Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code. Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a meaningful outlet for creativity. Linters are a great tool for eliminating bike shedding.
I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
I curse the inferior linter formatting and at the same time would not have it any other way because why? Some diva would come in and put up a MR reformatting half the code base to their preferred way, mixed in with the actual change they are making and I would have to hunt for the actual changes in the reformatting noise. And then we would spend half a day arguing about it like in the good old days. Fast forward six months and there would be 6 different code styles in the codebase and it would just be terrible.
I think you’re romanticising woodworking a bit here. A large saw is specifically built to allow doing a single, precise cut, in exactly the same way, over and over again.
The tools are absolutely made to prevent you from messing up the various ways, it’s just that you don’t use the professionals tools at home.
And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.
> where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code.
Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.
If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.
Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working as a team. Format your personal projects however you want, but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard format every time you save.
> Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic translation done by some bot or something.
Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).
Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.
I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
If there's a small team, individual freedom can be perfectly fine, as everybody knows everyone and it's easy to talk with each other in case there are discrepancies.
For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.
Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through open source repos all the time, which all have their own styles and which are often not self-consistent; my comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the other.
The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters, nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You really want to manually format that so each row is on it's own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be littered with
MatrixXf mat(2, 2);
// clang-format off
mat << 1, 2,
3, 4;
// clang-format on
which adds a ton of unnecessary noise which does impair reading.
I'll take the tyranny of the linter tool over not having it at all (and I've had both). At least with my current project, it's single-handedly helped catch tricky React re-render bugs, because it warns me when I'm missing a dependency, or also warns me ahead of time if I'm likely to encounter a re-render every frame (and what's causing it), etc.
Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).
Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.
And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.
> Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.
>> With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work.
This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a certain space under or over the counter, and need to be homogenous to a large extent.
It seems like you're making a distinction between types of work.
For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal. Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier and that's why some products are better when they are homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be "creative."
My theory is that excessive linter rules might be a symptom of trying to compensate for the weaknesses of a programming language. I see it a lot in Python and JavaScript projects where the language gives very litte guarantees about anything.
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.
It's an odd thing - at all the big companies I've worked for, you can usually get all your work for the day done in 4 hours. Between meetings and status waste, that's all anybody expects from you.
I wish I could be so lucky. In recent years, every job I've worked for has reached a point where I had to endure 4 hours of meetings per day before we could even begin to get work done (if we were lucky)
The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.
I’m very lucky. I work on a very small software team, with a very flat structure, where my boss, with a very high level of trust, tasked me with replacing several very old parts of the product stack using my best judgment and choice of languages/tools. He also appreciated that during the interview, I mentioned that my work must be oriented towards customer value; that is the ultimate goal of any of our work. I am often privy to client feedback. However, I am also protected by a hard communications firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side of the company. My job thoroughly satisfies my creative and technical needs, such that I do not pursue much programming or high-skill crafting outside of work.
Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind.
Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
> However, I am also protected by a hard communications firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side of the company.
One of the worst faceplants I've seen in my current role was when my team was developing a solution to integrate some third-party data. Our PO reported to a Product Manager who was tapped as the "I talk to the end users" person and he completely fucked it up. The team was siloed off to do this for multiple quarters, and at the rollout we literally got laughed at and told "we can't use this." But God forbid my team actually, you know, TALK and DEMO to the end users once an iteration like you're supposed to in Scrum, as opposed to plugging in some drone from corporate who it turns out doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
At small companies, across a long career, I’ve solved the same problems many times. But that’s not the part that stings the most.
What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.
Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
> Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching because that's when you got confronted to the problems from another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if your arguments and process are written somewhere.
Companies can be wildly different in how they operate, how decisions are made, and what trade offs they prefer, what culture they have.
Simply adoption something that worked in a previous place isn’t a way of usually making decisions, imagine a company with 100 engineers where they all came from different companies and have different ways they solved the cicd problem - how do you move forward from that ?
Decision making can be complex - can also be very simple, depending on the company ..
> Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with business practices and out of reality. You surely get back home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not everyone can master, especially among those who actually love their jobs.
Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both.
In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified.
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.
I think those people also are more likely to have the work life balance to pursue hobbies where most people doing fast growing/early stage startups are off balance. I personally don’t care what I spend my time on at work, I’ve found even when I enjoy the work, it doesn’t increase my fulfillment in life over the long term. So I try to optimize the life part of the ratio as much as I can, at times at expense of the work side of the ratio.
I learned to play the game. I too really enjoy being able to talk directly to the client while building, but I also learned to play the game of cogs, where I am separated from the client by layers of increasingly clueless management. I balance the insanity with pursuing photography.
I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)
When you are young and especially when you don't have a family to support, you move to some place where you like to work. When you are older and opportunities are rare (and agism is huge in the industry), you just take what you can and escape any way you can, like video games or side passions of any sorts. I bought a motorcycle when I was over 30 years old for commuting (heavy traffic, the bike was saving hours), but after a few years I started to take motorcycle trips in the weekends and, once in a while, across Europe. But it can be anything that you find enjoyable, the point is that you have to try different things and see what you like, when I was 20-25 years old I had no desire to ever buy a motorcycle. Now, if it's a light rain, I am happy to take it for a ride.
I work for a digital services consultancy handling large gov't contracts. It has all the problems of every large organization, public or private, but it's not overly demanding. The work is more challenging from a people perspective than a technical one.
But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.
So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.
I was in a fast-growing company (although adjacent to Tech), that grew "big" and went though tons of extra bureaucracy where you will spend months fighting for some stupid change that makes all the technical sense. Now the company is sinking, I hope I will be fired and with the severance package I can enjoy life for 6-8 months and then go find again a company where I can fix things and impact someone's life in a mostly positive way. Wish me luck.
