It tends to be more “I want a thing that just works.” rather than no technology, but yes.

Self-hosting services that are reliable and don’t get in my way, not using cloud-connected smart devices, running Linux instead of Windows, etc.

Was working on a PhD in CS focused on industrial cybersecurity, though current events involving the three letter agency that funded my research lead to me crashing out and now I'm trying to get into law school and do immigration law. Far too frail and pasty to buy a farm though

Time for this classic

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General's Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

The tech may be ancient for us, but it's a superb book.

Nah, I like PC gaming too much to want that. What I want is to be free of capitalism.

Well, it's driven me to Debian.

The issue isn't the tech itsefl but the corporate world and its effects throughout society.

There is a lot of cool tech, but used for the most asinine products. 2015-2016 was especially terrible with the accessibility of IoT. Everyone and their mother had a Kickstarter with a common everyday item with wireless capability tacked into it.

No, my bottle doesn't need Bluetooth.

The tech worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CISO > goat farmer

Honestly it's just the Internet. Tech is fucking awesome, as long as it's decoupled from anything and anyone else trying to control, monitor, impose, or otherwise fuck with the tech that's mine, bought or built fairly. And also the untold psychological torture the Internet is just constantly inflicting on us.

As a long time tech user within about 5 years of retirement, I don't quite agree with this for a couple of reasons. Tech is fine if its tech that serves me. I'm certainly not going to be doing JIRA updates in retirement, but I'll absolutely use a web browser, word processor, and probably a coding environment for my own personal projects. Retrocomputing is much more appealing to me too.

Also, I think most folks in IT have no idea how hard farming actually is, both mental and physically. Farming is really hard work, and having to manage some of the same annoying things we deal with in IT such as following complicated regulations, dealing with asinine people in power over you, and delivery dates.

Nah. I can understand why someone would think that way, but the more I work with tech the more I want to mod or jailbreak my own stuff so it doesn't suck

I prefer cabin in the woods, but my paycheck says small house in a shitty neighborhood.

Can confirm. I’ve been working in tech for 16 years. I now own a house in the forest.

There's different types of people in tech.
Some of my colleagues have elaborate home labs built from hardware discarded at work, and when there's kitty litter on the floor, their cleaning robot sends an email to the fridge to buy a new pack.
I have one laptop running Slackware, a vegetable garden, and I've actually considered buying a goat.

I grew up on a farm, hell no. If you think farming is going to be any different you’re delusional. It’s also full of physical labor that takes a toll on you.

But give it a go if you want just don’t think farming or ranching is simpler it’s not. And now you alone take on the responsibility of managing many lives be they plants or animals.

Yes it’s rewarding keeping a baby calf alive in -30 weather but be prepared to wake up every couple hours to keep watch on the animals. Also say goodbye to vacations. Without a family member or 5 to help out it’s hard to take a vacation without worrying that coyotes got into the chicken coop or other shenanigans.

I love growing things and I also love tinkering, building, finding new gadgets.

Have been a techie all my life so far, will be a techie until I die.

People that get tired of tech jobs, might not be because of tech, rather the people they have worked with and the unrelenting pull of a capitalist society.

Nope.

Grew up having a huge garden (~1 acre) to help feed us all. Last thing I want to do is farm later in life, fuck that.

I'll keep a small garden, but keeping any animals is right the fuck out. I know first hand how much effort it all is.

Tech is fine - in the end it's like any other work... You're a salesman for your field, regardless of what it is. Plumbers have to educate every customer, because most people know fuck all about plumbing.

Yes and no. Just like John Wick still had his hitman tools hidden in his house, tech workers who say they want to buy a farm and be a luddite will not be able to resist having a hidden server closet in their farmhouse.

I can confirm. I learned real quick in college working a part-time help desk job for the University that I attended that I under no circumstances want to work in IT at any level or program because they are both thankless and stressful career paths -- when tech works, then why do we need you and when it breaks, why do we have you is all the "leaders" ask in many companies because they do not have a basic understanding how any of the IT systems function, hardware lifecycles, etc.

