This is mostly true, but farming/ranching is constant work once you have even a modest amount of land and livestock.
I grew up in a low-net-worth family, working on a farm that has been in our hands since 1873. I worked 3 jobs while studying my butt off, and eventually got a degree in Electrical Engineering with a Computer Science minor. I was recruited into various government programs and defense contracting companies, made my way to consumer electronics and medical device companies, then finally free- and open-source hardware/software. I now gratefully hold a very prestigious position while living full-time in my RV while prepping a fully self-sustainable homestead back on my family’s ranch.
There is no substitute for the beauty of nature in the small amount of time we’re able to appreciate it. That said, there are many many many to enjoy nature without sacrificing vacations for the vocation of fixing fence, herding cattle, plowing fields, eradicating invasive species, calling the game warden on poachers, fixing fence…
30+ years experience with computing, and I hate them.
They only ever do what you tell them to, and they’re not even doing that anymore.
I have dreamed of this life since before I was in tech.
I was born in a passive-solar, earth-sheltered house that my dad designed and built himself. Instead of a stack of Playboys he had Mother Earth News in the back of the closet. My parents owned one of the first Priuseseses in the US.
For a wonderful few years I had this life. I raised pigs and chickens and managed my property. I got into the best shape of my life, physically and mentally, and just stepping out of my front door made me feel more alive than I’ve felt since I had to move back to the burbs. (I don’t think people realize how little oxygen they get in urban and suburban environments.)
Though I am stuck in the suburbs for now I am determined to get back to that. I would rather wake up to a hungry pig tearing apart its enclosure than to another fucking meeting.
The issue isn’t the tech itsefl but the corporate world and its effects throughout society.
There is a lot of cool tech, but used for the most asinine products. 2015-2016 was especially terrible with the accessibility of IoT. Everyone and their mother had a Kickstarter with a common everyday item with wireless capability tacked into it.
No, my bottle doesn’t need Bluetooth.
The longer I work in tech the less I’m impressed by new tech. I don’t want the latest and greatest phone. I don’t need a crazy gaming PC. I don’t need or want a bunch of smart devices. I want a few useful things that I can manage myself, and the freedom to wake up to no alarm except the livestock.
Because tech should be boring. Just like politics.
But companies shove tech in our face with fancy bells and whistles to make us buy more.
I mean, just look at PC where RGB is everywhere. I want a silent PC that I don’t see.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s me getting old or if it’s tech being more and more about solutions in search of a problem. I feel like we had reached a “good enough” point for a while, but I can’t tell if the “good enough” judgement is just me getting old and stubborn.
Both can be true. You’re getting older and lots of products are a solution in search of a problem to solve
It tends to be more “I want a thing that just works.” rather than no technology, but yes.
Self-hosting services that are reliable and don’t get in my way, not using cloud-connected smart devices, running Linux instead of Windows, etc.
It’s sad that self-hosting is apparently the path to having a solution that “just works”. You’d think that paying for a product would be more effective, but alas…
I’m starting to realise that a big part of why self hosting works is the customisability of it. There’s no financial incentive for Google or whomever to make sure process A has an interface to talk to process B because it’s a minority use case in their clientbase.
Self hosting - either someone has already had the same issue and made a plugin or I can create a shim of some description to make the two things talk to each other that wouldn’t be practical at scale.
i just want away from tech bro leadership and want star treck instead
Linux is not “just works”. I don’t care about your experience if you are not willing to ship your device to me.
Nah, I like PC gaming too much to want that. What I want is to be free of capitalism.
Yeah, same here honestly. I too wish to be free of avarice
Was working on a PhD in CS focused on industrial cybersecurity, though current events involving the three letter agency that funded my research lead to me crashing out and now I’m trying to get into law school and do immigration law. Far too frail and pasty to buy a farm though
Good luck with getting into law school!
Thanks! Trying right now to figure out how to ask my former advisors for letters of rec without explaining my motivations, which heavily imply that I think they’re in denial about their work being “make tools for fascists”
Haven’t owned a printer in well over a decade. Fuck printers.
Same but I still keep the gun around in case any printers sneak back in
Time for this classic
He stopped that profession in Jun 2025
Bonsai farmer
Self-employed Jun 2025 - Present · 7 moshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dryuan/
Another classic
Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood.
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477
Holy shit, gaoibg from farming programmers to geese? That’s an escalation, for sure
My original plan when going to IT university was to make 1 money-milking website and move to a forest in middle of nowhere…
Same and I graduated high school in the year 2000.
Still working on that.
Surprised no one pointed out that it is a screenshot from the movie oblivion. If you have not seen oblivion, go watch it. It has an excellent soundtrack by M83
The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General’s Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.
Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.
The tech may be ancient for us, but it’s a superb book.
Reminiscent of how Brian Eno spoke on creating the startup sound for Windows 95:
The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3¼ seconds long.”
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made eighty-four pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
As a long time tech user within about 5 years of retirement, I don’t quite agree with this for a couple of reasons. Tech is fine if its tech that serves me. I’m certainly not going to be doing JIRA updates in retirement, but I’ll absolutely use a web browser, word processor, and probably a coding environment for my own personal projects. Retrocomputing is much more appealing to me too.
Also, I think most folks in IT have no idea how hard farming actually is, both mental and physically. Farming is really hard work, and having to manage some of the same annoying things we deal with in IT such as following complicated regulations, dealing with asinine people in power over you, and delivery dates.
grass is always greener on the other side. …but, sometimes, it actually is, depending on who you are.
In my case, the forest was, and still is, the greener side. can’t really complain, and I don’t think I’ll be switching back to tech anytime soon.
Can confirm, though, a lot of people approach farming or homesteading with really unreasonable expectations.
I love growing things and I also love tinkering, building, finding new gadgets.
Have been a techie all my life so far, will be a techie until I die.
People that get tired of tech jobs, might not be because of tech, rather the people they have worked with and the unrelenting pull of a capitalist society.
I have a tech degree but I more so would love to focus on open source and just enjoying tech other ways. Creating or contributing towards software for a large corporation that I only get a very small piece of the pie for and would drop me at any moment isn’t motivating to anyone I would imagine.
I grew up on a farm, hell no. If you think farming is going to be any different you’re delusional. It’s also full of physical labor that takes a toll on you.
But give it a go if you want just don’t think farming or ranching is simpler it’s not. And now you alone take on the responsibility of managing many lives be they plants or animals.
Yes it’s rewarding keeping a baby calf alive in -30 weather but be prepared to wake up every couple hours to keep watch on the animals. Also say goodbye to vacations. Without a family member or 5 to help out it’s hard to take a vacation without worrying that coyotes got into the chicken coop or other shenanigans.
These people are “farming” in retirement, not for a living. Basically have a bunch of ducks and a couple mule.
I have a business plan ready for raising heirloom breeds of pigs and expensive ingredients and selling them to fancy restaurants. If I can get the right connections I can make it a pretty profitable business. Damn near broke even on four hogs last time, even with setup costs.
Exactly. There’s a huge difference between being a hobby farmer and actually trying to make a living as a farmer or rancher. Without needing to support yourself off of it, you can raise only a small number of animals you can comfortably care for, grow what you want without concern for market prices, etc. It’s the difference between coding for a hobby and coding for a job.
I prefer cabin in the woods, but my paycheck says small house in a shitty neighborhood.
great movie, too
Actually, that cabin may be cheaper. Property is way more expensive in dense areas.
A major reason lots of people move to the country in retirement is because the land is cheaper and.they end up with a bigger house and more land for less than they were paying before because it’s cheaper land with lower property tax.
