Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.

I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.

This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?

Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind.

Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.

With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.

It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.

I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.

I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not too far away from editing a short story to make it flow better.

Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value" one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both objectively and subjectively worse.

Like, in Prettier, adding a trailing comma to a short list of items will tell the formatter to put each item on it own line, while removing the trailing comma will keep each item in a single line (if the line length is not too long).

You get to choose the problem spaces and teams, which is a degree of autonomy. But it is not quite so free as “making your own decisions and not answering to anybody.”

Not that they can’t find at work. It’s actively taken away from them.

:deep breaths:

But I think the biggest thing as I move up and spend more time reviewing code than writing it...style preferences make it so much easier to review code. Linters have given back years of my life at this point!

And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.

Trying to de-romanticize it means you have absolutely no idea what motivates most of us.

Signed, someone with restored antique Stanley wood planes, Japanese saws and who drools over Lee Valley product reviews.

I spent a lot of time searching for and restoring old tools. I finally realized I was spending way more time on the tools than actually using them.

If you had a Woodcraft in town you’d only go to Rockler for things you can’t find at Woodcraft. Which is largely cabinet-making and air handling equipment.

Lee valley and veritas are mostly making reproductions of golden age Stanley tools before the race to the bottom (what the kids call enshittification) started, with a few omissions or improvements. They aren’t garbage, they’re low volume. That makes them less appropriate for people being paid by the hour or piece.

I went to rockler this morning to get a reamer because the only reamers at Woodcraft are for pen making. With the exception of big brands like festool or powermatic most of the tools they sell at rockler are not great tools. This reamer is not great.

OP complained about all the strict rules software engineers have to abide by, while woodworkers get to have all the fun with sharp tools, nobody telling them how to use them, and generally freedom at how they do stuff. But that’s precisely the perspective of a highly compensated person doing manual labor for fun, not the one of a professional woodworker. It’s like someone cooking fancy once or twice per week saying chefs have such a great job because they get to dice the onion the way they like. Ask any professional chef how well that works.

Something you do as a hobby will always seem more fulfilling, because it’s a hobby. Anyone doing it professionally very likely also has strict rules to follow, you just don’t know about them - because you’re not a pro.

Ignoring hand tools, which give you precise, tactile control ... I'd still argue with this.

There are tools for specific things and they're meant to reduce error. But a router (woodworking) can be used to do half the stuff you want/need to do. A table saw can make straight cuts, rabbets, joinery.

The tools themselves (outside of specialty ones) are generally multi-purpose and allow for experimentation and creativity.

OP's complaint is about syntactical differences and that's just because his team doesn't agree with him.

And tbh, to me, the fun creative part in programming lies in architecture, not how I space my code. With woodworking, the creative part is how I put it all together but not the actual cutting part.

Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".

Sure, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Well-meaning engineers frequently don't document their code at all. It's why I advocate programmers at least use descriptive variable names and function names; what I call "self-documenting code".

It still falls short of well-documented code but, as I say, gets you "good".

Code has its own flow and natural groupings just like human language, and adding spacing to match makes it easier to understand even though it is subtle.

This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?

Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.

If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.

Before back-tick strings in JS, it was useful to employ both single/double quotes for strings -- you'd use one most of the time, and then if you needed to embed a bunch of that quotation mark in a string literal, you'd switch to the other one.

    'my string'
    'my other string'
    "insert values ('foo', 'bar', 'baaz')"

    'insert values (\'foo\', \'bar\', \'baz\')'

    // linter pwease preserve my qwotes

Linting is a bit of a different beast, because linting includes changes to the code behavior itself, not just syntax. In JS there are so many footguns, that linting can often be pretty involved/strict. I think most of the people who don't like linting in JS either aren't aware of the footguns, or don't do very much code review and haven't worried themselves much with "what sort of bizare and unusual ways can this fail" sort of a thing.

Yes, both of these.

Obviously there are huge benefits to auto-formatting in large teams and popular open source projects, but some people also find benefit in having control of alignment, line breaks, indentation etc.

The only formatting that drives me up the wall is people using K&R braces in C# or Java. It's not 1970 anymore, and we're not all typing on green-screen terminals. It's like people fetishizing vim or emacs over modern IDEs.

All these are configurable (and not enforced by default but you can definitely do so with .editorconfig).

