I feel like we are all agreeing here
Honestly jealous
That’s what a year of being a software architect does to you.
22 years. 1 year is chicken farmer, 10 is ducks, 15 is, oddly, Alpacas, and 20 is geese.
You spent all those years down in the trenches implementing bullshit designs an architect came up with, positive you could do better if you just got the chance. Then you go to graduate school to get the qualifications companies say you need to be an architect. You receive a masters degree. You’re your companies leading expert on software design. You get promoted to architect.
That’s when you find out the truth. All those previous architects left for the same reason you someday will. It wasn’t the previous architects making the terrible decisions that frustrated you. It was the marketing team and the CEO telling the CTO that the software product must have certain buzzwords present in the design. Those buzzwords offer no value to what your software product is meant to accomplish. But if you don’t put them in the designs, they’ll fire you and hire someone who will play their games.
Eventually, you can’t take it anymore. Having interfaced with the upper levels of your company, and having the understanding of systems engineering you do, you realize that every software firm will be this. There is nowhere you can go that will be better. You start saving.
Your goal is to save enough money to purchase a small plot of land and put an organic farm on it. Your convictions for this farm are simple: it must be able to feed your family. This may not be exclusively what you envision for it, and you may not even intend for it to be the only source of food for your family, but it will help you be less reliant on the kinds of corporation you’ve come to know and come to see as irrevocably evil.
And then sometimes, you get people like this in the post. Who find enough success farming to focus their energy on it exclusively.
I was in my first architecture review meeting this week.
The accuracy is infuriating and humbling.
If you give a shit about your work and the product you’re working on, then don’t work in a big company. In big companies, people are there for the money and maybe for a good looking entry on their resume, so they’ll only do what they’re being told to do, after all they’ll be elsewhere in 2 years tops.
If you have ideals and don’t just work for money, don’t work in the corporate world. Small to mid-size employers come with a lot less bs and more engaged co-workers.
alas, many of us will never reach goose-farm level success
Jokes on programming. Hated life before being forced into it…
Edit: it meaning programming. This isn’t supposed to be that edgy.
Just try being uneducated and working in a dead end factory job while having hated life all your life anyway!
Much fun! -46/10 would never recommend!
I wish I was forced into programming… I tried on my own and just don’t have the mind for it, I find it incredibly boring. All my friends are in the field and all work from home wherever the hell they want to live. I’m stuck in a VHCOL area with shit income and 0 potential to increase it :(
Yeah well I was „forced“ into it by an injury and one my parents working at the university. I never finished my degree so in that sense I’m also uneducated.
I didn’t have the mind for Uni stuff either esp. the maths stuff. There are so many areas. I just liked doing webdev stuff in my freetime and that landed me a few jobs.
I’m sorry you’ve had to suffer an injury! From what I understand, your experience now and your interest outside of work counts for more than the paper degree so if you do choose to continue that path I wouldn’t worry too much about being uneducated. Good luck, I hope you find happiness in whatever you do!
Thank you very much! Yess school has never been for me but I’ve only been diagnosed with adhd when I was 21. so I’ve always struggled. I don’t know if it’s the perfect place for me, I’m still struggling from time to time, but let’s be honest who doesn’t. I never thought I could work 8 hours when I was younger. But here we are. So hopefully you can also find something you enjoy doing. And I wish the best for you too. Thanks again!
Yeah that sounds way more enjoyable, but first you need the 250k and up salary that a principal engineer at MS makes for 20 years, then you have plenty of equity to focus on whatever your hobby is
Average 350k according to levels.fyi.
I was expecting higher for principal tbh
I think MS like other big tech companies has started to run out of “senior” positions without paying more so many people just end up as “senior” principal engineers which is basically “this is as far as you can go if you don’t want to get involved in management”
“this is as far as you can go if you don’t want to get involved in management”
Yes. That exactly. This typically comes with a nice perk: Principals are supposed to have the same clout as lower-level managers. Which is to say they usually report to Directors or even the CTO in some organizations.
Another one is “Independent Contributor” which is similar but, as the name would suggest, is very self sufficient and does not work on (or for) a team. They’re basically one-man engineering shops and are expected to perform well everywhere in the company’s tech and talent stacks. As a result, ICs are very rare.
We have a principal software engineer who is a part-time farmer. He has chickens and cows.
Man I’m starting to think I’ve got the wrong hobbies. Maybe I do need to get out more.
Touch
grassgeese.
