

How one hacker quit the programming life for bluer skies - bootload
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/frank-duff/

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TravisLS
I have to say, having been both a bike messenger and programmer for several
years each, that there are some very alluring aspects to the bike messenger
lifestyle. It's serene and meditative, you work outdoors, it's really
energizing. The fact that it rarely pays more than $300/wk (unless it's
snowing) makes it a less viable option for people trying to make a good life
for a family. That part's not really mentioned in the articles glamorizing the
lifestyle.

Being a programmer can often seem like the opposite of that, when you're in
the office on Saturday writing PHP form validation logic for the 500th time
for an arbitrary deadline.

I used to say being a bike messenger was my favorite job I ever had, until I
saved up a little money and started working on a startup a few months ago.
Building my startup's product and market is much more energizing, freeing, and
rewarding than being a bike messenger ever was. I can't wait to get up in the
morning and start programming (assuming that's on the agenda for the day).

Plus now I can ride my bike around NYC during the work day, without having to
hang out in corporate mail rooms 40% of the time.

~~~
klint
"The fact that it rarely pays more than $300/wk (unless it's snowing) makes it
a less viable option for people trying to make a good life for a family. That
part's not really mentioned in the articles glamorizing the lifestyle."

Here's a bit that was cut from the article, originally right after the part
where I write that Duff gave couriering one last shot after moving back to
Toronto:

"It was humbling," Duff says. "I only lasted four months before I decided it
wasn't worth it." When he was 22, if Duff had a bad day and only brought home
$70, it was OK. He shared a house with three roommates and had cheap rent and
few expenses. But now if he makes only $70 in day, it's barely enough to cover
child care.

"I wouldn't recommend anyone who has a family consider leaving their white
collar job for couriering," Duff says. "But I think it's a very reasonable
decision if you hate your job and you're in your 20s and you're single and
have relatively few expenses."

~~~
bootload
_"... When a friend offered him a job as a bike messenger, he took it — in
part because couriers had been glamorized in cyberpunk novels like William
Gibson’s Virtual Light and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but also because it
would ease his mind ..."_

Great read Klint. This is the best quote from the article and I really
understand this. I remember having the best of both, working outdoors during
University - some money and hard physical work. Undo-able now. Of the bike
riders I see on the weekend, a fair portion I imagine are city-boys working in
high-stress cerebral occupations like software & finance ~
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5646201528/>

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AznHisoka
I think the mental grind of being a programmer can be exhausting. Especially
if you work in 95% of work environments/companies. Either you're working with
people who aren't passionate, or you're working on boring software. The fact
it's very much a sedentary activity doesn't help too, as it saps our energy.

After doing it for awhile, you can't help but ask "What's the point of all
this? Who cares? Who cares if we're producing wealth? I rather downsize, live
in a cave and go back to the simple life! This mental grind for that fancy car
and a new flat screen TV isn't worth it!"

~~~
kiba
_I think the mental grind of being a programmer can be exhausting. Especially
if you work in 95% of work environments/companies. Either you're working with
people who aren't passionate, or you're working on boring software. The fact
it's very much a sedentary activity doesn't help too, as it saps our energy._

I find uncertainty and confusion and then finding a solution to the problem,
to be exhausting itself.

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bitwize
Here I was all psyched up for a story about a pilot.

"Bluer skies"? He's a pilot!

Picture starts loading. He looks just like Cid Highwind. He's an awesome pilot
with a sense of humor!

I see "bike messenger." _The dreeeeeeam of the nineties is aliiiiiiive in
Portland..._ I am disappoint.

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drcube
He quit his programming _job_ , not programming.

I code (not very well), but I don't get paid for it. I'm an electrical
engineer by day and enjoy writing code as a hobby. I doubt I would ever want
to wade into a software development gig. I still like making computers submit
to my bidding, however.

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phleet
The leading sentence "Some people believe that everyone should be a
programmer." is crazy.

I want everyone to learn how to code, but not to be a programmer.

Just like I want everyone to learn math, but not to be a mathematician.
There's a difference, and it's important.

The whole leading paragraph implies that if some people are happier not doing
something for a living, then everyone should beware learning it at all.

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kiba
I remember working 8 hours a day and then coming home and not doing anything
interesting. I just want to play and enjoy myself, and then go to sleep. I
never really got used to programming for a living.

~~~
nollidge
What do you do now?

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briandear
Now if the guy would have quit programming to become a lumberjack, that would
have been interesting. Instead it sounds almost like an Onion parody of
hipsters.

~~~
masonhensley
I go cut down cedar trees (for any of you tree huggers, they are non-native &
invasive - they suck up a ton of water that our pretty oak trees need) on my
family's Texas hill country ranch a couple times a year... It is my go to
relaxation time.

Now, would I quit being a developer to cut down trees full time? No, I like
web development & my chainsawing skills won't pay the bills...

~~~
minimax
Cedar (Ashe Juniper) is not an invasive species in central Texas. Some people
are extremely allergic to the pollen though, so that's usually why they want
to cut them down.

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gav
I didn't want to go into programming after I got my CS degree mostly due to
the terrible job market where I lived in 2000 after the dot-com crash.

