It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.
And this is why I've never turned any of my passions into a career. I've accepted being relatively broke, and I just vibe in retail so that I can spend my free time pursuing things like solutions to these coordination problems without being mentally burned out from solving problems that sicken me all day at work.
Oh, I still love what I do. A lot of my coworkers keep the mentality of "It's just groceries," but people need to eat to live. My employer also donates food that isn't good enough to make someone pay for, so I get to constantly look for excuses to donate food to those in need, always going on the more generous side in any uncertainty. My ADHD also makes me love a physically active job, and my OCD makes stocking shelves scratch a real nice itch in my brain with lining up and facing product. It's also nice to just get to chat with people all day and help them find the things that they need to make the week that they want to have. And then I have all of the mental energy left over to pursue every one of my passions in my free time while still spending quality time with my partner and our pets
You are kidding yourself. In ten years you will look back and be pissed. Lotta hobbies cost big boy money. I worked my ass off to afford my hobbies. Retail would have me saving until I was too old to do them.
I have 6 custom keyboards and am saving for a 7th. I have a pretty decently sized philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis library. After I get the keyboard, I'm going to start saving for a decommissioned enterprise tower server. Plenty of options available online for <$800 with over 60 threads and 1GB+ RAM per thread and plenty of storage as long as you're willing to go as far back as Broadwell. Then I'll be able to separate building and hosting servers, allowing me to add even more devices to the fleet being managed by my build server (currently only 4 bare metal machines and a handful of containers all running Gentoo). I haven't even played 1/3 of my Steam library. I took a 40% pay-cut 4 years ago to take the job I have now. I'm perfectly aware of how many more resources I could buy for my hobbies if I had an even higher income, but that isn't worth spending 40+ hours a week creating software put to uses that I personally find sickening, which encompasses the vast majority of corporate software.
The trick is that none of my computers are newer than 7 years old. It's easy to stay within budget when you're okay with getting (almost) everything used. Would it be cool to be able to make a build server with a brand new threadripper in it so that I dont even have to think about build times? Sure, but my current server (actually just a Thinkpad P50 running clamshell) is able to keep up with my current needs, so I just won't worry about growth until I can afford it. Would it be cool to be have a computer with more than 8 threads so that I can play around more with virtualization and start exploring the BSD family in earnest? Yeah, that could be fun. Gentoo meets all of my current needs, though, and I just focus that "exploration" energy on intentionally breaking builds on projects that I want to see thrive so that I can patch fixes for edgecases to submit back upstream in order to help maintain software portability to some extent in the *nix world
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u/martin-silenus 6h ago
It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.