I get what you're saying, but for the author of the article it seems the opposite issue. He seems to (mostly) live from his own software products, and his two main points of stress are unreasonable customers & his own inability to let things go when fixing/working on stuff.
I'm one of those creative types. I have woodworking shop, I'm a musician, my wife and I are part-time performing magicians.
I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.
Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.
It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.
So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.
So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
As an aside, high skill and low excitement is a great recipe for composure. It makes me think of a veteran I once knew. He once talked us out of a sticky situation because seeing his calm demeanor, the authority figures had no reason to suspect we were up to something.
Amen. On the same bandwidth here. No social media. I don’t read the news. We don’t have a TV. I yearn for old tech. New tech has no character or charm. AI is the worst thing to happen to the industry. Literally just makes our working conditions worse
There are plenty of big tech or big tech adjacent public traded company jobs paying far better that are still majority coding and with a lot less speed pressure than an early stage startup, among other things allowi Ng for an earlier retirement.
I think there is something special about physical creativity that scratches a certain part of your even if you have a very fulfilling day-job.
"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
I worked for big companies, startups, and freelance. If you don’t take control of your career you will be unfulfilled. Software has the pick of the litter. The winning combination is a big company and a role you chose. Security, compensation, and creativity all in one. Startups are 90% likely to fail, contracting will set you back late in life if you don’t hustle all the time. YMMV but nothing beats a blue chip.
One man's garden of eden is another's hell on earth. I've gone back and forth between big and small. I'm genuinely happy at small companies with tight knit teams (getting abused by csuite for shit pay ofc). At big companies I get extremely depressed in a corporate hell scape mostly surrounded by people that have maintained sanity by dissociating from the job and collecting a paycheck.
I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.
I run my own self-funded solo business. I talk to my customers and make a meaningful difference in their daily work. If I do my job right, they gladly pay me subscription money. I'm pretty happy with this, especially given that I choose my tools and technologies, and that my customers are smart engineers.
>"This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?"
I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
> Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies
Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.
The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
> Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff.
There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to introspect what kind is important to you.
I love to build quality code. Production code that is quite efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-featured.
Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in startups.
(There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the exception.)
"Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build quality, this isn't it.
It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady revenue that there is some possibility of finding the environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is hard, and is an exercise left to the reader.
This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why.
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources
I’ve said this a million times on this forum.. the little trick whereby people who were once employees became merely _human resources_ has done more to damage work-life in this world than anything else I can think of.
Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts.
As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face.
Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice.
With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.
> This is why I am very happy [...] where one can have honest conversations
Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media)
> endless PowerPoints
We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law.
But to your point about Small versus Large entities...
> ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people.
Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems.
> people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies
These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.
Same. The enterprise can be enjoyable from some aspects, but in the end the soul-suck isn't worth it to me. I think a great skunk works team with a big budget is probably the dream, but short of those rare and difficult-to-get opportunities, the startup/small-tech co is the place to go for people like us. Some are better than others at faciliting honesty, but it's far more common IME than big corp.
> I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems
I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.
This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
Another idea: work for an IT services big company. Then you'll have a lot of change, will be much less of a cost center (only at times) and talk directly to the customer to solve their problems. Not the same as a startup of course, but at least on paper it looks like checking your points with slightly less stress or risk.
> Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff
My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
>> The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
> This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group' then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature.
startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an idea based in reality.
What will you do if your company becomes “successful”: is either acquired by a “big company” or becomes a “big company”? Particularly if you play a significant role in your company’s success? Maybe get a head start and learn about wood.
I think this all boils down to what Ted Kaczynski talked about in "Industrial Society and Its Future." Specifically "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" because "in modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs." I would say 99.999% of all modern work is "surrogate activity" (an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.)
It's no surprise you can end up feeling empty and unfulfilled in a career like software development, or any other modern career, you are putting energy and emotional involvement that you would otherwise have put into the search for physical necessities. I think this is particularly acute for those in software development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the physical world. Biologically speaking fulfillment should come from satisfying your physical needs (i.e. surviving) not from the pursuit of some made up goal.
It really is a shame that he ended up getting violent, because "Industrial Society and Its Future" is one of the most interesting, insightful, and fascinating things I've read. I recommend it to everyone.
IMHO it's a classic example where "the author is excellent at identifying problems, not good at identifying solutions." Unfortunately almost nobody reads the first (identification) part because the solution part is so unpalatable and unacceptable. For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense, but for most people who have a sense of compassion and empathy the costs are extremely unpalatable.
> It really is a shame that he ended up getting violent, because "Industrial Society and Its Future" is one of the most interesting, insightful, and fascinating things I've read. I recommend it to everyone.
It's pseudo-profound, but not really insightful at all. It's the kind of writing that seems brilliant to people going through difficult times in life or edgy teenagers who are angry at the world, but to be blunt it falls flat for people who are well-adjusted and thriving.
That's the crux of that type of writing: Ranting about the world in pseudo-profound prose is always going to feel brilliant to people who are struggling with something and want to identify with others who are also struggling, but that doesn't make it insightful or good writing.
> For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense,
Treating his writings and actions as two separate, unrelated things is really downplaying the manifesto. The fact that he took the ideas he wrote down and came to the logical conclusion that violence and destruction were the way forward should tell you something about his writings. Specifically, that they were hyperbolically incorrect.
To be honest, the way that you're identifying with his writings and thinking that even his actions make "logical sense" suggests that you may need to take a step back and reevaluate. It seems his prose got its hooks into you, but it's not actually brilliant content.
But we probably don't remember or cite them because their manifestos weren't published on the front page of newspapers.
That was due to the serial violence of the author, and it was subsequently talked about for decades.
