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As a lot of comments here highlights, the issue is not so much the tech but the politics, constant perf reviews, re-orgs, nonsense BS that is pushed top-down. This industry is taking a toll on you.
My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot. When I started my career I thought I would love doing this forever. I would never imagine I would get burned out in the long run. I would never imagine I would think about retiring early because tech was so fun to me.
The reality is that money and savings give you optionality. It allows you to work without worrying day to day. You never know when the next wave of AI or BS is going to hit. That's when having that optionality is really important.
I have seen so many of my peers making very high tech income but also living the American opulent life, spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area to impress their friends. Today they have no choice than continue working for another 30 years. Today I can have a simple life and retire almost anywhere in the world.
Decide what is important to you. I guarante that buying the multi-million dollar home is not worth the extra 30 years of grinding.
I worked manufacturing in my younger days and also spent some time in the Marines, so I feel ya on the cushy tech jobs... But I'd just about rather go back to Iraq before I go back to corporate culture.
I shifted away to get more predictability and less accounting/biz management stuff. Maybe the party has ended, but I bet there's still some ability to freelance for small orgs? Alternatively working for small yet sustainable companies should be similarly lean.
I find the BS really ramps up with the size of the org. Small orgs obviously have their own problems (and often create problems that don't need to exist), but pick your poison.
I have this idea that AI might actually be a real enabler for small or 1-man teams if you find the right niche. I haven't acted on it yet, but I expect a lot of folks are doing that right now.
You won’t exit after this year. You’ll keep pushing it out.
They are not really comparable and are exhausting in a different way. Tech makes me mentally exhausted fighting things out of my control. Hard labour made me physically exhausted but I felt more in control of my life. I didn't need to do any performative tasks. Once the day was over, it was over.
Just different type of exhaustions. Grass is always greener on the other side I know
Late career is a different story. Tech is Up or Out. A lot of people here are off-the-grid contractor types living in LCOL areas, fully remote, with varying degrees of financial comfort. Those people in HCOL areas who got used to expensive lifestyles - sometimes because, let's face it, return to office meant living in a HCOL area, and eventually buying when the rents got tiringly highter - well some of us have choices to make. You can be not wealthy enough to retire, but still trapped in expenses, and seeing how you can pivot to continue the high.
Then the planning begins to where you'll live in a LCOL area.
Some others in early career are really suffering. People who were laid off are having issues at the moment. It's K-shaped.
So enjoy your mid-career bump. Or, you're in the lucky few late-career types with googleable reputations, you accumulated FANG money/shares, and then you're golden.
I was digging 6 holes in full sun, 26 degree C, transporting 100 kg of dirt in 8 rounds, moved 600 kg of ceramic roof times, worked on rain and had sun burns which I treated 2 days with pain even sleeping
Everything for third of my normal salary
Although now sometimes I yearn for a solid day of physical labor out on the ocean.
But yeah, grass is definitely greener on this side. I can always go shovel dirt o a saturday.
That said, I would like to retire early, not because I dislike it, but because I like a lot of other things more than it. I'd probably still have a software hobby project or business, but it's nice to be able to choose to do so instead of having to do it because someone wants me to.
Plus I can choose how much AI to use.
As companies grow, it's the natural state of things, as any hope for goal alignment goes out the window. I am OK dealing with situations where the good for the company's long term might not be the same as my personal preferences. But we often see situations where what is decided isn't good for the company, or for most workers, but great for a decision maker, and we all know that at those layers, talking about the misalignment to the layer above is a great way to get canned. A decade or that, and the company is a zombie.
I've enjoyed tech in environments where there was alignment, and in a few cases it made me serious money, which is why I have said optionality myself. But nowadays AI has led to much higher capital costs to do innovative things, so the number of companies with the right size and potential has shrunk, and that makes fulfilling careers far less likely.
Therefore save when you can. Don't be fooled thinking you make a ton of money today therefore you will make a ton in 20 years. Get the optionality today, that's the biggest win you can add to your life.
But for the last 20 years my priority has been my family. Pickups and Dropoffs to school, sports, activities, and doctor appointments.
At least I was able to give them a good life.
Living in the United States, my retirement plan is "MAID"
In my country, best we can hope for is a quick, painless death - many people are bankrupted by medical bills and end-of-life care
I was one of those people.
Excellent tech income; zero savings other than a 401(k) I barely contributed into.
After an amazing meal at a burger place several years ago, I asked my wife about upgrading to a Model S. She figuratively sat me down (after we literally sat into the seats of our Model 3) and was more straight-forward with me than she had ever been prior to that moment.
"How much do we have saved? Oh, _we_ have basically nothing? Yeah, so I'm not saying no, but you need to fix that before we discuss this again."
I took it defensively in the moment, but not for long because I knew she was right. Building that nest egg became priority #1 since that talk.
That was in 2023. I saved a lot since then. It felt VERY VERY GOOD to look at my savings and say "You know, I could fuck right off for six months if I wanted to. I won't, but I could!" It completely changed my priorities at work.
Now, I've had to drain my savings twice now: once to secure a down payment for our house, and again for a major repair of said home (b/c I am strongly against treating our home as a credit card). Regardless, I chip away a good amount into several savings accounts every two weeks and am expecting to regrow the account within the next year. I can't wait to feel that feeling again!
You didn't build a nest egg, you saved for a down payment.
You didn't rebuild your nest egg, you created a sinking fund for your home.
You praise yourself for not treating your home as a credit card, but your left hand is still borrowing money from yourself.
You've recognized there's an issue, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've done anything about it
GP built an emergency fund, which is important, but then drained it twice for non emergencies.
A nest egg is a much larger tax advantaged holding that you don’t want to withdrawal from because you’ll have a massive tax hit. It’s also far more than a down payment, hopefully. GP had some low interest “savings” account at his bank. Poor wife, no pun intended :(
This is such great advice and really what I would suggest to anyone young in any field. A terrible thing I'm seeing is folks living a life that requires them to stay within their high paying career in whatever field they're in. Modern day slavery except it's mostly self inflicted.
How can one continue living in a small apartment with lead and asbestos hazards is beyond me.
I read on HN all the time that once you have kid it is unavoidable to spend 300k$ a year. But yet 99.9% of the world and the US manages to raise kids with a fraction of that income and they turn out mostly fine. (Before you ask, yes I have kids and yes we still live simply)
That's exaggerating a bit, but some places near offices are kind of that way. (Why I love working remote, which absolutely increases the spectrum of choices.)
I certainly agree that it'd be hard to have kids in a small space though, I definitely appreciate having more room - especially with a WFH setup.
