I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.
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.
Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.
I've rekindled by passion by working for a startup again.
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.
I'd say it's missing the FI part and the RE part of the FIRE strategy. Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it. The reason regular saving and regular humble living look a lot like FIRE saving and FIRE humble living is that an average person can only do so much to increase their net worth, so the possible variance between any two people is very limited.
"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?
The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"
I am not convinced that the "dark factory" / "gas town" people are actually shipping anything that isn't also part of the AI ecosystem. At least the noise/ship ratio is incredibly high.
The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence.
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.
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives
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.
Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI.
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.
>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...
More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.
> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted
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?
I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?
Yes it is. You don't need to announce whether you are using AI or not. Just keep doing your job, use AI when it pleases you and keep building manual code when you think that's better.
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
> 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?
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Working on my own product using Claude, I feel like front-end coding hasn’t changed much. It still requires a lot of manual tweaking and understanding users at a human level.
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
That's refreshing to read (frontend is my wheelhouse). I mostly agree. It seems like most people using AI treat FE as a solved problem, satisfied using tailwind and settling for "looks close enough".
Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.
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.
Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago.
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.
At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.
And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.
Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business?
Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.
As Eric Schluntz from Anthropic put it (not verbatim):
If you're not using AI (I believe he was specifically referring to Vibe Coding), then you are the bottleneck.
I'm not near retirement, but I have found that the side projects I work on have diminished quite a bit since AI took over coding. It used to be that writing a library for something like parsing ICal files was something I could spend time on, write, build out, and then other people could use. But now anyone can throw together a working version of it in a little bit. That's a good thing, but also it removes the fun of spending the time implementing it and creating something for others.
Man I really want to retire. I've gotten a couple stark reminders recently that life is fragile and short. I'm trapped by the golden handcuffs of the software industry, but I console myself by saying it's a means to an end (early retirement). I really hope that becomes possible in the near future, because whatever this is now is not sustainable.
Same age, but I gotta hang on a little longer. I'm a little too anxious about sequence risk in the market environment we're in now. But otherwise I'm with you, when I retire I may well dump nearly all of my technology and go back to stone tablets, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes I get so tired of it. Ironically, though, my work environment is pretty good, it's everything we're doing in tech outside my office work that gets me down.
I think part of the problem is that source code is always in flux. So to think of the satisfaction of completing a project seems difficult to imagine.
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.
It’s both, IMO from your brief comment, LLMs made you think it’s all troublesome endeavor because it outputs spaghetti code. No one likes hunting through spaghetti code and fixing it. Nobody wants to fill their plate with seconds immediately.
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.
Retired as well. Hated that dealing with AI was a big part of my job. Hated how half my time was spend clicking through portals, scrum boards, devops tooling. I just wanted to code.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
I have definitely found my enjoyment of coding in my spare time is lessened now that AI is on the scene. I know very few if any were going to use the code, but it felt like working on a classic car, the act of working on it was fun even if the final results seem like they could have been used more productively.
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.
I think you're getting unfairly downvoted. A lot of people, across all salary ranges, are just vaguely tired of constantly Providing Maximal Shareholder Value™ to their managers day in and day out, having that One Purpose dominate their lives, and at the end of each day looking up and seeing nothing tangible to show for what they've done.
Yep, this is the right answer. Everything is max money always, and you can't have nice things any more, you can only have things that extract all the value they can out of you.
For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care?
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 met Chad during the gittip years, and one of my life goals now is to go find him in the offline world some day and sit around an open fire at night to share stories. :)
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years.
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
Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless.
I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.
Maybe I know what you mean: after burning out 6 years ago, I have managed to dedicate 3-4h per day to work, and I didn’t know what to do with all the free time I had. It was excruciating. It made my recovery longer than it had to be. After reading a lot of philosophy and being patient with myself, I have found a source of creativity within me that regular office hours had completely eradicated in my adult years.
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.
Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
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.
Even just having to clock in on time is something many tech folk don't really have to bear.
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.
From 2024-2025 I worked as a firefighter instructor while running my own tech business, and after two years I decided I was done instructing. I could not handle working on my feet in the pouring rain, getting endlessly hassled for doing a task by the book but not the way the lead instructor likes it done, and then having to spend my lunch break listening to sexist and racist "humor" from my coworkers. Also getting exposed to seriously toxic materials at a radioactive building. Coworkers who all had the thinnest skin and most sensitive egos I've ever seen. All to get paid less in an 8 hour day than I make an hour at my business. It just wasn't worth it, even though I loved being there for the students and helping them grow. When I realized I could make more growing organic veggies in my yard than I could at the training center, I made the call to quit.
