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~jr

I'll give a little context; I am in school for software engineering at a school that's meant to teach you how to be a good employee essentially (more so than others, I guess - Western Governors University is the name if you want to check it out). I, however, do not want to do this because I do not want to spend my life building software that actively harms people or is useless proprietary/corporate stuff. I'm sure there are startups out there that *don't* do these things but as I'm sure you can guess (as I reside on the smallweb almost entirely), I am not a startup kind of guy.

Many of my friends have expressed similar sentiments, saying that they'd love to own a coffee shop/run a small farm/etc. They all plan on doing this when they're done with all the "real work," but I can't imagine spending a very large portion of my life wasting away and running parallel to the simple lifestyle I want.

To be clear, I know I can't single-handedly do everything or change the world or whatever; I just want to be happy and make my footprint as little as possible. It seems as if to do this, I have to be very sad and work a job I hate, and then at the end of that in 50 years I'll be able to do whatever I want.

To me, it seems not worth it at all to do this. Maybe I'll start a nonprofit, I'll seek out open source work, or maybe I'll find a place that doesn't suck...

Until then.

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~owleyarc wrote:

I wasn't sure from the original post, but based on this I can safely say: I've been in this exact same position. Specifically in my last year of school in 2019-2020.

Ultimately what spurred me out of it was two things, first, obviously was COVID hitting, so I felt lucky to have any job at all. Second was my boyfriend's (now husband's) career choice of being a starving artist; I wanted to support him as best as I could.

So here I am almost three years later, working a job that I don't especially enjoy for a big-tech company I hate. My routine is work maybe 6 out of the 8 hours I'm supposed to and generally just be checked out. The pay is good and it's not too taxing. Though I do think it has really harmed my enjoyment of computers, since I know I need to go through some corporate bullshit to open source any hobby projects, which makes me not even want to write them.

All in all, I think I'd make the same decisions over again, but I'm always keeping an eye on the exit door, looking for a slightly less awful way to exist. But ya know, the problem is capitalism and we'll probably be facing it until global warming gets us all.

Anyway, idk, if there's anything you want to talk/ask about in a less public forum, my email is on my pub profile, feel free to drop a line. And good luck, with whichever way you go. (And hey, if you find a way to do a tech job that doesn't suck, I'd love to know)

~ew wrote:

Hello ~jr,

you don't have to throw everything away. You could choose to learn the tools, and the patterns, and what can make the patterns visible. You can invest time in things like lightbeam (plugin for firefox; there is another project like this, but I forgot the name). In other words "know your enemy". I believe it is allowed to pursue something in quest for a better jumping point.

I have once upon a time decided to not pursue an academic career any further. And I found out, that the number of possibilities just increased from there on. However, I am grateful and a little proud, that I finished that last degree rather than giving up. Allthough times were dark and pessimistic for several long months.

Cheers,

don't give up. Telling the Midnighters about it is not a bad move.

~ew

~bartender? How about some herbs in the form of tea? Maybe something to infuse some sunlight into the poor soul at the counter? Yes? That would be so nice!