That is, the notoriety of his crimes could be the reason that you read and recommend his work, rather than somebody else's work -- as opposed to it being a coincidence
> I would say 99.999% of all modern work is "surrogate activity" (an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.)
I think this level of hyperbole only feels correct when you've been trapped in the kinds of companies where everyone is at least ten steps removed from the customer. When you're sitting through meetings and pushing around abstract "work" to achieve artificial goals all day, it can seem like modern work is all made up and arbitrary.
But step outside one of these absurd corporate jobs and you'll see plenty of people doing "real" work, and doing a lot of it. It's eye opening to go from a corporate behemoth to a small company where what you do actually matters to customers. Once you see the effect your work has on something up close, it makes a lot more sense.
Every time I read an HN comment where someone is romanticizing Ted Kaczynski's writings, it feels like they're coming from a place of being just a bit too chronically online and a bit too disconnected from how the real world works outside of the internet and corporate life.
You can understand why though. Those of us in corporate land swim in an all consuming miasma of unreality. Nothing matters. Logic is irrelevant. Absurdity is the norm. Of course it skews your perspective. Yet another ill corporatism inflicts on us.
> I would say 99.999% of all modern work is "surrogate activity" (an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.)
That's one of the most absurd hyperboles (or the most detached-from-realiy statements) I have ever seen. That would mean only one out of 100,000 people is doing "real" work. Or if you spread it evenly, less than one third of a second per working day.
You're probably right, it was a made up number to make a point. The point being that if you are not growing your own food (or hunting it) you're probably engaged in "surrogate activity" for a living and not directly satisfying your physical needs. Would you say more than 1/100,000 people in today's world grow and or hunt for their food daily?
1 in 100k is a stretch. But 1 in 10 maybe? Physically we need water, food, shelter and medical care. Around 10% of US workforce is in agriculture, but a decent chunk of that is probably for providing non-essentials foodstuffs. So maybe only 10% work on actually providing all the essentials for human life.
What about attracting a mate and social status. Those are fairly ancient goals that are relevant in the modern world. How does that impact the conjecture that we're wired for survival only?
Attracting a mate and reproduction easily falls under "satisfying your physical needs" and I would argue is a deeply wired survival instinct.
In his words "the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex."
> I think this is particularly acute for those in software development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the physical world.
Or is it what the "legendary" comment in the original link calls attention to: That the pay is good? As a result, you technically only need to spend a minutes per day, if that, working on software. Everything else is fluff. This seems to match what Kaczynski is talking about.
Take a job developing software that just barely covers the cost of your survival needs and I expect there is no chance you will feel empty about it.
I am working on coding stuff I like as escape for the absurdity of modern software. I make little games, stuff for 8 bit systems etc. Stuff that is as far away from anything modern , especially the hell of node, next, devops and ‘web frameworks’ as I possibly can. It works. It’s very relaxing, like a bonsai tree.
+1 for embedded software. I work for an IoT company and the web and app devs think LLMs are the saving grace of the universe. The firmware team just keeps chugging along, ignoring the noise, debugging hard problems, and writing unsexy low level code.
Yeah, programming used to be excellent and that’s not nostalgia as I still write MSX, Amiga and Delphi (win/lin) software. Now, with modern stacks, I just hate all of it really. I do it fulltime for work with nextjs (and all the du jour stuff that literally changes every few months and makes life easier: secret it doesn’t at all) but we are transitioning everything to my Common Lisp dsl; in one year even my work software will be a pleasure again. Stuff I should’ve done 20 years ago but I drank this modern tooling koolaid; it’s more akin to the layers of hell.
Nothing destroys your love of a hobby, even one that you are passionately (or even obsessively) dedicated to, like making it your job. I LOVE riding bikes but all the BS of working in software is preferable to trying to support my love of bikes within the broader industry of bikes.
The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should really be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not that you suck.
> The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should really be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not that you suck.
The negative connotations is a more recent development:
> The meaning "one who cultivates and participates (in something) but does not pursue it professionally or with an eye to gain" (as opposed to professional) is from 1786; often with disparaging suggestions of "dabbler, dilettante," but not in athletics, where the disparagement shaded the professional, at least formerly. As an adjective, by 1838.
It comes from the from the Latin amatorem, "lover": someone who does something not for any practical reason, but simply for the enjoyment / love of the activity. How well one does it does not necessarily come into consideration, as long as there is enjoyment.
> How well one does it does not necessarily come into consideration, as long as there is enjoyment.
Indeed, the Olympics is technically supposed to be an event for amateurs, while also being generally perceived as the peak of competition for each relevant sport.
Well, amateur is the word. It's literal meaning is only that you're not a professional, i.e., one whose profession is that:
> A person attached to a particular pursuit, study, science, or art (such as music or painting), especially one who cultivates any study, interest, taste, or attachment without engaging in it professionally.
(Wiktionary.) It just also can be used to derogatorily refer to a "low" skill level (Someone who is unqualified or insufficiently skillful., same), but the non-ad hominem definition doesn't have that connotation.
E.g., in the ballroom dance community, the "amateur" category is filled with people incredibly talented, I'd estimate with like 8-10+ years of experience. They're amazing to watch.
A hobbyist is an amateur who enjoys the activity. It adds some precision to to what he is looking for, but is still dependent on what you take amateur to mean. Someone "who sucks", but at least enjoys it, is not what he is trying to convey.
I don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies... most of my childhood friends don't seem to do anything fun now as adults.
I really love physical things I can do with my body as a counterbalance to working on the computer- weight lifting, woodworking, and sailing add a lot of value to my life, and have gotten me outdoors and in shape. I'm currently building a wood sailboat in my garage together with my son, using ancient woodworking tools I inherited from my grandfather.
