Our previous CTO left by saying “I have enough money now. Peace out!”
We need more of those people, people who find contentment in their wealth instead of endlessly pursuing more wealth.
This isn’t a shit post, its the truth
You ever been around geese? Those terrible shits take shits everywhere, all the time. Loud, nasty birds.
Peak performance. I love them.
Maybe if enough programmers become goose farmers they’ll be able to reprogram geese.
You ever been around Microsoft management? It’s an improvement.
Currently have 26 ducks and one goose on my farm so I get it.
Wtf does a goose farmer even produce
geese
its the last layer for my gooturducken
That sounds incredibly niche. Why not raise chickens or ducks :/
Bigger eggs and more meat. The cobra chicken is also a great security system.
Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.
You say that, but have you ever met a Sandhill Crane? They started coming back, and people think they’re wonderful and majestic. Then they get too close, and find out they’re feathery balls of pure hate with pointy beaks that will send you to the emergency room.
Appreciate Sandhills from a distance.
Honestly jealous
That’s what a year of being a software architect does to you.
22 years. 1 year is chicken farmer, 10 is ducks, 15 is, oddly, Alpacas, and 20 is geese.
You spent all those years down in the trenches implementing bullshit designs an architect came up with, positive you could do better if you just got the chance. Then you go to graduate school to get the qualifications companies say you need to be an architect. You receive a masters degree. You’re your companies leading expert on software design. You get promoted to architect.
That’s when you find out the truth. All those previous architects left for the same reason you someday will. It wasn’t the previous architects making the terrible decisions that frustrated you. It was the marketing team and the CEO telling the CTO that the software product must have certain buzzwords present in the design. Those buzzwords offer no value to what your software product is meant to accomplish. But if you don’t put them in the designs, they’ll fire you and hire someone who will play their games.
Eventually, you can’t take it anymore. Having interfaced with the upper levels of your company, and having the understanding of systems engineering you do, you realize that every software firm will be this. There is nowhere you can go that will be better. You start saving.
Your goal is to save enough money to purchase a small plot of land and put an organic farm on it. Your convictions for this farm are simple: it must be able to feed your family. This may not be exclusively what you envision for it, and you may not even intend for it to be the only source of food for your family, but it will help you be less reliant on the kinds of corporation you’ve come to know and come to see as irrevocably evil.
And then sometimes, you get people like this in the post. Who find enough success farming to focus their energy on it exclusively.
I was in my first architecture review meeting this week.
The accuracy is infuriating and humbling.
If you give a shit about your work and the product you’re working on, then don’t work in a big company. In big companies, people are there for the money and maybe for a good looking entry on their resume, so they’ll only do what they’re being told to do, after all they’ll be elsewhere in 2 years tops.
If you have ideals and don’t just work for money, don’t work in the corporate world. Small to mid-size employers come with a lot less bs and more engaged co-workers.
- rake in the lake
Yeah, after 22 years at Microsoft in a senior position, you should be able to retire and do whatever the fuck you want as a hobby. I very highly doubt this guy will ever make significant money from goose farming.
Are you saying his income will be … ahem … a goose-egg?
Might be one of the few times a Lemmy post related to me.
I have owned a farm for four years, and do engineering for fun. AMA
How did you get into owning a farm, and what led you to engineering?
My grandfather is/was an electrician for over 60 years. Worked on very important projects in New York City. This rubbed off on me growing up. I spent much of my childhood taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together how I liked. I’ve been working on both hardware and software since I was 11. Had the privilege to study CS formally in high school, and Computer Engineering in university.
Good timing mostly got me into farming, especially since interest rates fell to the floor during the pandemic. Had enough to buy the acreage I wanted, and the wife was interested in helping out. We grow a variety of things now, and not just plants. For example we sell Honey, Soaps, Walnuts, and Mushrooms. It can be hard on the body to be so active all the time, but it is more satisfying than a monitor staring back at you at 3am because of some small incident.
