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?

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.

The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should really be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not that you suck.

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.

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.

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 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.

I find DIY to be similar - you get a physical result, you use your hands to make something, the satisfaction is almost always about pleasing your own sense of what you want. Ok there's the wife too but ....

I also like feeling that I can cope with certain jobs even if not well. Also you do get better. Baking and cooking can be like this too. When you learn the "tricks" that make your bread turn out better or your skirting boards line up properly or whatever then it's a super feeling. :-)

Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”.

I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.

This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.

THere is a programmatic aspect, too: Fusion360's modeller has a Python API that lets you programmatically build and evaluate designs. I rarely use this, but it does come in handy. For one project, where I wanted to make a 3D topo-style map of California (basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkQ8pA_TLY) it was a great opportunity to learn geo (using the great GIS package, "OS4Geo", especially QGIS), turn that geo info into a mesh, and then render it in wood.

Stay-at-home-for-COVID made my life a lot easier, as I could start a carving in the morning and let it go all day while sitting nearby and programming.

I find that a lot of people go to work thinking they enjoy it, and wake up later and realize it is just "work". This leads them to go off and figure out what they really enjoy, and they start doing that (they call it a hobby). Some of them ruin their hobby, by turning it into a full time job, where once again, it just becomes "work".

And it's not just "it's more fun when you're not doing a thing for money", I certainly plan to try and sell these things when they're done, and I've relentlessly optimized the way I work for being fun to do. It's just really nice to be able to look at a physical thing and know that you made it.

Said Kaimu: “Nothing yet. But when I touch a lit candle to the oil I sprinkled from my lantern during our crossing, he will learn the reason to plan for the absurd, the virtue of rebuilding in stone, and the wisdom of not insulting your customers.” - 0

0 - http://thecodelesscode.com/case/154

It took twice as long as I thought. It cost double what it would have cost to buy one of Etsy but it's still one of my favourite things I've done in ages. My son still gets excited when he see's it sometimes

There's definitely a different type of satisfaction/reward you get from finishing something you put a lot of time in when you can feel and see the thing. I guess it aligns with why I enjoyed front end dev more so than backend enterprise stuff. Its visual.. With woodworking, its not only visual but a physical object. You see every inch of it, every corner, every joint, everywhere where you fixed something, where you took the time to perfectly sand a surface to ensure it looks just perfect in the end.

I also usually put on an audio book or music in my buds. Its a great way to disconnect and immerse yourself into something that isn't tied to anything else at that moment. No deadlines, no PRDs, no tests, no dependencies, just you and what you're working on... Its relaxing..

Sorry.. I lied... there's tons of dependencies.. Those happen to be all the right tools for the job that you don't yet have and every time you do something, you have to decide whether you'll invest the money to buy said tool, or build said thing to help you get from A to B, or if you'll go the other way around and wing it by hand, taking much longer and hopefully not too much of a worst result..

It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.

"When you’ve been conditioned to believe rightly or wrongly that your value as a human being is derived from the economic value you provide to those around you and all barriers to producing work have been removed by an unprecedented upheaval to social norms, it felt like there was only one path forward and that was working as hard as possible every day."

I am in part drawn to software development and programming, because it's logical and comparatively rigid (at least programming itself is, if you take away the environment/ecosystem/cults that develop around the idiosyncracies of different languages). I find programming very far from absurd.

I am therefore surprised to see software programmers claiming that software development is absurd - and that woodworking could somehow be less so.

The grass is always greener on the other side. (And I still can't accept that programming itself is absurd.)

I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes

Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.

I love coding. And I love woodworking too: there are so many videos out there to help you get started. Learning to use dowels was quite the revelation for me.

Still very scared of the table saw (Don t have one yet).

But it's great to have other passions outside of it. To get away from your main occupation. To reset and to get a perspective.

And woodworks seems like a good choice. You're still making things, physical ones and you can hone your skill.

I've made a handful of things in my life (e.g. two simple custom beds for my home) without any prior knowledge of wood working at all. They weren't great, but good enough. And I couldn't have been prouder.

So thanks for sharing your story. I might get back to tinkering in my garage more often!

I'd been on the new project long enough to fix a couple major logistic issues with code-build-test cycles, and to get a page that took 30 seconds to load down to 3 seconds with five lines of code, and they were starting to trust me.