If you inherited woodworking tools from your grandfather, I'm assuming that either your grandfather or father taught you some woodworking skills?
I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of building things with my hands or using power tools just fills me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.
I've always recommended hobbies that meet the following criteria
1. Don't require you to interact with screens
2. Require your full attention (e.g. if you were listening to a podcast while doing it, you wouldn't remember a single thing they were talking about)
3. Has a social aspect, but is also possible to do on your own
4. Preferably physical
5. Preferably has some level of "controllable danger/risk", e.g. mountain biking is good because you can walk down hard stuff or stay on easy trails, vs. road biking you don't control the risk of getting injured / killed by a driver.
Some that fall into this category are climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing.
There's the other category that this post about woodworking scratches: building things and developing new skills and mastery doing so. However, these don't often come with an easily-accessible, accepting community; it's usually just you alone in a garage. Given how important social connection is, and how isolating a lot of tech jobs can be, this is a void that a lot of us on this orange website need to actively pursue.
If you're in any "tech city", there's definitely a climbing gym nearby. Climbers are almost always amicable, and for the socially anxious, it's a great pretense to interact with someone (because they have to be on the other end of the rope anyway). The amount of capital outlay to get started is low (e.g. shoes, belay device, and a harness will cost <$300 total if you get nice stuff, albeit sticking with the non-expert shoes!), and you can pretty much start having fun right away (vs skiing takes at least a season to get confident enough to truly start having fun and not "surviving").
Yes, that is certainly a key part of it. My dad built the house I grew up in by himself in his spare time while also working full time, and taught me basic woodworking as a kid.
But he taught me crude woodworking like framing in houses- almost none of the tools or skills translate into fine woodworking required for building things like furniture or boats. Until the last year I didn't know how to cut with the grain, what a planer was for, etc.
What my dad really taught me was the confidence that I can learn what I need as I go, to do almost anything. I'm not afraid to start big projects where I have zero idea how to do any of the steps required at first, and am expecting to learn them one at a time as I go. My dad would regularly jump into things like buying a car with a blown engine and expecting to rebuild it without any clue where to start- and then follow books and advice, and do it successfully the first time. So I learned to also do that.
YouTube has been a huge boon- anyone can learn almost anything for free, without needing someone to teach them first. Also tech like 3D printers allows people to get into making things without the physical skills previously needed.
Don’t let that be a brake on your enjoyment though.
I always liked cars and I do have an affinity for tinkering. But I didn’t know anything about fabrication. I got me a welder and many YouTube videos and hours later I was making stainless exhausts. It was a very enjoyable experience. Just stumbling through is most of the fun.
I taken up on running and ultra trail running 5 years ago. I also started learning woodworking 2 years agi, using hand tools mostly as I can only practice in my living room.
I didn't have any experience in any of these before and I was not particularly athletic. You only need to find something you want to try, and if you like it try to commit to it for a couple of years.
In my example, I started running when I signed up for a 10k race as a team event when I joined my company, and realized the racing experience was actually enjoyable (regardless of my performance). And for woodworking, I signed up for a 6 weeks course to make a simple box at my local recreation center, and ended up making a couple of furniture or decorative pieces that are not fancy at all but still a lot more interesting than IKEA stuff.
As others have mentioned, try. Youtube has a literal endless wealth of knowledge of how to do any task. I learned how to machine metal after 5 months of background youtube videos on manual machining. Youtube Apprenticeship.
I started out with no physical skills and only ever have worked in software. However, I took a pottery class and loved it. Classes also start you out on a schedule which is a great way to make sure you actually invest in your new hobby. Similarly you can take classes in most tech shops as well.
Start small. Maybe just a little model kit. You can get incredibly cheap model kits these days. Get used to the idea that you can start with "bits" and end with "things", and you have agency over that process.
Just try it. With this age of Youtube, the barrier to entry is extremely low. You don't need a full shop of tools, just patience and the willingness to learn.
Yeah, both my parents have/had practical skills, like woodworking and gardening, and completely failed to pass them on.
Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how to work with physical objects.
Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists. Partly because my friends weren't working with physical objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect with my peers.
But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still did not pass on their knowledge.
> I don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies... most of my childhood friends don't seem to do anything fun now as adults.
I get more enjoyment whole-assing one thing than half-assing many, in my case. Not to say hobbies aren't cool - I know somebody that built an entire guitar starting from wood - but I'd rather spend that time going even further in my main thing. "Majoring in the minors" or whatever.
I hope it doesn't come across as some sigma grindset stuff, it's not that I suppress my urge to have fun hobbies - I just feel happier and more secure incrementally building on my main career than creating a new persona for an activity I'm indifferent to.
>I don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies...
If the prerequisites for having awesome hobbies are, "Having a garage," "Inheriting tools from one's grandparents," and "Having the time do something with both," there would be your answer.
In my opinion these are absolutely not prerequisites.
I built many things at my desk or the kitchen table in our flat with very simple tools. Even a single Swiss Army knife can be used to achieve a lot. And you don't need a lot of time to make small things.
It can be easy to be jealous of the DIY YouTubers with massive workshops (I'm jealous!), but I find it more satisfying to take inspiration from the kinds of simple things people make/made in simpler societies/civilisations.
There are tons of hacker labs, maker spaces, community colleges, etc. that have woodworking courses and materials in shared places available for cheap or free. The old tools I have are outdated and undesirable. They could be found for under $100 on Craigslist (or more likely free), and fit against the back wall of a 1 car garage- I can still park a car in there and use them in front of the car. My entire "shop" area is smaller than a regular dinner table or workdesk, and I have to shuffle things around and reconfigure the entire space each time I switch tools. For example, I have a table saw that is also the only workbench, and I have a drill press bolted on top of it, so it takes 10-15 minutes to actually clear the saw to make a single cut. I am also a single parent with a high stress/demanding job and my free time is limited- I've been building a very small 6' dinghy with my son for almost a year, and we're only 1/3rd of the way done but we're having fun.