It is also fairly popular in C# to use expression-bodied members where they have just a single statement e.g.

    class Test {
        public int Property => 42;
        public void Method() => Console.WriteLine(42);
    }

I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing.

My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical.

In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%.

It's far more important that APIs and other conventions are consistent. When constructs in the code aren't consistent, it can be an absolute nightmare. When code isn't formatted well, it's usually just annoying and can be trivially fixed with automation.

If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards.

Code is not art, it's instructions.

If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.

I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read by a computer and by your human teammates.

There are times when I'm frustrated because prettier is making a necessary but unintuitive choice and causing my code to become harder to read. But those are rare, and I would never trade them for the guarantee of readable code the other >99% of the time.

Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that programmers in positions of power fetishize is where things can get frustrating and time can get wasted.

The worst is when linter rules are used for things that should be evaluated by a human being in code review. At a previous workplace, someone thought it was a marvelous idea to try and enforce things like functions having no more than 6 lines or some other poppycock. My current workplace is OK, but even then there are some stupid rules like not being allowed to assign `this` to a constant, even though the function in-scope is being re-bound by some stupid middleware making it impossible to use fat arrows or `.bind` (in JavaScript). Sorry, but I'll assign whatever the f*** I want to a constant that isn't escaping the current scope in any way. What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.

Well I'm quite proud of having owned a certain repo at work which takes exactly this approach. If I have to disable a rule more than once, I take a good look at whether we need it at all, so we have extremely few `eslint-disable` comments in the entire codebase. It's one of the cleanest and most transparent codebases I've worked in -- but that's also an artifact of me spending long stretches working in it alone and having little oversight of how I spend my time. So there's a tradeoff :)

But they don't see value in warnings. Either you have a problem that needs to be fixed or you don't.

I still don't think that makes it art and this is why: art can't be simplified. Code can.

Take that to it's extreme and you see that code can be simplified down to nothing without anything being destroyed. Art can't.

Maybe you could say that the act of programming (or simplifying) is an artform, but that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about the product of that process, which is just instructions to accomplish a task.

I disagree. The thing being destroyed is readability and common understanding with your fellow programmers.

That tells me that the code itself is not important; the task/instructions the code performs is the important part. Therefore code is a utility, not an artform.

Yes I want written instructions to be understandable to humans, so my code conforms to tool-enforced formatting standards 100% of the time, not subject to artistic interpretation.

This is one of the major differences between hobby programming and work programming. When you're writing code as a hobby, it can be anything you want: code can be art, instructions, math, beauty, a means to an end, an experiment... At work, code must ultimately be a tool that creates profit. It has to be manageable, consistent, and boring.

That's how I like to see code. I don't want to struggle to figure out what you're trying to do. I want to be able to read your code and understand it easily and get on with what I need to do.

The opposite of this, keeping the medical context, would be the orthopedic surgeon who was so excited about how badly my then 25-year-old wife had smashed her wrist. "I never see this much joint damage in someone so young. It's incredible." Not words you want to hear from a doctor!

How can it be a waste of time? The whole point is to avoid wasting time talking about formatting on PRs or seeing line noise on PRs because people have slightly different preferences or settings for code formatting.

What I absolutely detest, is any kind of code formatting comment on a PR. If it cannot be enforced automatically, it’s not worth arguing about, and definitely not something to hold a PR up for.

But my issue with formatting, while great most of the time, is that sometimes I want to violate it, and tooling around automatic formatting and format validation is usually installed with the intention that it is 100% correct all the time. Sorry, but as a senior programmer, sometimes it really should be up to me to decide whether code belongs on a single line, and I don't want to fight against automatic formatting or the CI pipeline throwing a hissy fit when I desire that discretion.

Being a senior eng isn't about always knowing what's right, it's about knowing how to keep the team moving efficiently.

Yes.

> If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again.

That is unless one believes to have good reason to violate that rule, in which case suddenly time is being spent having practically the same conversation in this part of the thread that I started.

I think you are contradicting yourself a bit with

> Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code.

The point being that something small might have significance to one person but not the other.

And that consistency is probably important, but there is a difference between consistency of your stuff and consistency between your stuff and stuff of others.

So I think what it boils down to is that crafting hobbies are often more fulfilling not (only) because they have tangible outcomes, but because you can do them on your own and on your terms.