One day I'm in a conversation with the architect where we are about to spiral airing the things that suck and he starts talking about how some of these seem to be intrinsic. He ends a sentence with "and the only way to solve these problems is to open a flower shop. If you sell someone flowers they don't come back in five days telling you they were the wrong flowers."

From then on, every time the outlook got dark or just spicy, we would joke about opening a flower shop together. What's the best month to open a flower shop? Most of the sales are for Valentine's Day, but how long do you need to be open for brand recognition ahead of VD?

when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes

Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

A hobby gives me enough distance from work problems to come back to them with a fresh perspective and more energy.

I grew up further North in a region where every house had some tools for working wood. It was natural, some people were really good at it, some mediocre, but using a manual wood planner or a wood chisel was almost routine for any man or kid. I am no longer living there and I am not working with wood, but I find it escaping to do some work in the garden, put some pipes for irrigation or fixing something on the vise. It is a different world than the craziness of the software industry, especially in the corporate world.

There’s also this oily smell of AI and machine learning

Lovely phraseology - this definitely resonates with me, and is one of several reasons why any interest I might have had in working in tech has evaporated.

I am currently happy at my current job that pays well enough writing proxies. The team and leadership are great with tremendous internal training. It just feels military, which is fitting since it’s at a military organization.

If this line of work doesn’t work I will still not go back to software. I would rather be unemployed and lose my house.

Some ppl simply dont have money to start:

- woodworking

- sailing

- skying

- buying motors

- building boats

- renovating cars

Be happy you are in 1% of the richest ppl on the Earth.

Most of my friends are happy when they can get by in given month.

If you're only in it because it pays well, you've got the wrong idea and will run into those "throw the laptop out the window" urges and are likely to burn out fast and take up woodworking, or some other thing.

I think it's working for a huge corporation vs a tiny one.

If you feel drained by all the bullshit of your current development job, I'm guessing you work for a huge company. Start work at a <10 employee company, and see if you can find more job satisfaction there.

Actually, these solutions are just two different ways of working toward the same goal: absolute power

I suddenly became incapable of doing work that I found meaningless.

This attitude will fail you. The meaningless work must be done as carefully and joyfully as the meaningful work. Think of it as building the foundation for serendipity, something very difficult to see from the present moment.

I do a lot of programming, some wood working (a little fine stuff but also timber framing), stone work, and (ornamental) gardening. I find all of these things very similar. Building, guiding things that I don't quite control towards an end I want. Open-ended and creative. I find all of them very relaxing.

software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon

circa 2006 my father begged me to not pick Computer Science as a major. He was certain by the time I graduated there would be no jobs left.

And I got so tired of everything being online, immaterial, ephemeral and lonely, like indie development tends to be.

Ah well, it's good he's not gardening!

when people started coming with so many unrealistic and absurd expectations and demands about what my furniture should do

There, fixed it for you.

People are the same just pay sucks way more.

I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to have some very rude discoveries.

Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as well. Fine woodworking, the projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table (and you spend a few months making it full time), needs much more design vision and years of practice. Those 10k hours required to master a skill seem about right.

Been through a burnout 20 years ago, had to take a year off and then discovered that if you place correct boundaries and don't let people mess with you, our trade can be pretty enjoyable.

It's really satisfying to see stuff grow, to learn how to tend to plants, how they compete and cooperate.

It helps me to preserve some sanity.

The lesson: Woodworking is physically dangerous, do not cheapen on tools and protection.

I enjoy the former. I enjoy collaborating on my craft and doing something fun and cool. I like the people I work with and enjoy helping grow and build other people’s careers.

Then there’s the reality of navigating a workplace - the “career” has the silliness of managing narcissists aspiring to be the next Steve Jobs. It’s generally lucrative, but that money attracts its own absurdity and egotists, putting more into advancing their status in an arbitrary org structure than building. The older I get the less energy I have for these sorts of politics.

Let me tell you, there is nothing more joyous than going outside 3 days after planting new seed varieties in a recovered-soil hügel-bed, and seeing brand new leafy life reaching for the stars. I get the same sort of buzz out of watching seedlings push dirt out of the way, as I used to get from checking for PR's on some of my repo's, lol ..

Its at the point now where I have to have a desktop garden, or else I just don't feel complete as a human being. Lucky, there are tons of things I can take from my new hügel-bed's to plant on the desk, herbs, spices, salads and things .. its just so rewarding.

So yeah, garden, programmers. Garden. Its so good for you. And you can get a buzz from the methods, just like you do with code, too ...