I continue to tinker, and assist startups in my spare time, I can’t imagine I will ever stop programming.
I quit my 20+ year career as a sysadmin about 2 years ago and started turning my backyard into a massive garden. I’m currently trying to figure out places to sell large quantities of hot peppers and I’m about to start selling matted and framed photos of flowers and wildlife from my garden.
Fuck IT.
I feel like the progression of my “Programming shelf” says a lot about my career trajectory as well.
I love ‘DEBT’ lurking on the bottom there.
Judging by The Dawn of Everything sitting next to it, I’d guess that book is Debt: The First 5000 years by David Graeber!
What are those books on Doom and Wolfenstein? Is it the game development black book by sanglard? That’s the book I found with a bit of searching
Yes, those are the Game Engine Black Books (Doom|Wolfenstein) by Fabien Sanglard. Highly recommended for anyone interested in games, programming, and history. They are amazing time capsules of those games and the development environments that produced them. I think/hope he’s working on GEBB: Quake and I’m so excited for him to eventually release it!
I’m gonna have to snag that doom book. I love low level programming and I’ve heard a lot about how hacky game dev used to be and that just excites me
Oh you’re going to be in heaven, it’s one of my favorite books! He really gets into everything: how the game is structured, how different subsystems work (BSP trees, enemy ai, sound, music, every detail), and even gets into peripheral things like how the game was distributed, how the (old) console ports came about, and so much more. The copy on my shelf is actually my third because i keep giving them away to people.
Thanks for reminding me about Art of Shen Ku. Friend had a copy years and years ago and from time to time I would remember reading parts but could never remember the title. Cheers!
This looks uncannily like my shelf, I’m trying to buy land now for my permaculture forest 😭
The programmer to homesteader pipeline is real.
Just know that complete self sufficiency is a pipe dream, whereas community sufficiency is much more achievable
I wholeheartedly agree, I’ve been going down the pipeline myself and this has been my approach. Recently I’ve been working with family and neighbors to get a community garden going.
You read some Thoreau and immediately wanted to leave society behind lol, I see you took his lessons to heart.
The other pivot point is The Pragmatic Programmer, which is totally understandable.
That book does a good job of grounding the reader through examples and parables from everywhere else but IT. By the end, you realize that good software engineering makes the best of general problem-solving skills, rather than some magical skillset peculiar to computing. You wind up reaching a place where you can begin to solve nearly any problem through use of the same principles. So @codex here, perhaps effortlessly, went on to management instead.
Yeah… But right to left or left to right… Lol.
Damn it! It’s Duck, Duck, Grey Duck! NOT goose!
***A Minnesotan argues about the important stuff
I feel like we are all agreeing here
i’m a data analyst. there’s an urge to say fuck this shit and start a brewery. That urge is there every single day.
I used to be a Toolmaker long ago and far away. And there is a, and not undeservedly so, stereotype of Toolmakers as cranky old assholes. And the job tends to make us intolerant assholes.
I too had reached a point where I had enough of being angry, cranky, and hateful to everyone and myself every day. So I finally took all that cranky angry hatred and decided to channel it into something more constructive - I became a Medic for the next 15 years. And when that pissed me off enough I decided to teach math in my tiny rural school for 4 years until I retired.
I am a very slow learner…
We always need more brewists. Do it !
The Venn diagram overlap of senior+ programmers and farmers is oddly large
20+ years at M$ sounds like hell on earth. Might be better for mankind to work for 20 years at an oil company ffs
Not in computers. I’m an accountant. I don’t have enough money to throw the double middle fingers. Can somebody please, for the love of all that’s holy, show me the way out or, you know, come sneak onto my property when I’m not looking and delete me?
sell all your earthly possessions and buy two geese, one male and one female. then you, too, will be a goose farmer.
To avoid inbreeding issues you might want to start with a few more than that…