> I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
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.
Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!
Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intuition led me down the right road at the right time. Always trust your gut.
This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him.
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."
If things get as much as 10% as chaotic as you predict, there will be massive turmoil and the "Destroy all Clankers" party will actually be the one in charge.
Yeah, except we'll be a colony of China and those T800s will be on every street corner cause we didn't want to build datacenters and couldn't find a place to do yucky unaesthetically pleasing stuff like refining rare earth minerals and other primary industries anywhere that wasn't China.
burglars generally don't need technology and this likely won't change soon
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
This resonates with me as well. For more reasons than one: with the rise of AI (Mythos is but a pale forerunner) digital security — and by extension, digital privacy — has ceased to exist. The bomber will always win. The only way to win is not to play.
I don’t think is true - the endgame of software security is very secure atleast at the code level. I.e. fully clean supply chain, no memory safety issues, maybe even formally provable code.
Right now we are in a very unstable place but it might not be permanent!
I got into teaching several years ago, leaving industry behind. It's great! I had gotten a little bit tired of programming other people's stuff. It wasn't the programming itself that was dull, but I found most products that people wanted were actually kind of boring and formulaic. And none of them really worked for the betterment of humanity.
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 was about to comment something like "happy for OP, he's very fortunate to have enough to be able to simply retire" when I read the bit about Home Depot.
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
I'm not sure if payment is involved, but I've heard Orthodox Jews can and do seek non-Jewish help when they need e.g. light switches toggled on the Sabbath.
It is amusing and depressing to see so many people exit tech. I remember this happened in similar “vibes/strides around 08 and then for Covid, which ironically doubled down on remote work. And now for AI.
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.
While I share the sentiment, this feels like an extreme, nuclear reaction which might be irreversible. I understand the fatigue, and resentment, but if you are about to be a family, you are going to find that typewriters aren't the acceptable mode of communication nowadays, and that you need some money to raise children.
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.
thank you for this. what a sacred journey you're embarking on. i hope to follow you - talking with a close friend now about becoming an elevator mechanic. my wife is pregnant so i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand. i think the world you envision is possible, and closer.
Do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
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.
This would be ideal, but practically speaking, it will only become harder to switch careers and make up the income gap as I get older (i'm 30) and more people leave tech for less volatile industries. Plus, I don't think we'll be one and done re: kids. I don't think waiting is necessarily a smart long-term move given rising anti-tech sentiment among workers, even if it would be better to wait until the perfect age from a lifestyle perspective. This is just my opinion.
I guess it depends on how the pay actually compares.
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.
Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
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...
> Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
that's true, and also why it's prudent to not go around giving unsolicited family advice to strangers.
also it's why, when you're talking about one particular woman you've never met, you should keep the demographic insights you think you have about her to yourself.
important context for me is that layoffs keep eating my company every 6 months or so, meanwhile the due date is fast approaching. treading shark-infested waters
> my wife is pregnant
>> You're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income.
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.
> you're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income
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.
Typically two sentences directly following one another are related. You are missing a paragraph to separate your completely unrelated thoughts. The person you are replying to has a normal way of passing information. You need to work on how you present your information.
Aren't they related in the sense that they're not tech/SaaS/software related? "I'm looking into being an elevator mechanic; I need the money because my wife is pregnant." and then "I'm writing poetry by hand." Like, their life is going in a non-tech direction?
> would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
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.
Why is it a sacred journey? They are quitting a job at Sentry and taking one a Home Depot. As much as I value the role that Home Depot plays in society I'd never use the word "sacred" to describe the work, nor the work at any other job.
I guess it depends on what sacred means to you. i'm not a religious person, so my definition is entirely personal, but i consider honoring yourself even when it looks like a failure to others, or even when it doesnt give you money/power etc. to be a holy act.
I think we're going to see a ton of this in the coming years. A return to the 60s/70s when people were going off the grid, moving to a farm, or just disconnecting
People have always done this, and always will. I don't think we'll see a lot more of it. I haven't met a lot of people who are actually happy living a very simple frugal life for very long. Maybe it will be a fad for a while, or people will do it as a sabbatical type of thing to recharge but really committing to it forever?
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.