Yeah, after 22 years at Microsoft in a senior position, you should be able to retire and do whatever the fuck you want as a hobby. I very highly doubt this guy will ever make significant money from goose farming.
Are you saying his income will be … ahem … a goose-egg?
- rake in the lake
Might be one of the few times a Lemmy post related to me.
I have owned a farm for four years, and do engineering for fun. AMA
How did you get into owning a farm, and what led you to engineering?
My grandfather is/was an electrician for over 60 years. Worked on very important projects in New York City. This rubbed off on me growing up. I spent much of my childhood taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together how I liked. I’ve been working on both hardware and software since I was 11. Had the privilege to study CS formally in high school, and Computer Engineering in university.
Good timing mostly got me into farming, especially since interest rates fell to the floor during the pandemic. Had enough to buy the acreage I wanted, and the wife was interested in helping out. We grow a variety of things now, and not just plants. For example we sell Honey, Soaps, Walnuts, and Mushrooms. It can be hard on the body to be so active all the time, but it is more satisfying than a monitor staring back at you at 3am because of some small incident.
I continue to tinker, and assist startups in my spare time, I can’t imagine I will ever stop programming.
I feel like the progression of my “Programming shelf” says a lot about my career trajectory as well.
The programmer to homesteader pipeline is real.
Just know that complete self sufficiency is a pipe dream, whereas community sufficiency is much more achievable
I wholeheartedly agree, I’ve been going down the pipeline myself and this has been my approach. Recently I’ve been working with family and neighbors to get a community garden going.
Thanks for reminding me about Art of Shen Ku. Friend had a copy years and years ago and from time to time I would remember reading parts but could never remember the title. Cheers!
I love ‘DEBT’ lurking on the bottom there.
Judging by The Dawn of Everything sitting next to it, I’d guess that book is Debt: The First 5000 years by David Graeber!
Yeah… But right to left or left to right… Lol.
You read some Thoreau and immediately wanted to leave society behind lol, I see you took his lessons to heart.
The other pivot point is The Pragmatic Programmer, which is totally understandable.
That book does a good job of grounding the reader through examples and parables from everywhere else but IT. By the end, you realize that good software engineering makes the best of general problem-solving skills, rather than some magical skillset peculiar to computing. You wind up reaching a place where you can begin to solve nearly any problem through use of the same principles. So @codex here, perhaps effortlessly, went on to management instead.
What are those books on Doom and Wolfenstein? Is it the game development black book by sanglard? That’s the book I found with a bit of searching
Yes, those are the Game Engine Black Books (Doom|Wolfenstein) by Fabien Sanglard. Highly recommended for anyone interested in games, programming, and history. They are amazing time capsules of those games and the development environments that produced them. I think/hope he’s working on GEBB: Quake and I’m so excited for him to eventually release it!
I’m gonna have to snag that doom book. I love low level programming and I’ve heard a lot about how hacky game dev used to be and that just excites me
Oh you’re going to be in heaven, it’s one of my favorite books! He really gets into everything: how the game is structured, how different subsystems work (BSP trees, enemy ai, sound, music, every detail), and even gets into peripheral things like how the game was distributed, how the (old) console ports came about, and so much more. The copy on my shelf is actually my third because i keep giving them away to people.
This looks uncannily like my shelf, I’m trying to buy land now for my permaculture forest 😭
To have such a good career payout that you don’t need a career.
The Venn diagram overlap of senior+ programmers and farmers is oddly large
Yes, with AI anything is possible!
An AI goose farmer. Is that an AI Farmer™ or does that farm AI Goose™
I quit my 20+ year career as a sysadmin about 2 years ago and started turning my backyard into a massive garden. I’m currently trying to figure out places to sell large quantities of hot peppers and I’m about to start selling matted and framed photos of flowers and wildlife from my garden.
Fuck IT.
I’d way rather be a duck farmer. Geese are noisy little bastards.
Ducks are the grossest birds. Anything is better than ducks. I have 6 ducks.
Wait I thought you had 7 geese.
18 chickens, 7 geese, 6 ducks, 11 cats, 3 fosters, two dogs.
Today I turn on one foster kitten, the rest leave next week. Not sure if they will give me more when I drop off the one today. But if they have something extra spicy I’ll probably get it.
Basically multiple types and the number is fluid. We’ve lost two chickens and two geese this year.
Yeah I was thinking farming geese has got to be complicated and awful work.
Entertaining for the neighbours though!
and MEAN
Chicken is more profitable than ducks.