I actually felt a little stupid accepting these tools and setting up a space for them, when I later realized that I already had free access to several local community woodshops through a few different mechanisms... I am thinking about getting rid of some or all of the tools and using those instead.
I think it's pretty easy to make excuses for why something is impossible, but if people really wanted to, almost anyone could do it. The average teenager in the USA buys themselves single outfits of clothing that cost more than the basics to get into woodworking. Most Americans have streaming and Amazon Prime subscriptions that cost a lot more than I spend on woodworking- and I don't have any subscriptions like that.
How much do you really sleep and work in a week? If you work 40 hours a week and sleep 56, that leaves 72 more hours. Most knowledge workers actually do more like 10-15 hours/wk of real focused "deep work" and a lot of people sleep less than that also...
I find plenty of time to do my hobbies despite being a single dad, and having a high stress academic PI job. I have every weekend and evening free, and I use them. I also involve my kid in my hobbies- we do them together, so it's also parenting time.
I think most people aren't short on time, but short on energy because of poor physical and mental health- things that can be solved/addressed. For me, the hobbies themselves are a key part of staying healthy enough to have a lot of energy. But also not the only thing- I had serious medical problems that caused fatigue, which I needed to treat to have the energy I now have.
I also usually find a way to do hobbies cheaply, or even make money at them. For example, with cars and boats I get cheap ones that need work, fix them myself, and usually sell for enough more to keep the hobby self sustaining.
Ultimately, the most important thing is to just do it, even if it seems too expensive/inaccessible/etc. Take a leap/risk and find a way to overcome the barriers, don't come up with excuses to stop before you even start.
And many hobbies require space. I'd love to do some woodworking but I don't have any space for that. I live in small flat. Of course nothing money couldn't solve, but buying huge house with workshop is another level of expenses and requires lifestyle changes as well.
engaging with hobbies with your kids, which can also teach them useful skills, is one way
when I was a kid, when my dad was repairing the house or car I was always "holding the flashlight" or he would actually teach me to use power tools and do the repairs myself while guiding me along.
I agree with this to at extent, but will give a brief anecdote. My dad was/is a hobbyist woodworker and that's part of what he did on weekends. Typically late spring-early fall. However, 90%+ of his projects revolved around home improvement. Large decks and patios, chairs/benches for the kitchen table, playground sets, awning for the RV, redoing floors in the house, etc.
The larger projects would often span two summers. He also did not contribute to his projects on Sundays because he is religious.
I just can't help but pick up projects, and these really keep me going. I suppose I crave satisfaction much more than relaxation.
I find it very hard to relax by just chilling on a beach, or reading a book in the afternoon. I just want to work on a project.
What I find really fun is that often when I'm working on a project, my 5 year old daughter will get in to a project mindset herself, and will be working on her own thing (sticky tape, cardboard, etc), while I'm fixing a bicycle or building something. It's a really fun companionable time, where we're both working on our own thing, but in each other's company.
Because they are too busy watching TV or playing with their phones. Everyone used to have a lot more time, now "nobody has time" even tho life was much harder 100yrs ago yet those ppl found plenty of time for all kinds of social and volunteer events. It's the time sucking media leaving no time to be bored and thus motivated to seek out stimulation
> don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies...
Yeah, sure can name a lot of friends that consume: mainly gaming and streaming.
Has the curve on the creator/consumer axis shifted in recent times or has it always been skewed toward consuming? Or is there instead a social axis that has been waning recently? I'm thinking of the once popular Bridge card game or bowling leagues as examples...
One of my theories is that the internet and socialmedia exposes everybody to examples of elite talents and raises the bar too much for performance based hobbies. Playing the piano poorly can be a fun and worthwhile hobby even if you’ll never be as good as the people you see online.
And then there a collecting based hobbies* which have been ruined by being able buy rare things from anywhere in a click. Now getting a stamp collection isn’t a pursuit, it’s just an afternoon on eBay with your credit card.
*one exception here is birdwatching, which I’ve anecdotally seen a huge increase in. Almost all my friends are aware of Merlin and many Hanna the habit to stop to ask “what’s that” if they see an unfamiliar bird
I think it's always been about the same. Shakespeare wrote plays watched by hundreds who mostly didn't write plays, Mozart's music halls were full of people who mostly didn't compose, Austen's novels were read by people who mostly didn't write novels.
Maybe it's become easier to consume incredible amounts of content for free recently, but it's also never been easier to make things if you want, either in terms of access to cheap materials and tools or instructional content. Perhaps the one thing that has waned a little is closer-knit forums that have been replaced with endless Reddit.
Gaming is cheap, has low space and physical set-up requirements, and holds loads of potential for creativity, self-expression, and positive socializing. The FGC in particular embodies this.
I remember in math class in high school, we had a project where we analyzed hours of tv watching per day. Quite a few people watched like 6 hours of tv a day. I'd say its been heavily skewed towards consuming for a while. I would also say that gaming and watching streams can have a social aspect too, though that depends. If anything there is more of a social aspect? At least for me I talk to people on twitch regularly.
> software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon
Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on this. But I haven’t seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have their own existential threats around amount and quality of data. Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What we don’t know is whether doing this and then handing it to an LLM is as beneficial to humans in speed/quality/feedback as simply doing it yourself. Have already seen people saying that copilot’s interaction loop short circuits actually thinking about the problem.