I retired to the country, where any friends are 50 miles away, and most don't even reply to emails and messages.
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'll never give up tech. It's a passion I've had since childhood, and a large part of what keeps me going in society is seeing the lights of the eyes brighten when someone discovers something new with technology that genuinely makes their life that much better than it was a moment ago. Not merely the flame of some dopamine hit of something shiny, but that genuine, "Thank you for helping me save an hour of my time/cross this chore off my list forever/give me back time, to live my life" sense.
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.
While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.
I love my current job, but also part of me thinks a Garbage Man would provide a cool experience. (I'm ok with the stinkiness). I just think about careening through the city at the crack of dawn, exploring every nook of my city. That or group fitness instructor.
Software dev is so much infested with mediocre people who follow any line dictated by management and politics and force others to do it.
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.
I've been smartphone free for over 5 years now. It's been liberating, but its just not enough. I still use my computer to doomscroll for an hour or 2 a day. It takes me hours of hiking alone in the woods afterwards too unwind all the stress and distraction that comes with being connected.
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.
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.
Am I the only person in this thread who thought this might be a joke? The job at Home Depot in particular, and this bit:
> 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.
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.
It has been said that hunter gatherers spend a lot less time working and a lot more time just hanging out and socializing than agriculturalists. It would be nice if we could use all of our modern technology to get back to that kind of work/life balance.
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.
It's insurance. The same way you don't want to go too far with germline editing. There are genetic variations that you might need to save your species some day. The cost of that is people suffer.
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.
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.
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.
Good luck with what you're doing. It feels like everyone's shipping more but thinking less and with open source you really feel it with the PRs and issues. All the best!
what's the point in posting scan (?) of paper online instead of just publishing it normal way, so people can adjust font and actually read it? especially since you are anyway at computer and posting it on website and bsky
I just retired after 40 years writing code.
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 :-)
I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.
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.
Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.
I've rekindled by passion by working for a startup again.
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.
Any tips on finding this again? I had a great situation turn sour in exactly this way once growth and leadership change came.
> [...] nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly [...]
Textbook FIRE strategy.
I'd say it's missing the FI part and the RE part of the FIRE strategy. Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it. The reason regular saving and regular humble living look a lot like FIRE saving and FIRE humble living is that an average person can only do so much to increase their net worth, so the possible variance between any two people is very limited.
"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?
The best position anyone can be in 2026 is having financial freedom so you can leverage AI to build whatever you want.
The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.
Figuring out what you want to build isn't necessarily easy.
Being unemployed and unemployable with depleting savings is even less easy however.
So being financial independent even if undecided on what you want to build is still way better.
Absolutely. AI lets you prototype much faster and financial freedom gives you time.
> Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.
Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend
The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"
I am not convinced that the "dark factory" / "gas town" people are actually shipping anything that isn't also part of the AI ecosystem. At least the noise/ship ratio is incredibly high.
Don't compare your inside to other people's outside.
great advice
The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence.
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.
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives
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.
You are not crazy.
Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI.
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.
>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...
More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.
> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted
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.
I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?
Yes it is. You don't need to announce whether you are using AI or not. Just keep doing your job, use AI when it pleases you and keep building manual code when you think that's better.
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
> 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?
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Working on my own product using Claude, I feel like front-end coding hasn’t changed much. It still requires a lot of manual tweaking and understanding users at a human level.
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
That's refreshing to read (frontend is my wheelhouse). I mostly agree. It seems like most people using AI treat FE as a solved problem, satisfied using tailwind and settling for "looks close enough".
>is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022
Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.
There are spots and niches where you can do this but I expect them to dry up within a year.
Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.
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.
Yeah go to a niche market C++ shop
> are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago
They're getting outcompeted.
Are they? Have any examples?
Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago.
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.
Suddenly then all at once has been a common pattern for me too.
Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.
Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?
At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.
And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.
Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business?
Or is this just everywhere now?
Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.
How is that enforced though? At any normal workplace they will ask you "how long is this going to take"?
It depends on the management. Mine asks that, but others within my company get "this is going to be done by [DATE]".
And no one argues about unrealistic deadlines?
As Eric Schluntz from Anthropic put it (not verbatim): If you're not using AI (I believe he was specifically referring to Vibe Coding), then you are the bottleneck.
That sounds like a good reason not to listen to advice from someone who works for Anthropic.
Congratulations! Tech doesn't have to be the end goal. Personally I can't wait to shake this industry and find a new path in retirement.