If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.

Yeah, that's totally fair. I think conversations can be had with such cases, and I think that trying to effectively eliminate the conversation is a bad thing, which relates closely to my overall objection. Ironically, it ends up in conversation anyway unless a developer is always a good little goober and never marches out of sync.

Maybe my mindset would be different if I saw great software around me, but I see mostly crappy and user-hostile software these days. I'm not sure whether strict formatting "standards" is of meaningful benefit for the users.

> If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.

Yeah, I guess you've identified where my thought in response to woodworking falls apart. haha If it were one's employment, it could indeed be as confining as being a programmer at BigCo.

Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).

Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.

I definitely preferred the days of the open range....

Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic translation done by some bot or something.

It could obviously be done, but involves a yak shave that isn’t clear that it brings enough value to be worthwhile.

For linting (e.g. eslint in the JS-space), this is also possible, however, most linting-processes tend to run just long enough to be annoying when run on every commit. In the monorepo I work on we created a command "prep-pr" which specifically addresses this issue - run it before creating a PR, and the CI-pipeline will mostly be green, at least in terms of linting/unit-testing.

For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.

Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.

Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency. Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love it.

Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.

Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).

Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.

And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.

For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal. Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier and that's why some products are better when they are homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be "creative."

Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)

Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.

These days they are pretty good at preserving vertical separation if it already exists and adding it if it’s missing.

If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.

It’s not necessarily a weakness of the language.

Languages like Haskell, C#, and Java don’t have the same amount of expressiveness as js, python, or ruby, so they don’t benefit as much from a linter, though I know places that use one for C# to prevent usage of the ‘var’ keyword

And enforcing new lines on else or catch after the brace, completely different to the language guides.

It looks a fucking mess.

Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through open source repos all the time, which all have their own styles and which are often not self-consistent; my comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the other.

The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters, nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You really want to manually format that so each row is on it's own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be littered with

    MatrixXf mat(2, 2);
    // clang-format off
    mat << 1, 2, 
           3, 4;
    // clang-format on

[1] https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/group__TutorialAdvancedIniti...

This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a certain space under or over the counter, and need to be homogenous to a large extent.

The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.

What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.

Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.

There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.

That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching because that's when you got confronted to the problems from another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if your arguments and process are written somewhere.

Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.

Thankfully I quit and the new job has been great.

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.

It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of.

It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.

Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.

But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.

Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.

I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.

The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long

It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.

The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.

I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics factory where the chemical stench left my nose nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.

I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.

edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.

I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their parents' social circles into a tech career and never were wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I know what it's like to keep a job a job.

I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most of your time is spent coordinating rather than building, and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I don't hate, working with generally smart people, alternating between a cushy office and my home where outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor office perks. It's fantastic.

I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have lost his money -- luck carries that "should have" connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-sum connotation, because we always mean someone is privileged in relation to another, which introduces almost an adversarial tone to it.

For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not really harder than any other reasonable person. I was born in the right zip code, to the right family, had access to an amazing education, had the stability in my life to pursue it. Fortune.

I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish most people could have fortune in their lives. If the price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is down today, so be it!

By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish

“I’ll be truly happy WHEN”

When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done”

Fully agree, it’s a state of mind.

I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress

I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.

Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.

If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.

I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)

Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.

Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.

Will take one of those instead, any day.

I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.

Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.

The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.

It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.

So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.

So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.

My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.

Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.

The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.

Of course you can go looking again. But why not look for a slow-growing or not-growing small company, so you don't need to go looking so often?

There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.

> I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems

I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.

This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.

Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media)

> endless PowerPoints

We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law.

But to your point about Small versus Large entities...

> ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.

There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people.

Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems.

> people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies

These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.

This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.

> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product

Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.

It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.

As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.

This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.

The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.

  people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources

Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.

It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces.

Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members...

I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".

Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of enterprise IT.

Side projects and meditation supplements.

Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?

I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.

I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.

Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts.

As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face.

Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice.

With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.

But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.

So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.

Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)

It's no surprise you can end up feeling empty and unfulfilled in a career like software development, or any other modern career, you are putting energy and emotional involvement that you would otherwise have put into the search for physical necessities. I think this is particularly acute for those in software development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the physical world. Biologically speaking fulfillment should come from satisfying your physical needs (i.e. surviving) not from the pursuit of some made up goal.

