic background I usually feel like I can handle a pretty wide variety of problems. It's a very centering feeling, so it would make sense as to why other people worry about being overinvested in just one skill.

I've definitely struggled with that feeling in my work as well.

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.

While non software people certainly don't understand data structures etc themselves I'm sure they get the idea that software has to be designed, just as they get that most buildings (like larger than a shed) have to be designed by an architect before construction people actually start building it.

Most / all of software work, including coding, is actually architecture / design (at varying levels of zoom) the equivalent to construction in buildings is fully automated in software (compilation etc)

Huge agree with the "autonomy" part.

That scene in Office Space where he complains about having 8 different bosses really resonates with me.

I love programming, if I could get paid to work on what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted, I would (and hopefully at some point I will), but run of the mill corporate JIRA ticket churn isn't exactly something that deeply satisfies my soul, and I can understand fantasizing about getting as far away from that as possible.

It depends on the job for sure, but you're certainly not wrong that many technical jobs have a negative societal impact. I had a hard time finding jobs I actually wanted to apply to after college because I strongly disliked the idea of working for a company where the sum total of my contribution was making people more likely to click an advertisement or something like that. Felt pretty awful in terms of "meaning" in that way.

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.

I'll put on my devil's advocate hat and try to argue for the positive social impact of tech companies.

Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other.

People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that.

Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives.

Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D)

Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week.

The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions.

We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life.

The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3