I always have been fairly frugal and am in semi-retirement now from the residues of my last two small start-ups (to which COVID was unkind, so died simultaneously!).
My extended family has/had big houses, including one in which a famous film was set it seems, but I see those as mainly expensive liabilities. Never owned a car. Etc etc.
[0] As described by a visiting Secretary of State!
The truth is you don’t need a home or an SUV or a front lawn to raise children. And it’s also not necessarily better for them. It might be more cushy, sure, but that doesn’t mean it materially improves their lives in any meaningful way.
There have been times in the last decade where I wished I had chosen a profession that lets me stay offline more. Ironically, AI has given me more enthusiasm for tech than I've had in years, which seems opposite to most people's experience.
It's a bit odd to get moralistic over saving/spending money in general, but that's especially true around expensive homes.
I agree the ideal thing to do is to probably rent a cheaper apartment to start with.
Given that in almost all locales it is so much better financially to rent than to buy right now, Buying a 5m$ house is probably one of the least financially responsible things you could do in the current climate (And especially in the Bay area where the buy-to-rent ratio is all time high)
But the next big disruptive thing like this, that will probably be my last straw. Not sure what it will be, but when it comes, I’ll just know. Maybe it will be developers installing neuralink type devices or something into their brains to have some kind of “organic interface” or something using their thoughts to build prompts or whatever. You will have to have it just to stay competitive in the industry.
I will check out.
Now in my mid-50s, I sometimes think about that interview and the energetic kid I was back then. I wish I would've understood that the future is gonna come, and I wasn't always gonna have that 26-year-old level of energy and enthusiasm for work. Plan for your exit, kid.
I retired 10 years ago when I had enough (money) and had enough (of the industry). Always lived below my means. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in the industry for the past 10 years.
As far as the nonsense that is pushed top down, it is not so simple. I was at/near the top. I know what was happening, what I was doing, but everyone has a boss, even the boss. The industry is too important, too big, too critical for it not to be run by human nature. So glad I got out when I did.
There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on?
I'm not saying it's good, I think it's very concerning and potentially very destabilizing. But it is the way things are right now. It's also possible to be on the wealth-producing side and not see your savings disappear into the ether while still providing things of value to people that appreciate it. "rent-seeking" is a real thing, and much of finance doesn't actually provide any real value to society, but this isn't a simple black and white dichotomy across the have's and have-nots.
We ought to find ways out of this mess, ideally something that doesn't involve communism and the typical humanitarian nightmares that usually come along with it.
Self-perpetuating generational wealth is not a zero-sum game if said wealth is put to good work.
Having wealth morally obligates its holder to put it to use to benefit others. I think we all intuitively understand this; it's the impulse behind calls to "tax the rich!"
People the last 500 years who put wealth to good use, even in modest proportions, are part of the reason western culture is so rich. We would not have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven today if someone hadn't employed them (though I do decry the relative poverty some composers lived in and some OSS maintainers currently live in - come on, people). And modern infrastructure wouldn't exist if capitalists hadn't at one time thought it worthwhile to invest in railroads.
Don't run away from the desk job until you're really sure. If you're really sure, then don't let the door hit your ass.
Claims to have not used the internet or a phone since February, does all communication via USPS, declares that AI and social media make him hate himself... But somehow is continuing to post on Bluesky, continuing to update his blog, continuing to post YouTube videos, continuing to solicit donations on GoFundMe for personal matters. The account that posted this link to HN is brand new and this is the only submission -- hmm...
If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.
Need to tie off some loose ends first? Write a paper letter to your IRL inner circle and/or business partners. Get it copied at Kinkos. Call people (use a land line if you need) and talk to them about it.
Just this last time (you swear!) you absolutely must announce this at internet scale? Then walk the walk and minimize the tech involved by typing out your farewell in plain text and posting it directly. Y'know, like we did pre-AI, pre-social media. Don't pull out a typewriter, write a sappy "Dear Internet" letter, add a bunch of likely-pre-planned "edits" in red pen, pull out your digital camera, take a photo, transfer it to your laptop, carefully adjust and crop, then finally combine it into a multimedia update that you go out of your way to promote across multiple social media channels. This announcement has obviously been tailored for maximum social media engagement -- supposedly the thing they are making a principled stand in opposition to.
I mean, you can be cynical for whatever reasons, but I just think you'd be assuming (and participating in and perpetuating) a game Chad isn't playing.
He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. Clearly a lot of effort went into making this announcement social media friendly and click-worthy. He has analytics on his blog to track how many clicks he gets.
Whether it's in a "shallow sense" or not is subjective and there's no way to really argue against that. Do I think he's karma-obsessed and drooling over engagement dashboards? No. And maybe that's what you mean.
But you have to be willfully naive to deny the irony in deploying numerous completely unnecessary layers of tech, over numerous social media channels, to let everyone know that you no longer want tech and social media in your life.
Is he? I realize your comment is 2 hours old at the time of my response, but go to his webpage now, and click through to Bluesky. Then do LinkedIn. Then Twitter. Those accounts all appear to have been nuked from orbit. The argument that someone's "fucking around for clicks" falls apart when there's nothing to click on.
If someone was a frequent blogger with a big following, I won't fault them all that much for saying, "I'm out," to their audience. It's easier to answer, "Where'd you go?" in a public fashion right up front than it is to, potentially, field that question in private more than you'd like to after you bail.
Seems way more seasoned in typing, than most typist of those days. And yet, he can't find the time or patience to retype the piece without typos as a final version?
I don't know the man and don't doubt his sincerity. I even agree with most of what he's saying. But it's pretty obvious imo that this is all somewhat performative.
People create art and write in various ways and they are free to do so. If he wants to announce to the world that he's leaving the Internet (which is more of a meaningful expression than doing it quietly, for sure) then he can be creative about it without it invalidating his purpose. He could have even posted a photo or a poem along with the message and I don't think that would make it less meaningful.
I would hope that creative expression doesn't die just because we now have tools that lets us express ourselves flawlessly, if we choose to use those tool.
Is about as fucking around for clicks as it gets
There's people out there farming social media engagement for their wellness tiktok account by telling people to use their phone less. That has the potential to cause actual harm, rather than just pad an ego. Those folks actually sear my eyes.
> If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.
says who? you?
Yes, says exactly them.
You have a problem with people's own opinions in their own comments? Should they somehow reflect your opinion instead?