I had a year where I traveled and had jobs like handing out fliers, picking
pears, and pruning vines. Then I moved to the US, spent six months living on a
sofa while working as a mechanic, then as a part-time computer repair guy.

It's liberating working blue-collar jobs because you really don't have to
care, and certainly don't think about the job out-of-hours. I learnt that
there were two kinds of jobs--those that you shower before work and those you
shower after.

The real lesson was that you really can't have a decent living on minimum
wage. I ended up calling every local web design firm in the Yahoo! Directory
and begging for a job. I feel privileged that a decade late I'm earning nearly
eight times minimum wage and that I can enjoy the trappings that come with
that.

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ritchiea
It sounds like he just didn't like his programming job. I quit a decent paying
full time job in 2010. A bunch of my friends thought I was crazy at the time.
I left my office, I worked in a coffeeshop for a while, did some freelancing
and figured out what sort of job and work environment would make me happier.
There are a galaxy of programming jobs, this story doesn't strike me as being
actually about programming, just about a guy who was unhappy with one job and
did something very different for a while to feel better about it (which can be
a great idea for some people!).

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peapicker
"The pay was decent, and he was doing good for the world, but he realized that
programming just wasn’t his calling."

An he self-identifies as a hacker? By definition, if you are a hacker, it IS
your calling. No story here.

Clearly, he is a writer by calling (self-identified in the article) who
learned to program and uses it to pay the bill from time to time; an
occasionally writes a code riff for fun... but that doesn't make him a hacker.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
Hacker != Programmer

Being a hacker to me just means someone with an "engineering" mindset. Someone
who can make solutions out of whatever's available. It's the innovative and
clever mindset that most programmers share, but there's no rule that you have
to be a programmer or work in IT.

You'll find people with these traits working in medicine, construction,
agriculture, and any number of different professions. We wouldn't have
advancement in lots of areas if everyone that was a "hacker" only became
programmers.

~~~
mindcrime
It's entirely reasonable to imagine a hypothetical "programmer hacker" who
chooses something other than programming as a career anyway. One could spend
their time hacking on open source projects or hobby projects or whatever,
while making a living doing $WHATEVER. But they'd still be a hacker.

~~~
GuiA
As soon as I hit the 30s and have a family, I intend to move to teaching as a
career. I've been programming since i was 12 and have always had side
projects, and I don't think that will ever stop- but I have a hard time
imagining myself writing code for arbitrary projects and deadlines my whole
life.

Right now though, I'm young, it pays really well (and I save a lot of money
for later) and I enjoy the lifestyle.

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briandear
Why does this guy deserve a Wired story? He's not interesting. What next, a
story about stock brokers who start a restaurant?

~~~
xfax
I suppose Wired covered this because the general sentiment these days is that
everyone needs to learn programming since it is pretty much the only way to be
productive in the future.

~~~
ianterrell
Bingo. He's a slightly personable foil to the new rhetoric.

~~~
vertr
I enjoy stories counter to the current cultural sentiment, however I found
this one to be very bland.

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tomp
Quote from the article:

"He gave the bike messenger gig one more shot, but that only lasted for a
month or so. _It’s not career, but neither was programming_ , and being a
courier helped him realized that. “I really shudder to think what I’d be doing
now, if I had stayed with programming for the last seven years,” he says."

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guard-of-terra
Everyone should be a programmer, but not in the eight-year-in-cubicle-daily
sense. So it's not even mutually exclusive.

~~~
guard-of-terra
s/year/hour/

~~~
sirrealle
I dunno, sometimes it feels like I spend 8 years a day in my cubicle.

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pumblechook
The mistake in this (and in similar articles) is conflating activity and
purpose. Programming is an activity, not an end in itself. To love programming
is to love solving challenging problems with a computer, not the act of typing
code for 9 hours a day.

That is why articles like these just end up being psychological mirrors -
those who aren't being fulfilled in a programming job will always perk up at
the idea of "bluer skies". Job unhappiness almost always has a root cause that
has little to do with the activity of the job itself, and more with the job
situation.

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bstewartnyc
Hmm. Yeah making $300 per week sounds really great. Not. Silly article.

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furiouslysleepy
I'm a professional programmer who feels like he maybe shouldn't be. Articles
like these are encouraging, even if never wind up quitting.

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danso
Why is this presented as a either-or dichotomy, between programming and "blue
skies"? If you want to do just physical labor, OK, then I guess you don't
really need to program. However, if he decides to eventually start his own
messenger service, I imagine knowing how to program, even if for the
equivalent of 0.5 days a week in order to custom-build the kind of logistics
tool needed to break into the messenger-service market, will _help_ him
achieve this kind of bluer-skies lifestyle.

He's not giving up programming for bluer-skies. He's giving up a complex-
life...but that entails many other fields of knowledge besides programming.

~~~
josscrowcroft
Because short attention spa

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famousactress
I stopped reading at

 _Though some say that Duff was never a “real coder” if he was willing to give
up the life_

Dribble.

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antr
Take away: do what makes you happy.