Regardless, hobbies outside of work are absolutely essential in this absurd time. The author made some beautiful things.
Hobbies outside work can still be coding. Code is not the same as it was with LLMs but it’s more effective for work and outside work. The LLMs just help but for me they don’t make coding less enjoyable outside modern web crap that is.
It doesn't matter, it was never about LLM's, it's that tech holds special political powers across nations. Big tech can break laws and destroy people's lives and nobody is ever punished or regulated.
Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow. Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to force them into being sustainable.
Interestingly, Glenn Reid also escaped from making software (Touchtype.app, PasteUp.app, wrote "The Green Book", _PostScript Language Program Design_) to making dovetail joined furniture by hand.
That said, I've always described the "Maker" movement as "Geeks who missed shop class", and have argued that the world would be a better place if the Sloyd system of woodworking as a basic constituent of education was prevalent:
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
No, given the naïveté with which "Makers" approach things, they don't seem to have had real shop-class experience, or at least not a sensible class which actually taught anything meaningful.
I took the Cisco networking electives, being the geek I was. I slept through 90% of it, it was such a terrible experience. Ironically, there was a very popular shop class where effectively the entire student population knew who the shop teacher was and I chose to take the networking because I didn't have any interest in shop.
Now I have a garage full of woodworking equipment (and wood), spend my leisure time watching youtube and building things.. sometimes I wonder if I would have ever made it to software professionally had I taken that shop class. Might have ended up making cabinets :D
Nothing wrong with finding a new hobby but this is a stereotype of tech workers. If it isn’t woodworking, it’s beekeeping or some other perfectly fine side quest.
I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't special.
Readit News
Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
:deep breaths:
And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.
Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.
If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.
Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic translation done by some bot or something.
Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).
Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.
I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.
Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through open source repos all the time, which all have their own styles and which are often not self-consistent; my comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the other.
The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters, nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You really want to manually format that so each row is on it's own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be littered with
which adds a ton of unnecessary noise which does impair reading.[1] https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/group__TutorialAdvancedIniti...
Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).
Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.
And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.
Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.
These days they are pretty good at preserving vertical separation if it already exists and adding it if it’s missing.
This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a certain space under or over the counter, and need to be homogenous to a large extent.
For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal. Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier and that's why some products are better when they are homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be "creative."
They would if their woodworking projects spanned decades and involved thousands of other woodworkers.
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.
Companies would rather overwork 1 person than pay 2 and have both slightly under utilized
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Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind.
Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
They were certainly very good at coopting the agile „movement“ in this manner.
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One of the worst faceplants I've seen in my current role was when my team was developing a solution to integrate some third-party data. Our PO reported to a Product Manager who was tapped as the "I talk to the end users" person and he completely fucked it up. The team was siloed off to do this for multiple quarters, and at the rollout we literally got laughed at and told "we can't use this." But God forbid my team actually, you know, TALK and DEMO to the end users once an iteration like you're supposed to in Scrum, as opposed to plugging in some drone from corporate who it turns out doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.
Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching because that's when you got confronted to the problems from another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if your arguments and process are written somewhere.
Simply adoption something that worked in a previous place isn’t a way of usually making decisions, imagine a company with 100 engineers where they all came from different companies and have different ways they solved the cicd problem - how do you move forward from that ?
Decision making can be complex - can also be very simple, depending on the company ..
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
I want to have my cake and eat it too.
The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
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I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)
But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.
So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.
Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)
I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.
Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.
It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.
So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.
So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
Will take one of those instead, any day.
"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.
I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.
The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to introspect what kind is important to you.
I love to build quality code. Production code that is quite efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-featured.
Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in startups.
(There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the exception.)
"Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build quality, this isn't it.
It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady revenue that there is some possibility of finding the environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is hard, and is an exercise left to the reader.
(If you know any please share!)
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts.
As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face.
Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice.
With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.
Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media)
> endless PowerPoints
We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law.
But to your point about Small versus Large entities...
> ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people.
Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems.
> people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies
These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.
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> I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems
I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.
This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group' then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature.
startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an idea based in reality.
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Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of enterprise IT.
Side projects and meditation supplements.
Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?
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It's no surprise you can end up feeling empty and unfulfilled in a career like software development, or any other modern career, you are putting energy and emotional involvement that you would otherwise have put into the search for physical necessities. I think this is particularly acute for those in software development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the physical world. Biologically speaking fulfillment should come from satisfying your physical needs (i.e. surviving) not from the pursuit of some made up goal.
IMHO it's a classic example where "the author is excellent at identifying problems, not good at identifying solutions." Unfortunately almost nobody reads the first (identification) part because the solution part is so unpalatable and unacceptable. For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense, but for most people who have a sense of compassion and empathy the costs are extremely unpalatable.
It's pseudo-profound, but not really insightful at all. It's the kind of writing that seems brilliant to people going through difficult times in life or edgy teenagers who are angry at the world, but to be blunt it falls flat for people who are well-adjusted and thriving.
That's the crux of that type of writing: Ranting about the world in pseudo-profound prose is always going to feel brilliant to people who are struggling with something and want to identify with others who are also struggling, but that doesn't make it insightful or good writing.
> For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense,
Treating his writings and actions as two separate, unrelated things is really downplaying the manifesto. The fact that he took the ideas he wrote down and came to the logical conclusion that violence and destruction were the way forward should tell you something about his writings. Specifically, that they were hyperbolically incorrect.
To be honest, the way that you're identifying with his writings and thinking that even his actions make "logical sense" suggests that you may need to take a step back and reevaluate. It seems his prose got its hooks into you, but it's not actually brilliant content.
I imagine there are tons of philosophers who have said similar things.
