"I no longer build software"

Today an interesting discussion appeared on HackerNews. Everything stared from a message on Github about an ex developer, Eric Diven, who left his job to become a carpenter. As he said, “The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there’s always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there’s that :-)”.

Leaving aside this individual example, the discussion on HN received a lot of attention and many messages are aligned with Eric’s one. I think it’s possible to draw a sense of frustration among this sector of workers. Of course many disagree with this perception, sustaining that the ones who complain nowadays are just privileged kids facing a hard truth.

Even though I don’t have a complete opinion about, I think I find myself in the middle. Somehow developers in the last years have considered themselves different from other workers; they believed to the mirage of a life outside of the market laws, where all of them would have benefited from a high salary and an intellectually stimulating job. Finding out that most of us are just stressed employees like many other workers is of course a cold shower.

At the same time I think that the world of software production is evolving rapidly, and not in a good direction. We are improving our technical abilities, but the problem is not inherent to the tools we’re using: the problem is the world around them. The problem is what we made with these tools, for who we use the tools, and how we’re forced to use them. Working all day only to build more useless things and stressing out every last bit of energy from devs only to obey the rules of consumerism… I can’t honestly blame me and other young developers for complaining about all this.

One last thing: Eric left a personal message on the HN discussion which I believe is very important for his current life; just be sure to read it :) .

HackerNews discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964

Eric’s message on the Github issue:
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477

Eric Diven website:
https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/

Eric message on the HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24542600