IMHO it's a classic example where "the author is excellent at identifying problems, not good at identifying solutions." Unfortunately almost nobody reads the first (identification) part because the solution part is so unpalatable and unacceptable. For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense, but for most people who have a sense of compassion and empathy the costs are extremely unpalatable.

It's pseudo-profound, but not really insightful at all. It's the kind of writing that seems brilliant to people going through difficult times in life or edgy teenagers who are angry at the world, but to be blunt it falls flat for people who are well-adjusted and thriving.

That's the crux of that type of writing: Ranting about the world in pseudo-profound prose is always going to feel brilliant to people who are struggling with something and want to identify with others who are also struggling, but that doesn't make it insightful or good writing.

> For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view it makes logical sense,

Treating his writings and actions as two separate, unrelated things is really downplaying the manifesto. The fact that he took the ideas he wrote down and came to the logical conclusion that violence and destruction were the way forward should tell you something about his writings. Specifically, that they were hyperbolically incorrect.

To be honest, the way that you're identifying with his writings and thinking that even his actions make "logical sense" suggests that you may need to take a step back and reevaluate. It seems his prose got its hooks into you, but it's not actually brilliant content.

I imagine there are tons of philosophers who have said similar things.

Here's a comment recommending Jacque Ellul and Lewis Mumford - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015488

Another one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658601

(I haven't read them)

But we probably don't remember or cite them because their manifestos weren't published on the front page of newspapers.

That was due to the serial violence of the author, and it was subsequently talked about for decades.

That is, the notoriety of his crimes could be the reason that you read and recommend his work, rather than somebody else's work -- as opposed to it being a coincidence

27 years in the slammer to clear up some ideas means there is A LOT of additional reading material from him in form of letters, essays and books.

It seems the longer he thought about it the more he could not find a path to stop technology progress but figured we just need to ride through it until collapse, if that happens.

I think this level of hyperbole only feels correct when you've been trapped in the kinds of companies where everyone is at least ten steps removed from the customer. When you're sitting through meetings and pushing around abstract "work" to achieve artificial goals all day, it can seem like modern work is all made up and arbitrary.

But step outside one of these absurd corporate jobs and you'll see plenty of people doing "real" work, and doing a lot of it. It's eye opening to go from a corporate behemoth to a small company where what you do actually matters to customers. Once you see the effect your work has on something up close, it makes a lot more sense.

Every time I read an HN comment where someone is romanticizing Ted Kaczynski's writings, it feels like they're coming from a place of being just a bit too chronically online and a bit too disconnected from how the real world works outside of the internet and corporate life.

In his words "the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex."

Or is it what the "legendary" comment in the original link calls attention to: That the pay is good? As a result, you technically only need to spend a minutes per day, if that, working on software. Everything else is fluff. This seems to match what Kaczynski is talking about.

Take a job developing software that just barely covers the cost of your survival needs and I expect there is no chance you will feel empty about it.

That's one of the most absurd hyperboles (or the most detached-from-realiy statements) I have ever seen. That would mean only one out of 100,000 people is doing "real" work. Or if you spread it evenly, less than one third of a second per working day.

What makes you think think that your definition of "surrogate activity" is an interesting distinction? That only "growing your own food" is going to make people fulfilled, biologically? Is there any evidence of this? That hunter gatherers, or that farmers in history, were somehow happier?

As far as I can tell, most people throughout history worked really hard, but tried as much as they can to do anything but what they had to do to survive. Every single human culture has music, art, science, etc.

Water food and shelter are not all there is to a comfortable life.

I only code as a hobby anymore. Burnout destroyed my career and now I design PCBs and write embedded software without LLMs.

1. Learn basics of electricity, learn to use oscilloscope, logic analyzer. You don't necessary need to have knowledge to design complex PCBs (that's a separate skill and not easily attainable) but you need to be able to understand existing design on high-level and do some debugging. For example you wrote code which does some SPI to talk to some device but it does not work. You need to analyze electricity to understand what's going on in the wire.

2. Learn basics of assembly. You don't need to write your software in assembly, but you need to read it and write some little snippets if necessary.

3. Learn to read data sheets.

Modern MCUs and devices are really like libraries. You're using some interfaces, calling some functions and get some responses. Data sheets are library documentation.