Here's a comment recommending Jacque Ellul and Lewis Mumford - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015488
Another one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658601
(I haven't read them)
But we probably don't remember or cite them because their manifestos weren't published on the front page of newspapers.
That was due to the serial violence of the author, and it was subsequently talked about for decades.
That is, the notoriety of his crimes could be the reason that you read and recommend his work, rather than somebody else's work -- as opposed to it being a coincidence
I think this level of hyperbole only feels correct when you've been trapped in the kinds of companies where everyone is at least ten steps removed from the customer. When you're sitting through meetings and pushing around abstract "work" to achieve artificial goals all day, it can seem like modern work is all made up and arbitrary.
But step outside one of these absurd corporate jobs and you'll see plenty of people doing "real" work, and doing a lot of it. It's eye opening to go from a corporate behemoth to a small company where what you do actually matters to customers. Once you see the effect your work has on something up close, it makes a lot more sense.
Every time I read an HN comment where someone is romanticizing Ted Kaczynski's writings, it feels like they're coming from a place of being just a bit too chronically online and a bit too disconnected from how the real world works outside of the internet and corporate life.
That's one of the most absurd hyperboles (or the most detached-from-realiy statements) I have ever seen. That would mean only one out of 100,000 people is doing "real" work. Or if you spread it evenly, less than one third of a second per working day.
In his words "the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex."
Or is it what the "legendary" comment in the original link calls attention to: That the pay is good? As a result, you technically only need to spend a minutes per day, if that, working on software. Everything else is fluff. This seems to match what Kaczynski is talking about.
Take a job developing software that just barely covers the cost of your survival needs and I expect there is no chance you will feel empty about it.
I only code as a hobby anymore. Burnout destroyed my career and now I design PCBs and write embedded software without LLMs.
Regulation will force you to replace your car for EV and with more technologies for monitoring the driver and surroundings.
https://uzebox.org/
Cuzebox as the emulator:
https://github.com/Jubatian/cuzebox
Seconding this; I recently wrote a game for the GameBoy Color in C and it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done with coding in a while.
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The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should really be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not that you suck.
The negative connotations is a more recent development:
> The meaning "one who cultivates and participates (in something) but does not pursue it professionally or with an eye to gain" (as opposed to professional) is from 1786; often with disparaging suggestions of "dabbler, dilettante," but not in athletics, where the disparagement shaded the professional, at least formerly. As an adjective, by 1838.
* https://www.etymonline.com/word/amateur
It comes from the from the Latin amatorem, "lover": someone who does something not for any practical reason, but simply for the enjoyment / love of the activity. How well one does it does not necessarily come into consideration, as long as there is enjoyment.
Indeed, the Olympics is technically supposed to be an event for amateurs, while also being generally perceived as the peak of competition for each relevant sport.
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> A person attached to a particular pursuit, study, science, or art (such as music or painting), especially one who cultivates any study, interest, taste, or attachment without engaging in it professionally.
(Wiktionary.) It just also can be used to derogatorily refer to a "low" skill level (Someone who is unqualified or insufficiently skillful., same), but the non-ad hominem definition doesn't have that connotation.
E.g., in the ballroom dance community, the "amateur" category is filled with people incredibly talented, I'd estimate with like 8-10+ years of experience. They're amazing to watch.
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sometimes much-much more involved - paycheck-less - than just "next pro"
I really love physical things I can do with my body as a counterbalance to working on the computer- weight lifting, woodworking, and sailing add a lot of value to my life, and have gotten me outdoors and in shape. I'm currently building a wood sailboat in my garage together with my son, using ancient woodworking tools I inherited from my grandfather.
I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of building things with my hands or using power tools just fills me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.
1. Don't require you to interact with screens 2. Require your full attention (e.g. if you were listening to a podcast while doing it, you wouldn't remember a single thing they were talking about) 3. Has a social aspect, but is also possible to do on your own 4. Preferably physical 5. Preferably has some level of "controllable danger/risk", e.g. mountain biking is good because you can walk down hard stuff or stay on easy trails, vs. road biking you don't control the risk of getting injured / killed by a driver.
Some that fall into this category are climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing.
There's the other category that this post about woodworking scratches: building things and developing new skills and mastery doing so. However, these don't often come with an easily-accessible, accepting community; it's usually just you alone in a garage. Given how important social connection is, and how isolating a lot of tech jobs can be, this is a void that a lot of us on this orange website need to actively pursue.
If you're in any "tech city", there's definitely a climbing gym nearby. Climbers are almost always amicable, and for the socially anxious, it's a great pretense to interact with someone (because they have to be on the other end of the rope anyway). The amount of capital outlay to get started is low (e.g. shoes, belay device, and a harness will cost <$300 total if you get nice stuff, albeit sticking with the non-expert shoes!), and you can pretty much start having fun right away (vs skiing takes at least a season to get confident enough to truly start having fun and not "surviving").
But he taught me crude woodworking like framing in houses- almost none of the tools or skills translate into fine woodworking required for building things like furniture or boats. Until the last year I didn't know how to cut with the grain, what a planer was for, etc.
What my dad really taught me was the confidence that I can learn what I need as I go, to do almost anything. I'm not afraid to start big projects where I have zero idea how to do any of the steps required at first, and am expecting to learn them one at a time as I go. My dad would regularly jump into things like buying a car with a blown engine and expecting to rebuild it without any clue where to start- and then follow books and advice, and do it successfully the first time. So I learned to also do that.
YouTube has been a huge boon- anyone can learn almost anything for free, without needing someone to teach them first. Also tech like 3D printers allows people to get into making things without the physical skills previously needed.
You can also download his follow-up, "The Anarchist's Design Book", free here: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-design-book
Between those two, they will teach you what tools you need and how to build simple furniture by hand. Start small.
