Anyone in tech confirm?

It tends to be more “I want a thing that just works.” rather than no technology, but yes.

Self-hosting services that are reliable and don’t get in my way, not using cloud-connected smart devices, running Linux instead of Windows, etc.

Was working on a PhD in CS focused on industrial cybersecurity, though current events involving the three letter agency that funded my research lead to me crashing out and now I'm trying to get into law school and do immigration law. Far too frail and pasty to buy a farm though

Time for this classic

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General's Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

The tech may be ancient for us, but it's a superb book.

Well, it's driven me to Debian.

Nah, I like PC gaming too much to want that. What I want is to be free of capitalism.

The tech worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CISO > goat farmer

Honestly it's just the Internet. Tech is fucking awesome, as long as it's decoupled from anything and anyone else trying to control, monitor, impose, or otherwise fuck with the tech that's mine, bought or built fairly. And also the untold psychological torture the Internet is just constantly inflicting on us.

The issue isn't the tech itsefl but the corporate world and its effects throughout society.

There is a lot of cool tech, but used for the most asinine products. 2015-2016 was especially terrible with the accessibility of IoT. Everyone and their mother had a Kickstarter with a common everyday item with wireless capability tacked into it.

No, my bottle doesn't need Bluetooth.

As a long time tech user within about 5 years of retirement, I don't quite agree with this for a couple of reasons. Tech is fine if its tech that serves me. I'm certainly not going to be doing JIRA updates in retirement, but I'll absolutely use a web browser, word processor, and probably a coding environment for my own personal projects. Retrocomputing is much more appealing to me too.

Also, I think most folks in IT have no idea how hard farming actually is, both mental and physically. Farming is really hard work, and having to manage some of the same annoying things we deal with in IT such as following complicated regulations, dealing with asinine people in power over you, and delivery dates.

I prefer cabin in the woods, but my paycheck says small house in a shitty neighborhood.

Nah. I can understand why someone would think that way, but the more I work with tech the more I want to mod or jailbreak my own stuff so it doesn't suck

There's different types of people in tech.
Some of my colleagues have elaborate home labs built from hardware discarded at work, and when there's kitty litter on the floor, their cleaning robot sends an email to the fridge to buy a new pack.
I have one laptop running Slackware, a vegetable garden, and I've actually considered buying a goat.

Can confirm. I’ve been working in tech for 16 years. I now own a house in the forest.

Nope.

Grew up having a huge garden (~1 acre) to help feed us all. Last thing I want to do is farm later in life, fuck that.

I'll keep a small garden, but keeping any animals is right the fuck out. I know first hand how much effort it all is.

Tech is fine - in the end it's like any other work... You're a salesman for your field, regardless of what it is. Plumbers have to educate every customer, because most people know fuck all about plumbing.

I can confirm. I learned real quick in college working a part-time help desk job for the University that I attended that I under no circumstances want to work in IT at any level or program because they are both thankless and stressful career paths -- when tech works, then why do we need you and when it breaks, why do we have you is all the "leaders" ask in many companies because they do not have a basic understanding how any of the IT systems function, hardware lifecycles, etc.

I grew up on a farm, hell no. If you think farming is going to be any different you’re delusional. It’s also full of physical labor that takes a toll on you.

But give it a go if you want just don’t think farming or ranching is simpler it’s not. And now you alone take on the responsibility of managing many lives be they plants or animals.

Yes it’s rewarding keeping a baby calf alive in -30 weather but be prepared to wake up every couple hours to keep watch on the animals. Also say goodbye to vacations. Without a family member or 5 to help out it’s hard to take a vacation without worrying that coyotes got into the chicken coop or other shenanigans.

Yes and no. Just like John Wick still had his hitman tools hidden in his house, tech workers who say they want to buy a farm and be a luddite will not be able to resist having a hidden server closet in their farmhouse.

I work in automotive.

My livelihood depends on people crashing their cars because they are idiots.

People not servicing their cars is also a great money spinner because parts sales lost to missed services are made up by parts sales from breakdowns due to lack or servicing.

I wish people would service their cars regularly, drive safely and not be idiots.

ADAS is also zero-sum because drivers with ADAS are more complainant and just as likely to crash. ADAS just creates more idiotic idiots. (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems).

I work in Automotive because I didn’t want to work in Tech anymore.

I plan to open a bar when I stop working in tech. The farm life is not for me, but I love the atmosphere of a good bar.

Confirmed, although I've been looking at a live-aboard yacht instead of a micro farm. (not rich, but the housing market is so crazy that these things are in the realm of being cheaper than my house)

Nah, not really. I just want to spend more time working on my own projects.

I regret to inform you that salaries in tech are not as glorious as I thought they'd be. I'd be surprised to have enough to own a farm any time soon.