I plan to open a bar when I stop working in tech. The farm life is not for me, but I love the atmosphere of a good bar.

Confirmed, although I've been looking at a live-aboard yacht instead of a micro farm. (not rich, but the housing market is so crazy that these things are in the realm of being cheaper than my house)

I work in automotive.

My livelihood depends on people crashing their cars because they are idiots.

People not servicing their cars is also a great money spinner because parts sales lost to missed services are made up by parts sales from breakdowns due to lack or servicing.

I wish people would service their cars regularly, drive safely and not be idiots.

ADAS is also zero-sum because drivers with ADAS are more complainant and just as likely to crash. ADAS just creates more idiotic idiots. (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems).

I work in Automotive because I didn’t want to work in Tech anymore.

Can confirm, though it's mostly because tech workers are so de-politicized that they don't realize they would have the power to change things if they acted collectively -- so they do the "next best" thing, remove themselves from the equation.

I regret to inform you that salaries in tech are not as glorious as I thought they'd be. I'd be surprised to have enough to own a farm any time soon.

Would be nice to be able to afford a house, though.

In IT for over 30 years… 💯 %

Nah, not really. I just want to spend more time working on my own projects.

Not really. But the more you understand tech, the less you like the high tech market solutions and have the urge to have the same but in opensource.

I kinda dream that one day setups for mid-power home AI racks would be affordable enough to drop all the proprietary AIs and start automating my daily routines with agents & helping me build my local knowledge vector database with AI embeddings. No way in hell I'm exposing anything like that to thirdparties.

Definitely not everyone :) I am bad at agriculture, even worse at raising animals, so computer it is for quite a long while from now. But I would really appreciate an opportunity to just sit by the sea and stare at it for days on end

The Stardew Valley pipeline is real.

I'll only want to keep a computer around to play some games, but I really wouldn't mind ditching that for boardgames with actual people.

The problem with tech is that you aren't usually doing the thing that made you want to go into tech. For me this was creating things and solving interesting problems. Most of my days are meetings, dealing with clueless people and having to deal with leadership and product team changes that ruin already completed work. Thankfully being at large tech companies has enabled me to hopefully retire in my early 40s. I can then continue with tech in a way that is meaningful to me while also spending a lot more time outside. The PNW is beautiful and I intend to see much more of it .

Harboured a lifelong passion for computers. Having it as my job for 13 years made me lose much of that passion. To the young'uns: if you love something, consider whether you want to separate between what you do to pay for food and bills, and what makes you heart shine.

Weird choice of pic for this post. That's a mountain lake. Terrible place for a farm, even if one was for sale and you could afford it.

Lie.

It's the fucking users i want away from

It's not just tech workers. More people are going back to retro tech. Physical media instead of streaming, one device one function no internet, that kind of thing.

Especially when having to deal with Microsoft.

100%. I just talked about buying a farm to my colleagues yesterday, and I'm not making this up.

It was a thing in Ukraine during the 2020-2021 boom. the sheer amount of engineers who saved up enough money to buy a house in the nearby village communities before the 2022 invasion was legit insane. part of that was remote work, part of that was interest in growing your own things. i remember talking to one NLP engineer who legit planned an apple garden and wanted to transition into that business domain over time. in some other cases, folks wanted to have self-reliant sustainability (yeah, we kinda had doomsday preppers).

Everyone, in tech, from different cultures, different backgrounds, will have this urge, myself included. Had this discussion many times with different coworkers.

Can confirm 100.42%

Sort of

I still love open source software and tinkering and building my own software

Anything closed source can go pound a bag of dicks

30+ years experience with computing, and I hate them.

They only ever do what you tell them to, and they’re not even doing that anymore.

Yep. I've middle aged coworkers who are saying quite emphatically that they can't imagine retiring in tech -- they know they'll need to move to another industry well before retirement, in part because of AI reducing the need for certain skillsets. They also know they're too old to be considered a 'good hire' due to ageism in tech. Most seem to have made plans to try and move on to something relatively low skill for the last part of their working lives. I know one of their plans is to do a food truck.

Fuck no.