It's plainly not.
https://bsky.app/profile/chadwhitacre.com/post/3mmvzmugfqk2g "my good friend Dana could really use some help paying for major dental work. <gofundme link>"
His latest YouTube post, from 2 weeks after the alleged go-dark date, is also all about his personal plan to walk away from tech. Needed to make sure there is a GoPro in his face while he talks about how low-tech he yearns to be. Needs to make sure everyone on the internet sees HD digital footage of him tapping on a typewriter, carving a stamp by hand, and switching to paper bank statements.
> Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade
I don't doubt it. I also don't doubt the claims in other comments that he has made incredible contributions to open source, is a good, kind person, and so forth. He deserves immense credit for these things.
None of that negates the fact that this is an incredibly performative and hypocritical way to make this particular transition. Defending it by pointing out his other virtues is just a reverse ad hominem.
Did we want to stop and ask how it got posted? Are we sure he did it himself? Does it matter if his letter is off by a couple of weeks? Could it have been a typo and he posted that on his last day, forgetting to add the 9 in his letter? Or are we just flippantly reacting to this?
>None of that negates the fact that this is an incredibly performative and hypocritical way to make this particular transition.
Some people can rip the band-aid off and go cold-turkey. Others need a bit of a transition. This just seems to be the latter. You seem to be letting this ruffle your feathers more than it needs to.
Yes, of course this is "performative". Publishing is performance. Chad is, obviously, performing for his audience in sharing this, he wants to get his perspective out into the world.
Given Chad's decade plus of leading by example, embracing his ideals, it is important to know that he is a person of integrity when reading his words. Could this be a grand lie to some strange end? Sure, I guess, but everyone who knows Chad knows that he is exactly the type of person to mean everything in this letter in earnest.
His blog was part of his job. His job was an open source advocate, he was responsible for talking about open source. He posted on BlueSky in his role as an advocate for open source. Adding in a GoFundMe link that someone emailed to him on a post that got a bunch of attention doesn't undermine his point, at all.
A "hypocritical way to make this particular transition"? He's not advocating for you to make the same transition. He's not espousing moral superiority because he made this transition and you didn't. Life is messy, complicated, difficult, it's not "hypocritical" to... have a BlueSky account as part of your job while announcing you're stepping away from technology.
https://openpath.quest/2024/welcome-to-open-path/
"I work for Sentry, and my job requires me to be a “thought leader,” so I need a platform."
The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted.
For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired.
I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.
Is that AI? Or is it me?
Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I don’t miss tech.
Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)
But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff.
Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.
My previous employer (which I also joined as a startup) ended up in a situation where the head product manager became VP of engineering (it's a complicated story - don't ask). We also had a yes-man director of Eng and together they went all-in on very orthodox scrum, where they sat in the sprint planning/point meeting and overrode every decision of what to take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.
I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.
Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.
Textbook FIRE strategy.
The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.
I suspect the best solution will be architectural, which promises to be a pain.
Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend
If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?
What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.
In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before
It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.
That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN.
It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.
The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it.
He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.
Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.
What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?
In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?
Asking for a friend.
That's what I do, I have never been asked if I use AI to write my code.
If it's dumb code I use AI. If it's something that I want to craft I don't
It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.
Some do try feeding it log based mysteries, which sometimes spots problems but usually not the one that was being investigated.
So far, all their attempts to write code with AI don't seem to have been worth the time. Although there's one report of good unit tests being generated.
I don't get much feedback on my open source projects, because the audience is limited, but I did get an annoying report recently where the reporter was using AI instead of their brain. AI took them (and me) through a pretty wild goose chase over a very simple reported error (unused variables in a couple places). Just remove them and carry on.
No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.
Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
You can code in assembly instead of using a compiler, too.
I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.
When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.
Except with an intern, hopefully there's personal development and you only have to be very specific a few times. And the intern's manager gets good feels for helping someone grow, and maybe it's a hiring pipeline.
If I'm going to have to do that for everything, I would rather just do the work myself.
I have seen some sessions with let's call it over agressive autocomplete... That's mildly tempting, but I'm happy with my disintegrated development environment, and it doesn't have any way to do autocomplete at all, so that's not happening for me either.
If you like coding (aka "problem solving"), it feels like crap.
And if you like still having an IT job in a couple of years, it feels like dangerous crap.
(Of course you can be hoping you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off, to get to keep working on a higher level).
I haven't. But I found myself, to my surprise, not particularly interested in trying; which makes me wonder what motivates other developers if not peer pressure or demands for more productivity. I find coding interesting and fulfilling enough to do it on my own. I do ask LLMs questions from time to time, but for that, even a chatgpt or a gemini in a browser tab is enough.
The best experience I had so far is with code reviews, when the models pointed out my mistakes. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I would want them to write code for me.
They're getting outcompeted.
Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it.
And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...
5/5 would recommend :-)
I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
Some people will just risk doing without. Most will be fine; that's how insurance works.
But, as it stands today, I rarely touch any tech outside of work. Heck, I seldom ever bring my cell phone outside the home.
I long for the day, I can close my laptop lid and not open it again.
I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback.
And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1]
I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work.
[1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.
That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.
I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.
Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.
If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.
Hard to not use it
It's you. And that's fine.
You can still code entirely without AI or AI influence, so that's primarily why I say it's you. It may also, in fact, be burnout. It sounds like it to me. And it's okay to get back into coding if you ever feel like it.
I write code in my spare time for fun and hobby and personal skill development and I don't use AI at all. AI isn't ruining anything for me.
I used to code at home - chess engines mostly.
Maybe once the novelty of retirement wears off (and the autumn approaches), I’ll start coding again
It's not cheap, but it's easier to do my job with the thought that I have art this week and next week and maybe I'll get to teach it someday too.
It feels healthy to not let your work control your life after retirement. There's so much else out there to do.
> Is that AI? Or is it me?
I had that shortly after ChatGPT came out, but as nobody was using it for work, I don't think it was caused by AI.
Personally, I blame all the CV-driven development.
Playing with AI coding models can even give me a bit of the good times back.
Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”
- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).
Big corporations invent new “features” and then axe them, even if the products are delightful; venture capitalists obsessed with building to exit on profit alone; open source developers trying to make a name for themselves by building something in Rust to improve performance by 5%.
Compare that to something like architecture or woodworking, gardening, baking, painting—creating real tangible things.
My recommendation is combine the two: use arduinos and/or raspberry PI to automate water delivery in your garden. Stuff like that that you can experience the value at first-hand. :)
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
Mess around with a poc and try not using the LLM to get started (use a project scaffolding tool/code generator instead if you must). Start with some appetizers and a first course. Stop working on it even if you feel satisfied.
I like to try and get my pocs to a publishable state someone else can download and compile even if it’s wonky. That helps me bookend my work even if I don’t accomplish all the goals.