I'm not near retirement, but I have found that the side projects I work on have diminished quite a bit since AI took over coding. It used to be that writing a library for something like parsing ICal files was something I could spend time on, write, build out, and then other people could use. But now anyone can throw together a working version of it in a little bit. That's a good thing, but also it removes the fun of spending the time implementing it and creating something for others.
Man I really want to retire. I've gotten a couple stark reminders recently that life is fragile and short. I'm trapped by the golden handcuffs of the software industry, but I console myself by saying it's a means to an end (early retirement). I really hope that becomes possible in the near future, because whatever this is now is not sustainable.
I'm hoping to retire in the next 12 months (52 years old). When I do, I'll be buying a Chromebook. Any and all PC-related shit is being sold off.
I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
Same age, but I gotta hang on a little longer. I'm a little too anxious about sequence risk in the market environment we're in now. But otherwise I'm with you, when I retire I may well dump nearly all of my technology and go back to stone tablets, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes I get so tired of it. Ironically, though, my work environment is pretty good, it's everything we're doing in tech outside my office work that gets me down.
I think part of the problem is that source code is always in flux. So to think of the satisfaction of completing a project seems difficult to imagine.
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.
It’s both, IMO from your brief comment, LLMs made you think it’s all troublesome endeavor because it outputs spaghetti code. No one likes hunting through spaghetti code and fixing it. Nobody wants to fill their plate with seconds immediately.
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.
Retired as well. Hated that dealing with AI was a big part of my job. Hated how half my time was spend clicking through portals, scrum boards, devops tooling. I just wanted to code.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
I have definitely found my enjoyment of coding in my spare time is lessened now that AI is on the scene. I know very few if any were going to use the code, but it felt like working on a classic car, the act of working on it was fun even if the final results seem like they could have been used more productively.
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.
I think you're getting unfairly downvoted. A lot of people, across all salary ranges, are just vaguely tired of constantly Providing Maximal Shareholder Value™ to their managers day in and day out, having that One Purpose dominate their lives, and at the end of each day looking up and seeing nothing tangible to show for what they've done.
And being given an email and locked out of everything after a decade of doing so, on a whim, all because someone thought you were just an expense…
Its also the absolute assurance that we're all going to get screwed by a big crash circa 2028.
Yep, this is the right answer. Everything is max money always, and you can't have nice things any more, you can only have things that extract all the value they can out of you.
I made it 27 before I retired. I kind of wish I was older so I could have enjoyed more years of what was a fun career before it turned into... this.
More and more I'm finding myself saying: "I got into this career because I liked technology, computers, programming, and so on. Not whatever this is!"
For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care?
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 met Chad during the gittip years, and one of my life goals now is to go find him in the offline world some day and sit around an open fire at night to share stories. :)
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years.
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
Nothing like retiring with only 3 years worth of savings and no plan on what to do after that.
If you don't need to support a family and are unhappy otherwise, why not?
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...
Definitely not my first rodeo, but feel free to gloat.
Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless.
I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.
Maybe I know what you mean: after burning out 6 years ago, I have managed to dedicate 3-4h per day to work, and I didn’t know what to do with all the free time I had. It was excruciating. It made my recovery longer than it had to be. After reading a lot of philosophy and being patient with myself, I have found a source of creativity within me that regular office hours had completely eradicated in my adult years.
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.
Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
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.
Even just having to clock in on time is something many tech folk don't really have to bear.
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.
From 2024-2025 I worked as a firefighter instructor while running my own tech business, and after two years I decided I was done instructing. I could not handle working on my feet in the pouring rain, getting endlessly hassled for doing a task by the book but not the way the lead instructor likes it done, and then having to spend my lunch break listening to sexist and racist "humor" from my coworkers. Also getting exposed to seriously toxic materials at a radioactive building. Coworkers who all had the thinnest skin and most sensitive egos I've ever seen. All to get paid less in an 8 hour day than I make an hour at my business. It just wasn't worth it, even though I loved being there for the students and helping them grow. When I realized I could make more growing organic veggies in my yard than I could at the training center, I made the call to quit.
> I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.
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.
Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!
Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intuition led me down the right road at the right time. Always trust your gut.
This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him.
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."
What a wild dystopic vision of the future you have.
Ta da, this is the kind of future that will become the actual one, to everyone's surprise in the comment section.
What's worth stealing, to a dude with a robot?
Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.
Funny you should mention robots burglars. I just read this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093
I'm with the Tal Shiar on this one
Violence is always an option. In many cases, it's the only real option.
If things get as much as 10% as chaotic as you predict, there will be massive turmoil and the "Destroy all Clankers" party will actually be the one in charge.
Yeah, except we'll be a colony of China and those T800s will be on every street corner cause we didn't want to build datacenters and couldn't find a place to do yucky unaesthetically pleasing stuff like refining rare earth minerals and other primary industries anywhere that wasn't China.
Those industries have been reshoring for more than 5 years.
burglars generally don't need technology and this likely won't change soon
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
We have a choice right now on whether that world exists or not
This resonates with me as well. For more reasons than one: with the rise of AI (Mythos is but a pale forerunner) digital security — and by extension, digital privacy — has ceased to exist. The bomber will always win. The only way to win is not to play.
I don’t think is true - the endgame of software security is very secure atleast at the code level. I.e. fully clean supply chain, no memory safety issues, maybe even formally provable code.
Right now we are in a very unstable place but it might not be permanent!
That's an optimistic take I haven't heard before, love the idea a lot. Wake me up when we get there though...
I got into teaching several years ago, leaving industry behind. It's great! I had gotten a little bit tired of programming other people's stuff. It wasn't the programming itself that was dull, but I found most products that people wanted were actually kind of boring and formulaic. And none of them really worked for the betterment of humanity.
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 was about to comment something like "happy for OP, he's very fortunate to have enough to be able to simply retire" when I read the bit about Home Depot.
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
Chad is one of the kindest souls I've ever met. Good luck off the grid!
Also, how did he post this if he isn't using the Internet?
Probably had a friend do it for him
Do the Amish pay non-Amish to do forbidden things for them? Asking for a friend.
I'm not sure about "forbidden" per se but they definitely make accommodations for various things, e.g. riding as passengers in cars for long trips.
I'm not sure if payment is involved, but I've heard Orthodox Jews can and do seek non-Jewish help when they need e.g. light switches toggled on the Sabbath.
Shabbos goy. Pete Hamill was one, and tells a good story. Snow in August, I believe, is based on his experiences.
Yes. They pay folks to drive them around.
It is amusing and depressing to see so many people exit tech. I remember this happened in similar “vibes/strides around 08 and then for Covid, which ironically doubled down on remote work. And now for AI.
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.
While I share the sentiment, this feels like an extreme, nuclear reaction which might be irreversible. I understand the fatigue, and resentment, but if you are about to be a family, you are going to find that typewriters aren't the acceptable mode of communication nowadays, and that you need some money to raise children.
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.
thank you for this. what a sacred journey you're embarking on. i hope to follow you - talking with a close friend now about becoming an elevator mechanic. my wife is pregnant so i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand. i think the world you envision is possible, and closer.
Do not do this until your youngest child is at least 4.
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.
As someone who changed careers as my youngest was born - hard agree.
This would be ideal, but practically speaking, it will only become harder to switch careers and make up the income gap as I get older (i'm 30) and more people leave tech for less volatile industries. Plus, I don't think we'll be one and done re: kids. I don't think waiting is necessarily a smart long-term move given rising anti-tech sentiment among workers, even if it would be better to wait until the perfect age from a lifestyle perspective. This is just my opinion.
I guess it depends on how the pay actually compares.
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.
Incel logic for relationships. This isn't how people actually work. Lost my job, considering career switch, marriage and baby are fine
Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
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...
> Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.
that's true, and also why it's prudent to not go around giving unsolicited family advice to strangers.
also it's why, when you're talking about one particular woman you've never met, you should keep the demographic insights you think you have about her to yourself.
important context for me is that layoffs keep eating my company every 6 months or so, meanwhile the due date is fast approaching. treading shark-infested waters
> my wife is pregnant
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.
> my wife is pregnant >> You're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income.
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.
> you're just about to become much more dependent on a stable income
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.
Typically two sentences directly following one another are related. You are missing a paragraph to separate your completely unrelated thoughts. The person you are replying to has a normal way of passing information. You need to work on how you present your information.
Aren't they related in the sense that they're not tech/SaaS/software related? "I'm looking into being an elevator mechanic; I need the money because my wife is pregnant." and then "I'm writing poetry by hand." Like, their life is going in a non-tech direction?
> would you consider the 2026 SaaS market stable? Very naive take.