True. I am eyeing woodworking more every day.

Tech workers is like the majority of fediverse. You won't run out of people to ask.

Edit: A friend of mine working in IT mentioned that his ex-boss retired and then became a children's book writer. If financial constraint isn't an issue, I would be a polymath and travel to learn more about the world. That was actually the point of education is to be a more well rounded person.

Worked in tech for 18 years, now I fix rust old cars and try not to touch computers beyond looking up wiring diagrams and replacement parts.

When I started my career in IT I consciously started keeping a variety of backup careers in mind, and I intentionally keep my expenses where I could simply swap careers and make it all work financially.

Probably my most viable backup plan is to move into banking or finance. Decent money available there, still tickles the part of my brain that loves understanding numbers and processes while also working my brain entirely differently than troubleshooting network problems. Data science, HIT and HRIT are also options in considering if I want to stay in the realm of IT, but that depends on how burnt out I get really

In my personal life I've been picking up more off-screen hobbies to help stave off burnout among other reasons. I'm hoping career-wise I can promote myself into management before I get too burnt out, but you never know

I disagree. 20 plus years in tech. Never wanted a farm, and I still love tech.

Confirmed.

I'm halfway there having a farm but still required to have a tech job to sustain life.

Hoping to retire in 3-4 years though and after that I'm getting say in to growing my own food.

Yeah. But I think most of us would only last 2 days on a farm, and then come screaming back to comfortable office life.

I work I tech and have a small nature sanctuary. Why not both? We get high speed internet out here now 🤣

Agree with the sentiment. Solar and print farms might be part of the picture though.

Stardew Valley in a nutshell

I don't want any sort of device or appliance in my home that requires an internet connection that doesn't get a long time of security updates. My old printer died and they're so bad now I just don't have one. I'm going back to a dumb flip phone because this one's battery s dying. I use everything I can without spending money because I've never had a lot to spend to try and maintain my privacy. I keep spam email for the random site that wants you to enter one. The IoT is cancerous, it creates huge security holes because these appliance manufacturers don't care about security one iota. I have worked in IT for 15 years professionally with over that personal experience. I hate what the internet has become, I want something more akin to the 2000s back or at least the scrubbing of corporate mandates cut out. It's actually more dangerous to be on it because of advertisements. I would still have internet and gaming PCs regardless, but I want tech that's basic and functional.

I don't even work in tech but I want this more and more each, I blame it on society getter consistently worse each year.

Andre Staltz, who developed manyverse, posted recently showing himself working in construction https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3m6qwv56xyc2v

I think he is still coding too, but it is cool to see how people balance it out.

Can confirm.

This is mostly true, but farming/ranching is constant work once you have even a modest amount of land and livestock.

I grew up in a low-net-worth family, working on a farm that has been in our hands since 1873. I worked 3 jobs while studying my butt off, and eventually got a degree in Electrical Engineering with a Computer Science minor. I was recruited into various government programs and defense contracting companies, made my way to consumer electronics and medical device companies, then finally free- and open-source hardware/software. I now gratefully hold a very prestigious position while living full-time in my RV while prepping a fully self-sustainable homestead back on my family's ranch.

There is no substitute for the beauty of nature in the small amount of time we're able to appreciate it. That said, there are many many many to enjoy nature without sacrificing vacations for the vocation of fixing fence, herding cattle, plowing fields, eradicating invasive species, calling the game warden on poachers, fixing fence....

Nah, I just want to retire not live on a farm. The last place I'd ever want to live on this earth is a rural community, I've tried. It is terrible.

I have dreamed of this life since before I was in tech.

I was born in a passive-solar, earth-sheltered house that my dad designed and built himself. Instead of a stack of Playboys he had Mother Earth News in the back of the closet. My parents owned one of the first Priuseseses in the US.

For a wonderful few years I had this life. I raised pigs and chickens and managed my property. I got into the best shape of my life, physically and mentally, and just stepping out of my front door made me feel more alive than I've felt since I had to move back to the burbs. (I don't think people realize how little oxygen they get in urban and suburban environments.)