I most recently made a poc with nuklear ui and libuvc make a small app that displays my camera feed. I pushed it up, the camera frames have some green flicker but it works. I did more research and found out there are better libraries than libuvc for this kind of thing. Now I have another prototype to make for my ideas. And a base to clone if I need some starter template.
He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it.
Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still make a huge impact. Either way I respect his decision and hope he finds peace offline. TBH I’m a little jealous.
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
I wish him well and I don't blame him at all. He already gave more of himself to advancing OSS sustainability than probably anyone else on the planet (might be room for debate, but I can't think of who else is even in the discussion).
I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a year or two being frugal. After that it’s anyone’s guess, but I am beyond excited not having to program for a living any more, just on what feels meaningful, in complete autonomy.
Projects lined up: a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, a series of small games that I have been itching to work on, then, of course, the lifelong project of living in a rural house. Stretch goal if I win the lottery: build a solar farm.
Maybe I will be so lucky never to have had to use LLMs in my work. You guys have fun without me. :-P
Word of advice.
Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal.
The two years are going to fly by.
EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.
My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
I have a very niche set of skills so I could up until 6 months ago pick up contract work anytime I needed. Despite being one of the best in the world at what I did, I can't compete anyone with $400 in tokens using Codex or Claude Code. I'm pivoting quickly but the sentiment is "Oh, shit, this is coming fast and heavy!"
Sure it's not 'the smart thing to do' but if it makes you happy and you're still not far worse of than most people...
I don't want to step on your design process, but if you want to explore some microkernels to run beam, I can link you to mine and another one that I ran into recently. Asking before linking, because sometimes you'd rather not look.
2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy.
Processes just export a
entrypoint instead of a main function. I just want to see where I can take this idea.Here's my thing: Crazierl https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ demo (desktop recommended) at https://crazierl.org/demo/
Here's the other one: Tyn https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel
I haven't studied Tyn, I think from the high level we both have the same goals; enough kernel to run BEAM, and then BEAM does the rest. I wrote in C because learning Rust and bare metal OS stuff at the same time seemed like too much. Crazierl does much less in my kernel; my kernel handles time keeping, memory paging, interrupts, fallback console output, and a simple read only filesystem. Tyn includes device drivers and tcp/ip in the kernel as well. Crazierl runs BEAM compiled for FreeBSD and Tyn runs BEAM compiled for Linux (musl). Crazierl is x86 32-bit, Tyn is x86 64-bit.
IMHO, regardless of what your eventual target is, I would consider running on x86 with bios boot, because it means you can run in v86, which is handy for sending links to demos.
I think building a multiboot capable OS and relying on other people's loaders is a good step to reduce effort.
Starting with serial console also helps a little. VGA text isn't too bad, but UEFI (or other) framebuffer means you need a font renderer and all that. That might be fun and interesting, but it doesn't need to be in the critical path.
If you want to run on hardware, test frequently. Most of the emulators aren't super accurate in early boot, and let you get away with stuff that won't run on hardware. Serial console helps here, because on a pc, writing to the serial port is easy and your output will stay in the terminal even if the pc reboots.
Fully automated PXE boot is helpful too, if you get into a boot loop, it just keeps pulling the latest, and you can push a new binary and wait for the output without having to touch the device under test. Also handy once you get it working a bit... just reboot to pull in new code.
I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.
All this to say, a person trained to work for someone else 40 hours a week for all their adult life is not able to self-direct and find meaning without a lot of introspection and readjusting.
Even if you ignore all that, I think you just need a break, rest, recover, find something else in life and move on. The whole thing about "life was better in the past" is just plain non-sense, simply because the past, for all we know, extends to infinity. Why 1980 and not 1890? or 1590? the inquisition? maybe the crusades? or maybe the pharohs? If you believe in biblical tales then how about being in the great flood? or being one of the pharoh soldiers that die after the sea moses split closes on them? or one of the skulls in gengis khan's tower of skulls?
You can read Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" and get a good sense of how far along have we come.
But you can just stop doing those specific things. Delete your social media accounts. Put a screen time timer on your phone. Continue to work on your hobby projects or work projects without AI. There is a middle ground without going full "1980s tech Amish life conversion". Email, text messaging, Maps, basic websites, etc are all still super useful and generally non-harmful. You can still perfectly-well enjoy analog hobbies like typewriters, vinyl, film photography, etc _alongside_ common-sense modern tech.
And you look dumb to anyone paying attention when you launch a multi-pronged social media moment to tell the world that you don't think social media is worth using. It's kind of sad, like someone making a huge deal about "this is my L A S T cigarette everyone!", "this is my L A S T drink!" but all their friends are kind of cringing inside.
Also sad that he feels the need for online promotion of his paper zine about fully offline life.
I would (genuinely) be interested in a follow up on how that works out for them. I've "threatened" to do this many times, but my partner points out that if I thought tech management was full of BS, wait until I am getting ordered about by retail industry management while working the shop floor, dead on my feet, penalised for taking too long a toilet break. I think reality could come down hard here.
I have worked retail before, and to add onto the things you put it was the lack of problem solving for me that was absolutely mind numbing. Sure there were the little "problems" to solve of shelving, stock order, tidiness etc but it doesn't push the brain (and maybe they're done with that part, which is fair), but until you've experienced it I would be very surprised if this person finds retail better than tech.
But I don't think it's charitable to assume the author doesn't understand what he is getting himself into. I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt and increase my admiration for his commitment accordingly.
This is a nice understatement. What we see here is privilege at work and phrasing it in a likable manner. "Tech" folks appear to be particularly vulnerable to this type of framing.
that's pretty presumptuous I think. He says in the piece he is an Orthodox Christian who wants to build a offline community in Pennsylvania where he lives. The average salary at HD is 70k, that's the household income in the state.
I know a bunch of Orthodox folks in the US and their idea of a reasonable lifestyle doesn't include two Teslas and three holidays, they do just fine on less than that without a tech cushion.
It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech that some people seem convinced they cannot live 'reasonable lives' without earning more than 95% of the population.
Fair, but another way of looking at it is - since the 1980s the income - cost of living gap has steadily increased, such that "median income" translates to a much more frugal lifestyle than the name implies, to put it euphemistically. Its not like people work multiple blue collar jobs because they want/love to.
I'm not talking about Teslas and holidays. Where I am, an equivalent job would really be living on the edges in terms of the basics: rent, groceries, healthcare, energy, saving for retirement.
> It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech...
