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Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

"I should have run off with that hippie girl and started a homestead in Alaska."

Me, every fucking time I look at code.

In "The Soul of a New Machine," there is an engineer who spends months debugging nanosecond-level glitches in their new CPU, snaps, and runs away after leaving a note: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

There are many days where this sounds like the next logical step in my life.

It is funny though. Look at all the physicists and mathematicians in that quote list. Positive, enlightened, a little snark maybe, but generally, moving things forward for the betterment of humanity.

All the programmers, "embrace the suck and the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train".

I picked the wrong career.

As an software engineer, NO you did not (unless you actually suck at it). Part of the problem with software dev as a profession is that often the people responsible for resource allocation are out of touch and the overall process is complex enough that you can acquire a lot of technical debt for a short term gain. this makes bad managers look good while creating a lot of problems in long term. Since acquiring technical debt does not really breaks anything in short term its really hard to create a budget line item that allocates resources to it. this continues until something gives and then you have a crisis somebody can fix and take credit.

Until there are leaders 'woke' enough to proactively do the right thing I dont see anything change in computing industry.

Lol, dude, I'm 31. I've been doing this for around 10 years now. And I'm alright at it :P

Have you seen how happy homesteaders are?

On a serious note. I'm aware. That's why I did my own company with a friend. It cuts a lot of bullshit out I don't have to deal with anymore. As (essentially) a contractor, it's easy to tear people a new asshole in a meeting and get away with it. I can't imagine an employee being able to.

First off, people need to stop worshiping the ilk like Jobs, Musk and Bezos. They're just money makers. Just like Rockefeller, Morgan and Carnegie. None of them are visionaries as all their ideas are easy to spot from history or other people. Like the hyperloop... just about 80 years too late to call that one unique. Ooooo you put colored pieces of plastic on a computer and made a small digital music player. The Zune was WAY better! The other guy just sold books and moved on to other shit. Congrates on the better mouse trap. But it's not like they did it themselves.

Maybe a homestead on a tropical island... I like coconuts.

I think you're trivializing their accomplishments just a tad.

And then you meet network engineers and discover what true despair looks like.

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