Though I am stuck in the suburbs for now I am determined to get back to that. I would rather wake up to a hungry pig tearing apart its enclosure than to another fucking meeting.

I think it has more to do with maturing with age rather than the tech itself. At least in my case. And I don't really want a farm. But living in the wild is pretty cool and calming.

My original plan when going to IT university was to make 1 money-milking website and move to a forest in middle of nowhere...

Yep, absolutely

Surprised no one pointed out that it is a screenshot from the movie oblivion. If you have not seen oblivion, go watch it. It has an excellent soundtrack by M83

True for me.

I was a nix admin. For two decades. Printers are banned in my house. My only IoT device is a Roku stick. I have 6 geese, 4 ducks, 14 chickens, too many cats, one acre, a number of raised beds, fruit trees and grape vines. I'm now a handyman.

I fit the profile.

YES

I think most people feel like Ron at the end of office space.

No, I really can’t.

Meh.

If you're in a toxic workplace, sure. If you're in a workplace that lets you have fun with your work, learn, discover new things and tinker - the 9000th day is exactly as exciting as the 9th day on the job.

A tech job to fund a pivot into ranching sounds like a fun plan

I'm retiring from an IT position with a public college at the end of the month. I sure AF don't plan on doing any programming for shits 'n' giggles.

Somewhat - I still have a softspot for my ROG Ally and IPad for reading, but yes I would like to have the option of engaging in tech when I want and not be forced to because of survival

I work in tech and long for something like this, sadly I got in very late in life and will never earn enough. I could change companies to max my earnings but honestly where I work now is 33 hours a week and incredibly flexible and manage my neurodivergence very well.

Not a farm, but I'd like to open a coffee shop or bistro type place someday. The kind of place where people in my neighborhood can meet up to chat and grab a really good sandwich, not just stare at their laptops.

I have worked in tech since 2011 and I'm definitely looking for a way out. Don't think I'm cut out for farming though.

Farm? I would take a single acre of overgrown wasteland on a former landfill if it was a legal option to live there.

Absolutely not. Farming isn't anywhere as romantic as those city slickers think. I'd certainly like to get off the hamster wheel but shovelling manure isn't anywhere on the list if things I'd rather do instead.

Sitting in that office I literally felt my life ending. I contemplated all the ways it could be better. Carcrash. Fire. Get superhigh and destroy.

Otoh, I love my projects deeply.

Can confirm , bought farm. No sewage , no water. (But fibre internet)

ngl, i thought about becoming a farmer, but i value living in a society above living on a farm, though both are actually important to me.

the thing is to be a farmer in today's economy is close to impossible, and also i lack experience and equipment.

Not far off. I wouldn't do well with owning and maintaining a farm, but damn do I yearn for a career change often

It’s sad how integrated with tech that farming has become.

Yes but I'll still have a Linux thinkpad on the farm

neofetch guy can confirm

Just said almost exactly this not a week ago.

https://lemmy.today/comment/20889621

I’ve always wanted to leave tech and become a boat mechanic but yeah same deal

I farm now, but I still run my own infra and build apps. I just do it in the winter when I have nothing else to do.

And I don't miss the users. One. Single. Bit.

Depends on the person and what they've dealt with. I've worked IT since '99, but I'm not really burnt out. There are definitely things I dislike, but I still enjoy tech, I still enjoy gaming, and I'm still interested in future tech, even if I do agree I don't like the direction it's going in.

Part of it is that I seem to have a pretty decent burnout warning sensor, and I just stop whatever no work thing moving me that way for a while. Yes I like games, but I like reading, I like climbing, I like biking, I like photography, I like nature, I like the stars, etc.

Another reason may be that while I dislike the way some tech is going, I have other worries about either nontech stuff or just the main reason tech stuff is going in wrong directions, and those worry me more, so tech can still be an escape from worse worries.

Goose farmer

If I had to start over I'd probably start with a plumbers apprenticeship. I like the work, and there's something to be said about having "completed" a job at the end of a day that you don't really get even if you close a feature.

If my cable printer would make a noise I didn't recognize, I'd shoot it.