I didn't have any experience in any of these before and I was not particularly athletic. You only need to find something you want to try, and if you like it try to commit to it for a couple of years.
In my example, I started running when I signed up for a 10k race as a team event when I joined my company, and realized the racing experience was actually enjoyable (regardless of my performance). And for woodworking, I signed up for a 6 weeks course to make a simple box at my local recreation center, and ended up making a couple of furniture or decorative pieces that are not fancy at all but still a lot more interesting than IKEA stuff.
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Watch a YouTube video.
Plan on failing a few times in ways you don’t expect.
Remember that this is a hobby so the stake are low.
Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how to work with physical objects.
Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists. Partly because my friends weren't working with physical objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect with my peers.
But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still did not pass on their knowledge.
I mean hell there's plenty you can do that doesn't require learning at all.
I get more enjoyment whole-assing one thing than half-assing many, in my case. Not to say hobbies aren't cool - I know somebody that built an entire guitar starting from wood - but I'd rather spend that time going even further in my main thing. "Majoring in the minors" or whatever.
I hope it doesn't come across as some sigma grindset stuff, it's not that I suppress my urge to have fun hobbies - I just feel happier and more secure incrementally building on my main career than creating a new persona for an activity I'm indifferent to.
If the prerequisites for having awesome hobbies are, "Having a garage," "Inheriting tools from one's grandparents," and "Having the time do something with both," there would be your answer.
I built many things at my desk or the kitchen table in our flat with very simple tools. Even a single Swiss Army knife can be used to achieve a lot. And you don't need a lot of time to make small things.
It can be easy to be jealous of the DIY YouTubers with massive workshops (I'm jealous!), but I find it more satisfying to take inspiration from the kinds of simple things people make/made in simpler societies/civilisations.
I actually felt a little stupid accepting these tools and setting up a space for them, when I later realized that I already had free access to several local community woodshops through a few different mechanisms... I am thinking about getting rid of some or all of the tools and using those instead.
I think it's pretty easy to make excuses for why something is impossible, but if people really wanted to, almost anyone could do it. The average teenager in the USA buys themselves single outfits of clothing that cost more than the basics to get into woodworking. Most Americans have streaming and Amazon Prime subscriptions that cost a lot more than I spend on woodworking- and I don't have any subscriptions like that.
Awesome hobbies are awesome! But they require time, and in some cases, financial resources.
I find plenty of time to do my hobbies despite being a single dad, and having a high stress academic PI job. I have every weekend and evening free, and I use them. I also involve my kid in my hobbies- we do them together, so it's also parenting time.
I think most people aren't short on time, but short on energy because of poor physical and mental health- things that can be solved/addressed. For me, the hobbies themselves are a key part of staying healthy enough to have a lot of energy. But also not the only thing- I had serious medical problems that caused fatigue, which I needed to treat to have the energy I now have.
I also usually find a way to do hobbies cheaply, or even make money at them. For example, with cars and boats I get cheap ones that need work, fix them myself, and usually sell for enough more to keep the hobby self sustaining.
Ultimately, the most important thing is to just do it, even if it seems too expensive/inaccessible/etc. Take a leap/risk and find a way to overcome the barriers, don't come up with excuses to stop before you even start.
when I was a kid, when my dad was repairing the house or car I was always "holding the flashlight" or he would actually teach me to use power tools and do the repairs myself while guiding me along.
The larger projects would often span two summers. He also did not contribute to his projects on Sundays because he is religious.
I find it very hard to relax by just chilling on a beach, or reading a book in the afternoon. I just want to work on a project.
What I find really fun is that often when I'm working on a project, my 5 year old daughter will get in to a project mindset herself, and will be working on her own thing (sticky tape, cardboard, etc), while I'm fixing a bicycle or building something. It's a really fun companionable time, where we're both working on our own thing, but in each other's company.
> don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies...
Has the curve on the creator/consumer axis shifted in recent times or has it always been skewed toward consuming? Or is there instead a social axis that has been waning recently? I'm thinking of the once popular Bridge card game or bowling leagues as examples...
And then there a collecting based hobbies* which have been ruined by being able buy rare things from anywhere in a click. Now getting a stamp collection isn’t a pursuit, it’s just an afternoon on eBay with your credit card.
*one exception here is birdwatching, which I’ve anecdotally seen a huge increase in. Almost all my friends are aware of Merlin and many Hanna the habit to stop to ask “what’s that” if they see an unfamiliar bird
Maybe it's become easier to consume incredible amounts of content for free recently, but it's also never been easier to make things if you want, either in terms of access to cheap materials and tools or instructional content. Perhaps the one thing that has waned a little is closer-knit forums that have been replaced with endless Reddit.
Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on this. But I haven’t seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have their own existential threats around amount and quality of data. Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What we don’t know is whether doing this and then handing it to an LLM is as beneficial to humans in speed/quality/feedback as simply doing it yourself. Have already seen people saying that copilot’s interaction loop short circuits actually thinking about the problem.
Regardless, hobbies outside of work are absolutely essential in this absurd time. The author made some beautiful things.
Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow. Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to force them into being sustainable.
That said, I've always described the "Maker" movement as "Geeks who missed shop class", and have argued that the world would be a better place if the Sloyd system of woodworking as a basic constituent of education was prevalent:
https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
(I'm the Geek who hated shop class, and thank my locking stars I can make a living writing software, decades later.)
Now I have a garage full of woodworking equipment (and wood), spend my leisure time watching youtube and building things.. sometimes I wonder if I would have ever made it to software professionally had I taken that shop class. Might have ended up making cabinets :D
I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't special.
And many jobs have much worse stuff like danger, filth, hard manual labor, no social standing etc