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.
Why is it a sacred journey? They are quitting a job at Sentry and taking one a Home Depot. As much as I value the role that Home Depot plays in society I'd never use the word "sacred" to describe the work, nor the work at any other job.
I guess it depends on what sacred means to you. i'm not a religious person, so my definition is entirely personal, but i consider honoring yourself even when it looks like a failure to others, or even when it doesnt give you money/power etc. to be a holy act.
The ideal career path
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1jgcfx9/pe...
I think we're going to see a ton of this in the coming years. A return to the 60s/70s when people were going off the grid, moving to a farm, or just disconnecting
People have always done this, and always will. I don't think we'll see a lot more of it. I haven't met a lot of people who are actually happy living a very simple frugal life for very long. Maybe it will be a fad for a while, or people will do it as a sabbatical type of thing to recharge but really committing to it forever?
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.
I retired to the country, where any friends are 50 miles away, and most don't even reply to emails and messages.
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.
Fair play to the chap, it was refreshing to read a scan of a letter typed from a typewriter.
<joke> I just hope he doesn't start mailing packages to people in the tech industry in the next few years.</joke>
> refreshing to read a scan of a letter typed from a typewrite
But it's not responsive! Hadn't he heard of mobile-first? ;)
I'll never give up tech. It's a passion I've had since childhood, and a large part of what keeps me going in society is seeing the lights of the eyes brighten when someone discovers something new with technology that genuinely makes their life that much better than it was a moment ago. Not merely the flame of some dopamine hit of something shiny, but that genuine, "Thank you for helping me save an hour of my time/cross this chore off my list forever/give me back time, to live my life" sense.
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.
While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.
I love my current job, but also part of me thinks a Garbage Man would provide a cool experience. (I'm ok with the stinkiness). I just think about careening through the city at the crack of dawn, exploring every nook of my city. That or group fitness instructor.
I dream of being the Zamboni driver for my town's arena. I have a plan I'm successfully executing to get to be that before I'm 50.
The hardest part will be beating all the competition for the job.
There's no such thing as a zomboni roomba?
If this is viral marketing for a typewriter company, it's genius.
Software dev is so much infested with mediocre people who follow any line dictated by management and politics and force others to do it.
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.
Echoes of _The Soul of a New Machine_
>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've been smartphone free for over 5 years now. It's been liberating, but its just not enough. I still use my computer to doomscroll for an hour or 2 a day. It takes me hours of hiking alone in the woods afterwards too unwind all the stress and distraction that comes with being connected.
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.
Been thinking the same lately…
> 1980. Neo-Amish.
I've not a new 'retirement' plan to voluntarily be stuck in the '80s.
Lol, had to tell the internet on his way out huh. He'll be back of course as he clearly values the internet and makes it part of his ego.
i got 9.5 years. 9.5 years and then I'm finally climbing off the stage, picking up my tips, and my dancing days are over. i'm counting it down.
I think about this a lot but I also kind of feel like I'll never truly be able to retire in a way that matters.
I am very fatigued by tech and AI too.
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.
Am I the only person in this thread who thought this might be a joke? The job at Home Depot in particular, and this bit:
> 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.
This isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure.
I wish I could do the same.
I wish I could retire...
wait home depot is hiring??
This is a great choice
I am clearly in the minority in these parts.
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.
It has been said that hunter gatherers spend a lot less time working and a lot more time just hanging out and socializing than agriculturalists. It would be nice if we could use all of our modern technology to get back to that kind of work/life balance.
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.
It's insurance. The same way you don't want to go too far with germline editing. There are genetic variations that you might need to save your species some day. The cost of that is people suffer.
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.
Even good ideas can be ridiculous if you take it 100% radically literal.
Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.
Then they came for the programmers but there were no one to come for because they all have taken up farming.
Very nice performative piece.
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.
It can be both.
Legend
Must be nice.
I'm curious about one thing thouhg:
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.
Good luck with what you're doing. It feels like everyone's shipping more but thinking less and with open source you really feel it with the PRs and issues. All the best!
Godspeed.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315784
Text inside images is not a11y. That's a paddlin'.
I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.
Yup, I was interested what he has to say, but when I saw the scan I've lost my interest.
what's the point in posting scan (?) of paper online instead of just publishing it normal way, so people can adjust font and actually read it? especially since you are anyway at computer and posting it on website and bsky
and why announce to the world your noble cause. why not just do it.