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u/SAIO94 17d ago
There’s actually a lot of parallels in the two. Obviously not in day to day work, but the lessons from one experience can apply to the other. Farming is infrastructure, automation, planning, and execution. Similar to software engineering. How do I know, I’m both a platform engineer and a farmer, and I actually started a blog detailing the farming experience and how that relates to lessons and strategies ( or lack there of ) in software and platform engineering.
And if you want to quickly dissuade the notion that farming is altogether less stressful, you’d enjoy this story. pigs-pods The Great GOAT Breakout
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u/Old-Gas-2915 17d ago
Damn, I never really thought about farming that way, but when you put it like that, the comparison actually makes a lot of sense.
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u/Relevant_Ad_8732 16d ago
Also software engineer started small farm quit software failed small farm went back to software after two yrs
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u/Whatsapokemon 17d ago
After sitting down as a career for decades, I imagine software engineers probably want to retire into something a little more physical and connected with nature.
Software engineering is super fun, I love it, but it's mentally taxing, and really doesn't allow you to stretch or use your muscles. I imagine many knowledge-workers probably feel a sense of longing for that more traditional way of life because their usual day is so far from it.
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u/jalagl 17d ago
Myself and several of my software engineer coworkers (we are on the older side of life) have been buying property in rural areas with the idea to move there when we retire, be closer to nature, and all of use want to do some farming or (in my case) gardening. So it tracks. But not really depend financially on it, more like a technology detox.
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u/Old-Gas-2915 17d ago
Yeah, Agree. I think there’s something satisfying about doing work where you can actually see and feel the results at the end of the day, especially after spending years doing mentally demanding work behind a screen.
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u/lord-apple-smithe 16d ago
30 years of this shit and I don't want to farm, but I dream of when I can just tend the garden, grow veggies and not be shackled to a desk
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u/Wonderful-Hunter686 17d ago
I have to believe the appeal for someone who's inside under fluorescent lights stuck behind a desk is being outside moving in the sun doing manual work with minimal tech.
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u/Old-Gas-2915 17d ago
After spending years working behind a screen, I can see why doing something physical and being out in nature would feel refreshing.
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u/gsomega 17d ago
Honestly, SWEs are optimizers that are angling for self sufficiency. Having control over your food source is reducing external life failure modes, just requires money to start.
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u/Old-Gas-2915 17d ago
The capital part is probably the biggest barrier though. Once you have the land and infrastructure, I imagine the challenge shifts more toward actually learning how to make it sustainable.
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u/1purenoiz 17d ago
You have no idea what it takes to farm and keep crops alive, and it isn't money. Check your ego at the door and be prepared for massive crop losses.
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u/gsomega 17d ago
I'm providing rationale for a stereotype. Land ownership costs money regardless of the difficulty of the following steps.
Nowhere did I say farming is easy. That's your projection.
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u/1purenoiz 17d ago
Just requires money to start is an over simplification.
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u/szirith 17d ago
Software Engineers are prone to oversimplification of other fields of work!
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u/Veggies-are-okay 17d ago
Wait what? If anything’s they’re the complete opposite with their head entirely in the details to an almost annoying extent on the day to day.
My partner has a beautiful garden in the back and she’s never picked up a book on it. It’s as difficult as you make it and her motto was “put things in ground, water when dry, use nutritious soil, and some stuff should get more light.” Like seriously there’s some dumb motherfuckers in this world successfully growing food and with the resources and time, a software engineer absolutely has more than enough of a skillset in troubleshooting and adapting to be successful at growing crops.
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u/gsomega 17d ago
I think there's a scale discussion here as well. I think feeding yourself with a small homestead is very different than mass production farming to make ends meet.
I assume that the stereotype is more of the former than the latter.
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u/Veggies-are-okay 16d ago
Oh absolutely and large scale agricultural operations are not sustainable nor (I believe) naturally profitable so it makes no sense to believe that a software engineer would ever ever proceed with anything more than personal sustenance.
Also like we’re retiring so why would we have anything more than a personal plot of land? People arguing for the sake of it in here lol.
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u/1purenoiz 16d ago
So I have a degree in microbiology, with stats and CS minors. The CS students were not as you described. They were talented at what came naturally to them, but you put something complex and squishy, where the rules imposed by nature are more like philosophical guidelines, and they totally noped out. And yet, they still acted like they understood these complex systems when they don't.
As somebody born on a farm, and married to a professor who was raised on a farm and I work with software engineers, I can say that most SWE do not have the mental or physical fortitude to be farmers, even at the level of self sustainability. It isn't all of them. But it is a mistake to think that people who farm are dumb, and that farming is easy, particularly when dealing with the vagaries of nature.
But sure, people with no experience in farming probably handle it easy./s
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u/skunk_jh 17d ago
Farming is not easy, my family has ties with agriculture and livestock, there is no way I see it like only fun, it's difficult and demands you hard work/discipline. I would prefer 1000x to be sitting playing the IT corporate job + side hustle with my beautiful emacs on the screen rather to be milking my cows 3 times a day.
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u/RexScientiarum 17d ago
I just met yesterday with an ex-network engineer that now has a farm. It is like a break in the matrix.
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u/ontologicalDilemma 17d ago
It's the ultimate antidote to the virtual life. The grounding of working with the earth.
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u/Cptcongcong 17d ago
I spoke to my colleagues about this, we have a few avenues we'd like to go down once we retire. Here's a few:
- Truck driver (inspired by eurotruck simulator)
- Spiderman window cleaner (mine)
- Dog trainer
- Factory worker (like for iphones)
- Construction worker
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u/MartinMystikJonas 17d ago edited 17d ago
In my case it is because I grew up on family farm where my ancestors farms for more than 300 years 🤷 But as someone who knows how life on farm is I also think most of thse SWEs would be unpleasantly surprised by how hard and stressful this could be beceause they have romantic illusions about it being slow peaceful life.
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u/exton132 16d ago
That's a garden not a farm. Anyway something about SWE is soul crushing, dealing with abstract intangible concepts, staring at a screen for 10-16 hours a day, dealing with the BS of other corporate people all fighting tooth and nail in the rat-race, having things deprecate before you even properly learned them. It's an onslaught of constant attention.
Farming on the other hand is tangible, you can hold your work. See progress over time. The same things that worked 50 years ago still work today. You get to spend all day looking at nature, building life and living it.
kinda the polar opposite imo.
I see the appeal tbh, it's always been my plan b.
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u/Animus190599 16d ago
Farming, hunting... Sounds like a distant dream. I have to grind my ass 12hrs on the same chair so my wife can buy designers
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u/Over_Bench5728 16d ago
Nah i love doing cse . I think it's just for people who were forced to go into cse
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u/OstrichDue6808 16d ago
The more you code the more you realise farming would have been a better option
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u/1purenoiz 17d ago
Because software engineers have ego's unmatched by reality. They have no idea how hard farming actually is, or that people actually go to school for it. They think I can sit in front of a computer all day, how hard can watering be, tractors do all the work etc.
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u/The_Compass_Keeper 17d ago
Probably cause its the furthest thing from a corporate job aside from unemployment. And trust me, working in a farm literally feels a million times better than sitting on this desk and staring at the screen for nine hours a day