4. Learn C, learn build tools (at least make), learn debugger (gdb), learn linker.

Then it's only matter of time and experience. Most vendors supply their terrible libraries that you're supposed to use. Most vendors support some bad IDEs that you're supposed to use. Often you're forced to use Windows because not everyone supports Linux or macOS. It's not fun part and sometimes you can avoid it, but sometimes you can't.

Learn to read documentation in general. It's shocking how many people seem incapable of finding answers that are in official documentation but not on Stack Overflow.

This is especially true from a security standpoint. Many analysts are worried about XSS attacks and other such high-level techniques. C has an entire different class of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. And beneath that, there are countless vulnerabilities by exploiting properties of the physical hardware. Most industries choose to ignore these problems, because they’re very expensive to mitigate.

Seconding this; I recently wrote a game for the GameBoy Color in C and it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done with coding in a while.

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

The negative connotations is a more recent development:

> The meaning "one who cultivates and participates (in something) but does not pursue it professionally or with an eye to gain" (as opposed to professional) is from 1786; often with disparaging suggestions of "dabbler, dilettante," but not in athletics, where the disparagement shaded the professional, at least formerly. As an adjective, by 1838.

* https://www.etymonline.com/word/amateur

It comes from the from the Latin amatorem, "lover": someone who does something not for any practical reason, but simply for the enjoyment / love of the activity. How well one does it does not necessarily come into consideration, as long as there is enjoyment.

Indeed, the Olympics is technically supposed to be an event for amateurs, while also being generally perceived as the peak of competition for each relevant sport.

> A person attached to a particular pursuit, study, science, or art (such as music or painting), especially one who cultivates any study, interest, taste, or attachment without engaging in it professionally.

(Wiktionary.) It just also can be used to derogatorily refer to a "low" skill level (Someone who is unqualified or insufficiently skillful., same), but the non-ad hominem definition doesn't have that connotation.

E.g., in the ballroom dance community, the "amateur" category is filled with people incredibly talented, I'd estimate with like 8-10+ years of experience. They're amazing to watch.

I really love physical things I can do with my body as a counterbalance to working on the computer- weight lifting, woodworking, and sailing add a lot of value to my life, and have gotten me outdoors and in shape. I'm currently building a wood sailboat in my garage together with my son, using ancient woodworking tools I inherited from my grandfather.

I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of building things with my hands or using power tools just fills me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.

1. Don't require you to interact with screens 2. Require your full attention (e.g. if you were listening to a podcast while doing it, you wouldn't remember a single thing they were talking about) 3. Has a social aspect, but is also possible to do on your own 4. Preferably physical 5. Preferably has some level of "controllable danger/risk", e.g. mountain biking is good because you can walk down hard stuff or stay on easy trails, vs. road biking you don't control the risk of getting injured / killed by a driver.

Some that fall into this category are climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing.

There's the other category that this post about woodworking scratches: building things and developing new skills and mastery doing so. However, these don't often come with an easily-accessible, accepting community; it's usually just you alone in a garage. Given how important social connection is, and how isolating a lot of tech jobs can be, this is a void that a lot of us on this orange website need to actively pursue.

If you're in any "tech city", there's definitely a climbing gym nearby. Climbers are almost always amicable, and for the socially anxious, it's a great pretense to interact with someone (because they have to be on the other end of the rope anyway). The amount of capital outlay to get started is low (e.g. shoes, belay device, and a harness will cost <$300 total if you get nice stuff, albeit sticking with the non-expert shoes!), and you can pretty much start having fun right away (vs skiing takes at least a season to get confident enough to truly start having fun and not "surviving").

I think people often turn away from sailing because it's seen as an expensive elitist thing for wealthy people, but the truth is the polar opposite of that- most people in the sailing community are working class and often have either small dinghies or older boats you can get for a few hundred dollars and easily maintain yourself. I paid $800 for my first working sailboat, and the first yacht club I joined had a literal garden shed full of rusty hand tools for a "clubhouse."

Agree. With zero background in wind-sports I joined a crew. The yacht owner mostly just wanted someone that would turn up reliably - we had one guy who was terrible on the boat but he was reliably there. Good mixture of backgrounds of the crew.

I really enjoyed being part of a team sport.

The main cost was committing to one day a week. I got cheap gear (jacket, gloves) and currently I use a summer wetsuit to stay warm and dry (cold water in our Banks Peninsula harbours).

> climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing

Suggested by previous comment. But they are not team sports. I am a developer and those sports are good and social but they are focused on your own personal skills.

One thing I may add is commitment and responsibility, as in, if you are careless, people may die, including yourself. In most software work, with all these tests and reviews and backups, you don't have that, for very good reasons, but it kind of feels like what you are doing is inconsequential.

But he taught me crude woodworking like framing in houses- almost none of the tools or skills translate into fine woodworking required for building things like furniture or boats. Until the last year I didn't know how to cut with the grain, what a planer was for, etc.

What my dad really taught me was the confidence that I can learn what I need as I go, to do almost anything. I'm not afraid to start big projects where I have zero idea how to do any of the steps required at first, and am expecting to learn them one at a time as I go. My dad would regularly jump into things like buying a car with a blown engine and expecting to rebuild it without any clue where to start- and then follow books and advice, and do it successfully the first time. So I learned to also do that.

YouTube has been a huge boon- anyone can learn almost anything for free, without needing someone to teach them first. Also tech like 3D printers allows people to get into making things without the physical skills previously needed.

Nowadays, I'll set everything up, cut/buy the metal, etc. and usually for under $100 have someone come over and do the actual welding for me.

Keeping the tungsten from touching the bead is harder than it looks.

The thing with welding is that it doesn’t give you any time to figure things out in the moment. Sort of like tennis in that way. You hit it wrong and you gotta go get the ball. Start wrong with welding and gotta get the angle grinder and restart.

I didn't have any experience in any of these before and I was not particularly athletic. You only need to find something you want to try, and if you like it try to commit to it for a couple of years.

In my example, I started running when I signed up for a 10k race as a team event when I joined my company, and realized the racing experience was actually enjoyable (regardless of my performance). And for woodworking, I signed up for a 6 weeks course to make a simple box at my local recreation center, and ended up making a couple of furniture or decorative pieces that are not fancy at all but still a lot more interesting than IKEA stuff.

I've also replaced the starter and replaced the default head unit with something modern that includes GPS. Most of it was intimidating to get started, but none of it was what I would call difficult. There's too many very specific guides around showing you exactly what you need to do. And developers are used to following guides and running into inconsistent documentation and troubleshooting from there. Most of them would be right at home stumbling their way through auto repair.

Last year I epoxied my garage floor and got very good results thanks to my YouTube studies. My YouTube internship has also lead to me re-modelling my entire kitchen. I designed everything in sketchup and am in the middle of building the custom cabinets. I'll end up mixing and pouring concrete countertops myself as well. I've repaired my dishwasher twice and my dryer three times by looking up symptoms online and ordering the most likely parts and just digging in. Every time there have been videos with the specific model and the specific problem that I can follow along with.

Again, none of this is what I would consider to be difficult relative to some of the technical problems I've had to face at work. It's all very well documented processes and combined with the ability to troubleshoot and the budget to not have to fight your tools all the time and most things seem to be very achievable by non-experts. I still don't consider myself to be "handy". But I know I can fix pretty much anything in my house or on my vehicle with enough tutorials and time.

Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how to work with physical objects.

Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists. Partly because my friends weren't working with physical objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect with my peers.

But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still did not pass on their knowledge.

I get more enjoyment whole-assing one thing than half-assing many, in my case. Not to say hobbies aren't cool - I know somebody that built an entire guitar starting from wood - but I'd rather spend that time going even further in my main thing. "Majoring in the minors" or whatever.

I hope it doesn't come across as some sigma grindset stuff, it's not that I suppress my urge to have fun hobbies - I just feel happier and more secure incrementally building on my main career than creating a new persona for an activity I'm indifferent to.

I find it very hard to relax by just chilling on a beach, or reading a book in the afternoon. I just want to work on a project.

What I find really fun is that often when I'm working on a project, my 5 year old daughter will get in to a project mindset herself, and will be working on her own thing (sticky tape, cardboard, etc), while I'm fixing a bicycle or building something. It's a really fun companionable time, where we're both working on our own thing, but in each other's company.

Awesome hobbies are awesome! But they require time, and in some cases, financial resources.