Would be nice to be able to afford a house, though.

I love growing things and I also love tinkering, building, finding new gadgets.

Have been a techie all my life so far, will be a techie until I die.

People that get tired of tech jobs, might not be because of tech, rather the people they have worked with and the unrelenting pull of a capitalist society.

Can confirm, though it's mostly because tech workers are so de-politicized that they don't realize they would have the power to change things if they acted collectively -- so they do the "next best" thing, remove themselves from the equation.

In IT for over 30 years… 💯 %

Definitely not everyone :) I am bad at agriculture, even worse at raising animals, so computer it is for quite a long while from now. But I would really appreciate an opportunity to just sit by the sea and stare at it for days on end

Not really. But the more you understand tech, the less you like the high tech market solutions and have the urge to have the same but in opensource.

I kinda dream that one day setups for mid-power home AI racks would be affordable enough to drop all the proprietary AIs and start automating my daily routines with agents & helping me build my local knowledge vector database with AI embeddings. No way in hell I'm exposing anything like that to thirdparties.

I'll only want to keep a computer around to play some games, but I really wouldn't mind ditching that for boardgames with actual people.

Harboured a lifelong passion for computers. Having it as my job for 13 years made me lose much of that passion. To the young'uns: if you love something, consider whether you want to separate between what you do to pay for food and bills, and what makes you heart shine.

Weird choice of pic for this post. That's a mountain lake. Terrible place for a farm, even if one was for sale and you could afford it.

Lie.

It's the fucking users i want away from

Can confirm 100.42%

It's not just tech workers. More people are going back to retro tech. Physical media instead of streaming, one device one function no internet, that kind of thing.

Everyone, in tech, from different cultures, different backgrounds, will have this urge, myself included. Had this discussion many times with different coworkers.

The problem with tech is that you aren't usually doing the thing that made you want to go into tech. For me this was creating things and solving interesting problems. Most of my days are meetings, dealing with clueless people and having to deal with leadership and product team changes that ruin already completed work. Thankfully being at large tech companies has enabled me to hopefully retire in my early 40s. I can then continue with tech in a way that is meaningful to me while also spending a lot more time outside. The PNW is beautiful and I intend to see much more of it .

100%. I just talked about buying a farm to my colleagues yesterday, and I'm not making this up.

I work in tech and a lot of my interests are geared around computers. I have other interests as well, and also enjoy being outdoors, but can’t imagine never wanting to see a computer again.

I don't want any sort of device or appliance in my home that requires an internet connection that doesn't get a long time of security updates. My old printer died and they're so bad now I just don't have one. I'm going back to a dumb flip phone because this one's battery s dying. I use everything I can without spending money because I've never had a lot to spend to try and maintain my privacy. I keep spam email for the random site that wants you to enter one. The IoT is cancerous, it creates huge security holes because these appliance manufacturers don't care about security one iota. I have worked in IT for 15 years professionally with over that personal experience. I hate what the internet has become, I want something more akin to the 2000s back or at least the scrubbing of corporate mandates cut out. It's actually more dangerous to be on it because of advertisements. I would still have internet and gaming PCs regardless, but I want tech that's basic and functional.

It was a thing in Ukraine during the 2020-2021 boom. the sheer amount of engineers who saved up enough money to buy a house in the nearby village communities before the 2022 invasion was legit insane. part of that was remote work, part of that was interest in growing your own things. i remember talking to one NLP engineer who legit planned an apple garden and wanted to transition into that business domain over time. in some other cases, folks wanted to have self-reliant sustainability (yeah, we kinda had doomsday preppers).

Especially when having to deal with Microsoft.

Sort of

I still love open source software and tinkering and building my own software

Anything closed source can go pound a bag of dicks

Yeah. But I think most of us would only last 2 days on a farm, and then come screaming back to comfortable office life.

30+ years experience with computing, and I hate them.

They only ever do what you tell them to, and they’re not even doing that anymore.

I work I tech and have a small nature sanctuary. Why not both? We get high speed internet out here now 🤣

Worked in tech for 18 years, now I fix rust old cars and try not to touch computers beyond looking up wiring diagrams and replacement parts.

Confirmed.

I'm halfway there having a farm but still required to have a tech job to sustain life.

Hoping to retire in 3-4 years though and after that I'm getting say in to growing my own food.

Tech workers is like the majority of fediverse. You won't run out of people to ask.

Edit: A friend of mine working in IT mentioned that his ex-boss retired and then became a children's book writer. If financial constraint isn't an issue, I would be a polymath and travel to learn more about the world. That was actually the point of education is to be a more well rounded person.

I don't even work in tech but I want this more and more each, I blame it on society getter consistently worse each year.

Agree with the sentiment. Solar and print farms might be part of the picture though.

True. I am eyeing woodworking more every day.