It's tiring to me that tech workers really have no idea how well they live compared to people working retail full time - to the extend that it gets romanticised like this. It's incredibly patronising. Which is why I would be interested in a follow up on wether the reality matched the "dream".
That said a middle aged guy with college education and 10+ years as an engineering manager I very much suspect is not going to literally stack shelves anyway, and store managers at the big retailers earn a pretty handsome salary. Working what might be the most common, white collar middle class job is not some horror story in the making.
Additionally, the fact that this announcement is a scan of a typewritten letter, despite the fact that he has communicated in text-form on BlueSky since the letter's authoring, feels a tad performative to me.
This feels like a purposeful misreading. The author is using hyperbole to vent about their feelings on where we are right now in tech. The idea being there will still be some vestiges of humanity left who can live without any of the advancements from the Industrial Revolution onward because it may all disappear in a calamity.
>taking a one-way plane ticket and camping out somewhere where they cannot be found.
Camping isn't building a sustainable human community. Trust me. We go camping in the White Mountains every summer and I can tell you based on the campground bathrooms alone that is not a society.
My point is that if the Sentinelese were gone, the primitive lifestyle would not forever be lost to time. If somebody finds enough people willing to join them, it would be possible to found an off-grid commune somewhere.
> We go camping in the White Mountains every summer and I can tell you based on the campground bathrooms alone that is not a society.
I doubt anybody going camping in the White Mountains intends to found a society.
Also, I don’t think the Sentinelese intended to found a society, given they most likely lack the concept for the concept for that.
That said, I appreciate you noting their name as it gave me something to google/learn.
What I was speaking about was more the claim that the author had veered into fanaticism. That doesn't seem true. He's working at Home Depot not becoming a hunter-gatherer let alone murdering anybody.
I didn't realize people still used this word to apply to human beings.
Lol thanks, that answers my question. Whenever these "I'm leaving tech" posts come up I'm amused that the website is still online, they're still tweeting, and there's no indication that they've left anything at all. Our society rewards speaking out too much. It's especially difficult to stop if a big part of your existence is networking, and this guy seems to be all about networking.
Just look at all those socials:
https://chadwhitacre.com/
If CEOs were smart, they'd use the AI craze to identify the AI boosters and then fire them all. This will increase productivity and save them way more money than a Clown Code subscription.
Right now we are in a very unstable place but it might not be permanent!
* Make Rust (or similar memory safe language) drop in replacements for C/C++ code
* the stick is Claude mythos and the like - scares CISO’s, shareholders, etc into urgency
* the carrot is - improve performance significantly where possible. Either through straight up better code OR through customizing hot paths for companies specific use cases
So for companies running large workloads it could be economical in two ways
In the times I saw him since, I consistently saw someone who thought hard every day about how to help others, and didn't lose sight of the human element. Sentry worked hard to create a viable business, without losing sight of open source goals. (you can see some of his efforts at https://blog.sentry.io/authors/chad-whitacre/ )
I tell my younger colleagues to do the best work they can sustainably do... but too often in this field, the big roles become too intense to be sustained forever. I hope his new role shows him the same warmth and support that he tried to put out there for others.
Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside because he doesn't have a robot bodyguard. His UBI would have paid him to stay inside and stare at the wall, but he won't sign up for that cause it requires a smartphone and an identity implant. Probably wind up homeless with a handwritten sign, "Destroy All Clankers! Anything (without an embedded microchip) helps."
Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093
with tracking in laptops/phones/airtags/etc it's more likely to be the enemy than the tool or even the object of acquisition
even in 2026 the most sophisticated stuff we get are wifi jammers and keyfob intercepts and that's still like the top <1% of sophistication, most of petty theft is all the classic smash and grab because desperate people don't have the bandwidth for sophistication
relevant: https://xkcd.com/538/
I'm sure we'll get hackers trying to hack your home assistant bot to steal your credit card numbers though
21 days left. I don't plan to look back.
Second, I'm fascinated by this. If you don't mind my asking, what kind of work do you do in tech? And do you have a family (spouse, kids, etc)?
I'd just be curious to hear anything else you'd like to share about your lifestyle.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1jgcfx9/pe...
Teaching is a massive challenge. The stuff that I teach in computer science I find to be relatively easy after 20 years in industry, but figuring out how to teach it effectively? That's really, really difficult. Such a great challenge to be able to sink my teeth into—so rewarding. And it's for a good cause.
I'm not opposed to going back to industry work. I'd probably use genAI to get a bunch to get stuff done, too, even though I don't use it for my personal projects. But it would have to be some work that I believed in, that was doing some good in the world. I can imagine working for the county, say, or for a non-profit.
I had a company I'd co-founded with a friend of mine, and Google would feed us work (in advertising, of course). It was getting old, and then Google terminated the program we were working under. I just couldn't get enthusiastic about searching for more clients in that field, so I floated for a bit.
During that time, I started doing ad-hoc free classes as part of a local meetup. And I networked with people at the local community college and state university. Taught a couple one-off courses as an adjunct (they always want adjuncts).
In the meantime, someone who was working for a startup bootcamp found some of my writing and reached out asking if I wanted to work there. So I joined that as an instructor.
And that worked for a while, but then the school and I began to disagree on the direction the curriculum was taking. And I decided it was time to move on. I resigned the position and floated for a bit.
Then, fortuitously, a 9-month contract (with benefits) instructor position opened up at the state university, and I went for it. And got it! I've been there 4 years now.
As for how I do teaching, I write a lot of tutorials. Hundreds of thousands of words of practice. I try to come up with effective plans, and I reflect on what worked and what didn't. I watch other instructors and copy the good stuff. I read books on instruction. I interview past students. I talk to people in industry.
I like programming because I enjoy optimization problems. And teaching is still an optimization problem. "How do I get students to realize durable learning with minimum instruction?" It's just that now what we're "programming" are squishy, non-deterministic humans. They don't always get it immediately right. :) But I love working on how to be more effective as a teacher. I think about it all day, every day.
I was also lucky to buy this house near market minimum so my mortgage is low. We buy virtually everything used and rarely spring for expensive fun stuff (except travel). My car is 27 years old (purchased new), gets 37 MPG, and I do routine maintenance myself. I commute on a $200 bicycle.
And I'm lucky to be GenX so I was able to navigate a relative sane economy during the majority of my work years, and my college was 5x cheaper than it is now (inflation adjusted). (When I tell my students my junior college charged $6/unit when I went there, their brains simply reject that information out of hand.)