I find plenty of time to do my hobbies despite being a single dad, and having a high stress academic PI job. I have every weekend and evening free, and I use them. I also involve my kid in my hobbies- we do them together, so it's also parenting time.

I think most people aren't short on time, but short on energy because of poor physical and mental health- things that can be solved/addressed. For me, the hobbies themselves are a key part of staying healthy enough to have a lot of energy. But also not the only thing- I had serious medical problems that caused fatigue, which I needed to treat to have the energy I now have.

I also usually find a way to do hobbies cheaply, or even make money at them. For example, with cars and boats I get cheap ones that need work, fix them myself, and usually sell for enough more to keep the hobby self sustaining.

Ultimately, the most important thing is to just do it, even if it seems too expensive/inaccessible/etc. Take a leap/risk and find a way to overcome the barriers, don't come up with excuses to stop before you even start.

The obscene idea is that whatever hobby you pick up you must master, be great at it. Fail a lot at your hobby and learn from the mistakes. Perfection in your hobbies comes from the time you spent failing. This is the time you should long after a hectic day, week or month, a time to fail.

Once in a while you will create something you love, it probably won't even be good. It doesn't matter. Your not making a dollar on your hobby(do not try to), your carving your mind and body into a better person.

After work, after kids, after exercise, I've spent many nights just carving wood into what ever I feel like. Spoons, forks, etc. Many of them suck, many have been used to keep me warm on a cool night, none have expected anything from me, its always there when I have time and the will.

I've also suggest some cut gloves as well, you need your digits for the next time you decide to pick up your hobby.

I used to buy/sell/repair cars as an undergrad in college both for fun and spare money, and did it on the side of public roads, and outside in a low budget apartment parking lot.

For many equipment-intensive hobbies, you can also take classes, e.g. at a local community college or community center, which are taught in places with all of the equipment provided.

when I was a kid, when my dad was repairing the house or car I was always "holding the flashlight" or he would actually teach me to use power tools and do the repairs myself while guiding me along.

The larger projects would often span two summers. He also did not contribute to his projects on Sundays because he is religious.

If the prerequisites for having awesome hobbies are, "Having a garage," "Inheriting tools from one's grandparents," and "Having the time do something with both," there would be your answer.

I built many things at my desk or the kitchen table in our flat with very simple tools. Even a single Swiss Army knife can be used to achieve a lot. And you don't need a lot of time to make small things.

It can be easy to be jealous of the DIY YouTubers with massive workshops (I'm jealous!), but I find it more satisfying to take inspiration from the kinds of simple things people make/made in simpler societies/civilisations.

I actually felt a little stupid accepting these tools and setting up a space for them, when I later realized that I already had free access to several local community woodshops through a few different mechanisms... I am thinking about getting rid of some or all of the tools and using those instead.

I think it's pretty easy to make excuses for why something is impossible, but if people really wanted to, almost anyone could do it. The average teenager in the USA buys themselves single outfits of clothing that cost more than the basics to get into woodworking. Most Americans have streaming and Amazon Prime subscriptions that cost a lot more than I spend on woodworking- and I don't have any subscriptions like that.

Has the curve on the creator/consumer axis shifted in recent times or has it always been skewed toward consuming? Or is there instead a social axis that has been waning recently? I'm thinking of the once popular Bridge card game or bowling leagues as examples...

And then there a collecting based hobbies* which have been ruined by being able buy rare things from anywhere in a click. Now getting a stamp collection isn’t a pursuit, it’s just an afternoon on eBay with your credit card.

*one exception here is birdwatching, which I’ve anecdotally seen a huge increase in. Almost all my friends are aware of Merlin and many Hanna the habit to stop to ask “what’s that” if they see an unfamiliar bird

Social media totally shifts and ruins our experience of things: it becomes a performance to impress others rather than actually fun itself.

Once I realized that- I realized the people everyone envies online aren't even having fun, or actually enjoying the hobby. That person doing extreme camping on Instagram with the most glamorous photos: it's 100% fake. They're lugging camera equipment to remote places, and likely bringing a professional paid photographer. They probably tore it all down and slept in a hotel after setting up camp for the photo.

Maybe it's become easier to consume incredible amounts of content for free recently, but it's also never been easier to make things if you want, either in terms of access to cheap materials and tools or instructional content. Perhaps the one thing that has waned a little is closer-knit forums that have been replaced with endless Reddit.