Also, CS instructors can often command a higher salary since they're looking at a MASSIVE paycut to move out of industry into a college salary scale. And it was really hard to recruit near the COVID peak when I was hired. So I get paid pretty well for an instructor, probably 45% of what I could earn in industry. :) Part of that is made up for with a pension, good health insurance, and unpaid summers off. (That's actually a double-edged sword. Your entire time-off schedule is set from above every year with zero flexibility. I accrue zero days of PTO annually.)
Working for private schools pays more, but the salad days of the online school are behind us, currently.
There is no profession better matching what women in western countries expect from a co-parent than tech. The money first and foremost, but the flexibility to work (more accurately, pretend to work) remotely, too.
Let me reiterate:
For your marriage, do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
If the tech salary is more than the trade salary, every year you hold on is more runway for the eventual transition. Even if it takes you longer to get into the new thing because you were slow jumping ship, the extra runway might cover the difference.
Obviously I've had similar thoughts to the ones you're having. But this is a pretty cushy gig and I don't think leaving it before they make me is the right decision.
If u lost your job already, u didn't choosingly give up a stable(don't know u, so guessing) job as the other person alludes (don't know their situation so people guessing here).
So if u had a stable good paying job, giving it up to start something new while having a new kid can be very hard .. but doable. Still I'll advised.
If u lost your job, based on job market, career switch makes total sense as you need to help provide and a career switch may provide a better or stable opp.
Many people have successful home life/family life with no financial stability or even a job altogether...
You're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income.
> i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand.
These two sentences are completely independent of each other.
Sorry to be a downer, but once you have kids shit gets real and room for idealism shrinks fast.
I would say your priorities and what you value are about to radically change. Parenthood is very instinctual, you'll work so much harder and struggle and worry so much more than you ever have but you'll find so much more joy than you ever thought existed at the same time. Once you hold your child for the first time the only thing that will matter will be your family and that will drive your decision making from there forward.
would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
> These two sentences are completely independent of each other.
They are two separate thoughts. Two thoughts that are separate can exist in one comment. They are just next to each other. The profession that comes close to tech salaries is elevator mechanic. The poetry is for my heart, which is related to this guy's post, in which he talks about leaving tech for the sake of his heart.
Not only are you a downer, but you have a highly unusual approach to parsing information.
There is lots of stable software work outside of SaaS. Not exciting but reliable and pays decently. That's what might take priority when you start a family.
I get what you mean, but if there's any part of me I want to pass onto my daughter, it's my idealism. What would be the point? "Hey, I would like to get involved in this 'Next Generation of Humanity' project because I love people and think we are wonderful and can do anything. Before I go having a kid though, let me actively forget all that!"
https://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/12.php
I still see a ton of frontier to explore, and personally I love AI. I've always loved writing code, but was always frustrated at how it took at trudge through learning new languages and approaches, and all of the plumbing and boilerplate it took to actually build something. I've always enjoyed having extensive breadth about many languages in addition to the few that I had extreme depth in.
In other words, I don't feel AI has taken something I love away, but has removed barriers to finally build solutions in a way that maps perfectly with my brain.
I think it really does come down to a theory I've seen here a few times: if you were the kind of developer (code artisan) for whom the code was the point, AI sucks. If you were the kind of developer (problem solver), for whom the code was just the tool at hand to solve the problem, AI is awesome.
Also, how did he post this if he isn't using the Internet?
They offered to pay me for my time, but I refused as I'm happy to help my neighbors. They seemed pretty uncomfortable with me helping without anything in return, so they pay me back in discounted products or labor of their own.
I am unable to find the video, but here is an interesting story: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/02/25/172886170/a-co...
Then the younger generation who have never known life without AI will be entering the workforce (whatever that looks like in 10 years time), and it will just be normal.
<joke> I just hope he doesn't start mailing packages to people in the tech industry in the next few years.</joke>
But it's not responsive! Hadn't he heard of mobile-first? ;)
I simply can’t handle the performative Machiavellian culture anymore.
I could play that game for longer, but I don’t want to. All I want is to build cool and ambitious things without any of the theatrics.
I don’t want to go offline. I just want to live a normal, modern, and peaceful life. I would go nuts without all of the comfort of modern tech, especially the high speed broadband.
I'm now posting this from the family laptop. (If you want to see the hand-written original, you'll have to visit. ;) I'll be using it to fulfill my obligations as an Open Source Endowment board member through August. I've turned off chadwhitacre.com, and deleted (or kicked off deletions for) Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Discord, and Reddit. I've deleted one Amazon account and am working on the other (I'm pretty sure my dad's last book and author page are associated with it). I've transferred the openpath.quest domain and repos to Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, who asked if he could preserve it. I also gave him softwarecommons.com, the Czarin font, and MP4s of the five Open Path episodes to reupload so I can finish deleting my YouTube channel. (Maybe I'll burn DVDs to watch offline. Can I make VHS?) My Google account will be around as long as I need email; zetaweb.com is my last domain on auto-renew. If anyone wants to buy xmin.org or gospeldesk.{com,org}, ping me on chad@ before August. That'll subsidize 10-year renewals for my dad's memorials, whitacregreek.com and singinghome.com. Those are hosted on GitHub pages, so I won't be deleting that account. I've archived my other repos. I'll lose access if someday I'm able to delete email, which won't be until I don't need Carta anymore, at least. There's probably some other stuff that will make it hard to delete email. Wish me luck. Dang's even harder, so, here, I'm stuck. ;^)
My hope with the magazine is to recover a more humane information technology, so even though I'm leaving the Internet, I'm not leaving public life. After all, all the world's a stage, to quote a sage. Whether your own performance here has been friendly or cynical, thank you for it. This whole thread is beautiful to me, and all its little details. I love you, as much as this meatstick-manipulated textarea in the virtual realm will allow, which is not much, but not none. Hopefully some day one of you, friend or foe, finds me in the physical realm where we can vibrate air instead. I would love that! Until then, keep being HN.
"differentia"
Others please confirm.
Trying to figure out how to make this sustainable.
But seriously, didn’t really start making big money until about 25 years ago, and bailed heavily into my pension fund.
The tech industry is constant change, but the change in the last 10 years or so has been fairly shitty to be frank.
Hopefully, this AI bubble bursts and maybe there’s a few years of sanity in the tech industry.
I've been having trouble finding consistent work for the last year but was recently accepted into a recruitment network. Almost every posting on the network's job board is for AI/agentic bullshit (many of them in defense contexts) and I just can't bring myself to apply for any of them. I won't be able to fake the required enthusiasm. I've been through 4/5/6? hype cycles over the course of my career and I'm just over it all. Maybe the AI bubble will burst? Maybe it won't? Either way, it takes the fun out of what I've enjoyed doing -- even if it's because it's all anyone wants to talk about. Layer all of the surveillance* and age verification crap on top of that and ... I want off this train.
*Anecdote: I was a chaperone on an elementary school field tried yesterday and there were >8 cameras on the bus. This amount of surveillance and accompanying normalization of it hasn't prevented or even helped rectify multiple incidents my child has had while riding on school buses. So, all of the downsides and no upsides.
When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.
Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.
That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.
This post here does not seem to be like that. I suspect he's really planning on taking a hiatus from the 'net, something like a sabbatical at least. I do think he'll eventually return to the 'net in some form and he might even become active in whatever the free software world has morphed into by then but he does seem to have positive plans for the future. He's starting a magazine centred around an Orthodox Christian community, something which can provide the same type of fulfilment as working on free software projects can.
I still want to utilize some free wikis and such to help share ideas.
There are simple things that can improve life for people, especially seniors, that are very low tech, and that's the rub.
Low tech things mean taking action, getting away from the screen, where SO WE THINK, magic happens when we create some new fantabulous code gizmo.
Maybe just bringing a pizza to someone, inventing some gadget to read invisible labels and expiry dates on food, or making an exoskeleton for someone with back pain will do more good than some AI that writes exciting posts on social media, or better, counters some other AI that is coming for your money and creative mind.
We are all overthinking everything, when simple, human problems are neglected in some race to an unknown "endpoint" that is illusory and ever-moving.
I've not a new 'retirement' plan to voluntarily be stuck in the '80s.
I think this is fine. A person, having worked for so long and successfully on something, has every right to call it quits and switch to something else. Something fresh and different. Godspeed!
I don't remember which team he got matched with, but he was definitely going on to do hardcore SRE stuff.
He didn't have a smartphone. Just a little dumb flip-phone that's so difficult to come by these days.
This was in 2015. That blew my mind.
He absolutely knew what was coming. Just like the author of this really nice letter.
I wish him the best of luck in his new lo-fi life. Don't forget to get a rifle to shoot your printer with!
>I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
If memory serves, the note left by a burnt-out engineer on their workstation when they left abruptly.
I was planning to write a book about how to start and run a small software business (which I have been doing for 20 years), but things are changing so fast recently that I am starting to feel a bit of a dinosaur and I'm not sure anyone would be interested.
The hardest part will be beating all the competition for the job.
People want to drive the Zamboni. It’s one of the coolest jobs out there.
It really paints a projection on how much time we all really have in this world and this segment of work.
At best I wonder, do “I” have another 10 - 15 years left in tech?
Do you?
Agreed with the other comments on financial freedom. It does feel that tech is one of the last bastions remaining where you can really solidify being an autodidact to have an exit of your choosing.
There is often a disconnect between both sides.
While anyone can learn the language of business, an MBA helps in understand their side, by teaching how executives think, evaluate risk, and make decisions.
A respected MBA also provides credibility, making it easier to translate technical ideas into business outcomes and gain support from leadership, etc etc etc.
The real value isn’t the mba itself, but learning to operate in both worlds. There is so much gray and fun things to can do once you see and can communicate both sides.
Tech-management arbitrage. That layer you describe is just talking another language, that most people in tech just don’t know. They also control the money.
The fact so many of us are burning out so hard, so fast, so thoroughly despite tech being a passion genuinely worries me. These are otherwise brilliant people, well-read, modest intellectuals that are just sick of this anti-human society we've built, with the constant braying by Capitalist and Industrialist leaders that this thing is necessary or you will be left behind, in lieu of natural discovery and adoption and integration into our lives. We bought into it initially and for so long, even as time after time after time it proved to be empty, or shallow, or vapid, or hollow. Never life-changing, never society-changing, always enriching those with far too much by taking from those with far too little.
I wish the OP well. I think we all need more offline time, if just to remind ourselves what the role of technology was always meant to be within it.
I do recommend people get outside activities to balance things out - just walking my dog 1-2 miles a day is like therapy for me (and a good way to get unblocked and energized with a new idea).
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
I only got good enough at programming to get a job in tech because I became obsessed with the Curry-Howard Correspondence as a backdoor into learning math.
I've always had a wide array of interests. I live on a half acre property with a giant garden and a shop that is bigger then my actual house. I've always split my free time between exploring and learning about computers, gardening, radios, and carpentry, fixing old machines, etc.
The shift in my lived work experience with AI has substantially demotivated me from programming and computers in my free time. A million times over I would rather pull weeds or clean my Bridgeport mill.
I've always wished I could go back to a 1990s experience where the computer lived in the den, the internet was only somewhat monetized, the future was utopian.
OP's plan to fallback to 1980s era technology is appealing but also somewhat depressing. Not only do I really like and enjoy learning about computers, but also making this kind of individualistic decision doesn't really get us to a better place as a society.
I wish we had heeded the warnings of researchers like Sherry Turkle who identified the impacts of technology on the individual as far back as the 1980s.
See, through the years I've left behind an immense graveyard of dead projects I never had the time to finish and now they're all rising from the dead at the same time, like a really bad zombies movie, like MJ's thriller video, all dancing to the tune of AI, all coming alive in minutes because of AI.
This is it, Valhalla, Elysium, Paradise, here we are, I am already dead and I don't know it, but I love it.
But if you haven't ever composed on the OG desktop, you should give it a type.
What's not completely clear from the post is what he dislikes with AI / technology. Does someone know?
Best wishes. You are an inspiration.
Ironically right around February I started to have similar thoughts as Chad, that perhaps I should become Neo Amish as he calls it. Like Chad, I like disconnected, non-AI technology just fine. But anything that spies on me or tries to modify my behavior needs to go.
Maybe I'll mail Chad a letter and see if he wants to be my penpal.
This is the final nail for me, that something is rotten in the state of open source.
There's the "old guard" of open source, who seem to spend most of their time arguing about semantics, governance, and the nth kubernetes telemetry solution.
So where is the "new guard"? There's been a lot of interesting work in open source AI, but it seems to me like a championed effort cannot exist without a new paradigm around collaboration and monetization. More and more, we see the new guard question or outright deny new contributors due to AI slop PRs and issues continue to pile up.
There desperately needs to be a sexy revitalization of open source, starting with young developers. I thought it would be from the YC-esque startups of the world, who use open source as a way to garner legitimacy, good will, and a top-of-funnel upselling motion.
"Trad" open source is greying - and the new wave is more of a ripple. It has no shared identity, and no champion.
Or profession is very young and what annoys me the most: i can do my job only on a computer and i'm very good in knowing how to use it and i also use it for everything.
Privat and work has merged into being in front of a screen.
The joke of starting a bakery or doing other manual labor jobs is quite common.
It might just be time for this to transform.
I would retire yesterday if i could afford it though.
It does not bode well for the future.
One's Life is structured w.r.t. three axes;
1) The Goals of Life aka Purusartha - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puru%E1%B9%A3%C4%81rtha They are;
2) The Stages of Life aka Asrama - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%C5%9Brama_(stage) They are; 3) Finally, your "duty" aka Karma in Society. In today's world, we generally equate this with work which enables us to earn our livelihoods. This should be in harmony with the Goals and Stages of Life i.e. at each stage the mix of goals and emphasis on them are different.Understand your current stage in life, Manage/Control your goals w.r.t. that stage and Adjust your duty accordingly for a Happy and Fulfilled Life.
To be honest, retiring completely from tech is something I wish I could do as well...
Even if you are already wealthy and don't actually need to work anymore, going off the grid completely is still the wrong move. There's a lot of ways to spend less time online, improve your privacy and reduce tracking, and still benefit from some of the actual, real advantages of tech.
And the last and maybe most important thing is, we are currently on a roller coaster of disruption and frankly some daunting prospects - but we don't know what's right around the next turn. What the development landscape might be like in a few years, or maybe what kind of new problems will emerge that are not yet clear.
The right move is to take some time off, clear your head and decide if you stopped liking tech altogether, or you just needed a break. If you still like problem solving, limit your AI use, stay effective and skillful, and find ways to enjoy your skill.
I've never met an engineer who actually stopped enjoying problem solving.
I do find occasional pleasure in personal projects, creating exotic programming languages that are not text-based, compilers and stuff like that, but otherwise coding work makes me wanna puke.
Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.
I find it intellectually alarming (but not surprising) that someone would say something like "[the north sentinelese tribe] are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday".
"way of life" is doing a lot of obscuring here.
It took centuries of hard work to leave that behind.
We may need a close connection to that way of life again and not have to relearn it from scratch.
This strikes me more as one of those things that is shocking to hear but not incorrect. People get more upset that someone said it without actually having a counterargument.
He's not saying that we _should_ live that way but that we might need to.
But in no way is "their knowledge" (which I think is an overly generous use of that term) - acting in the role of a knowledge seed bank.
Can you do it and sustain hundreds of people? I doubt it. At least they're here to be potentially observed. You don't have to _totally_ wing it. People living like that through history had bigger day to day survival concerns than documenting the finer details of sustaining their continued existence to us.
The last closest analog we have to them would be the Hadza people and they've had agriculture since 500 CE...
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.
I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.
Maybe a consultancy of people who have seen and done it all before - Very selective of their clients.
update after reading the comments: a good portion of the HN community is so f*ing judgmental
The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it.
AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.
The end result of it is that the average dev position becomes seen as dispensable, competition goes up, workload goes up, compensation stagnates.
Being able to escape the rat race and retire is a privilege though. The rest of the rats gotta keep running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
I'm fortunate with regards to the timing and being able to do it, but if I could have a job like the one I had ten years ago I'd still be working.
Ah yes. Romanticizing the noble savage. It's as old as, I don't know what exactly (I could ask a LLM but fuck it).
Why stop at killing outsiders? We can do better...
We could also romanticize cannibalism that was all alive and well when europeans discovered the americas (yup, both in north and south america there was cannibalism).
What about we forget about the enlightenment and the great philosophers and just take a shortcut: why don't we start writing articles about how we should we should start eating each other? Yup, just eating. Because, you know, the myth of the noble savage. So why not?
And let me one-up that: what about torturing kids as much as possible (which was a thing in southern america before it got conquered), to extract as many tears as humanly possible? What about we venere the noble savages who were doing just precisely that. Oh but it was "contextual". Yeah: explain me the concept, please.
Wait: I can one-up that. Cannibalism? Wanna me to romanticize slitting the throat of your enemies and then raping and then turning into slaves their wives and daughters?
Oh wait I've got an even better idea: combine that with eating their boys. Rape the daughters, eat the boys. Not many lost calories.
Rape and enslave the daugthers and wives, torture the boys so that they cry as much as possible, then eat them (alive, because why not).
Such noble savages.
Very connection to nature.
Much simplicity.
Deep down all of us (well, you mostly really) aren't we (well, you mostly really) deeply connected to these wonderful noble savages?
/s (just in case it is isn't clear that this is sarcasm... I wouldn't want to end up in trouble)
I personally like using AI tools and experimenting with local models, but I hate being subjected to the output of AI from other people. There's such a large competency gap that exists in the human operators, and AI does not ameliorate it, it makes it worse, but so many have drank the koolaid that it solves everything and eliminates that gap. I won't become a luddite, I will still build technical things at home, but I miss being able to see the tangible fruits of my labor and getting an honest thank you from another human being I've helped out through my work. I miss the permanence of physical things. I'm also tired of arguing with people who think their incompetence + AI outranks my competence and expertise.
"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"
yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.
> I haven't used a phone or the Internet in my personal life since February 6. To communicate, I use the USPS, or maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat. I love it. I want to be part of a society of people likewise inclined.
I'm not at all certain though. Chad posted it on LinkedIn and Bluesky, so if it is a joke he's definitely committing to the bit.
Here's Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, the person Chad names as taking over the Open Source Pledge, posting about it - https://bsky.app/profile/vlad.website/post/3mmw3jigagk2q - which makes it seem more real.
Update: more evidence in-favor of "not a joke" is this 19th Feb 2026 video from Chad's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc - at 16:22
> I don't not want to be someone who helps lay the groundwork for the remnant. I'm going to call it the remnant, a remnant of humanity that doesn't take the bargain. I have no idea what's next. Alright, we're starting Gift magazine. Whoa. I went to Penguin Bookstore. I got an address book, and I got a ridiculous planner. And we got our P.O. Box. Box 200. Oh, and I also switched to paper billing. Paper bank statements at Dollar Bank. Puzzle gaming. Figuring out the offline.
Update 2: here's a blog entry from 19th Feb that accompanied that video: https://openpath.quest/2026/spitting-out-the-agentic-kool-ai...
> Long story short, I’ve decided to dial back my engagement with mainstream technology, and to launch a print magazine called Gift to network with like-minded individuals.
So I'm sold, there's humor in the presentation, but it's a real decision.
Hence my uncertainty - I'm not saying "this is obviously a joke", I'm saying "is there a chance this could be a joke?"
(See updates to my original comment, I now suspect it is not a joke having watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc )