The happiest I've ever been

https://ben-mini.com/2026/the-happiest-ive-ever-been

by bewal416 • 5 months ago

662 365 5 months ago

hyperhello• 5 months ago

For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.

In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.

SoftTalker2• 5 months ago

only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better

Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.

reconnecting6• 5 months ago

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.

I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.

jnovek• 5 months ago

I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

reconnecting6• 5 months ago

Same here. I've long had the feeling that the internet could somehow help the world, but honestly, I don't feel that's the case anymore.

derektank• 5 months ago

“Have you ever considered piracy? You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts”

https://youtu.be/IIbeFgaYTNs

Remnant44• 5 months ago

There's a whole lot of us out there. I don't know if there's still a future in the thing that I love, which is where all the malaise comes from.

kakacik2• 5 months ago

Do w hat we did in corporate/banking/other sociopathic envs did decades ago - find another source of fulfillment and happiness. For me its adventures and sports and kids, could be something else for the next joe.

Or just code as you want as a hobby, unrestrained, for whatever you need or makes you happy.

Aeolun5• 5 months ago

Keep going? Just because there’s a different way to do what you like doing doesn’t mean you should stop.

Or become a carpenter. The world is going to be flooded by them.

cobbzilla• 5 months ago

keep programming and learn to use AI.

it’s just another tool. lots of people didn’t want to use compilers and got left behind. the world moved on.

i’m older than you and doing fine. it’s just another tech upheaval, we’ve been through plenty.

yes it gets tiring and at some point you find your way off the treadmill. but it’s really not that hard to stay on, especially if you have the experience.

pixl974• 5 months ago

I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.

reconnecting6• 5 months ago

A decade ago, you needed to think and choose from a dozen solutions, now AI provides you with two options to execute.

A/B testing/validation has become a sort of A/B creation method.

dgritsko• 5 months ago

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.

DonThomasitos2• 5 months ago

One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.

bityard• 5 months ago

I look at it like this: Yes, AI can write code. It can write it much faster than I can. Sometimes it can also write it better than I can.

But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.

pvillano• 5 months ago

I am trying to think of it like hand tools vs power tools. As long as I work in construction, I'll have to use power tools. Maybe one day I'll support myself by making fine furniture. I'd like that.

melagonster• 5 months ago

If you do not know yet. Artists had been destroyed first.

UncleOxidant• 5 months ago

(the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)

We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.

fragmede2• 5 months ago

Does it have to get any better than it is, to totally upend a huge swath of society?

jimbokun14• 5 months ago

The challenge is whether any of those meaningful things we can do will pay the mortgage.

throwaway14922• 5 months ago

At the very least these ai threads where we argue this ai topic will be of great historical interest as our profession either dies or mutates to something else!

chasd005• 5 months ago

I could have written the same comment. Maybe it was me just sitting down one weekend and really giving them a chance but something changed early this year. The coding agents just got really good or, like I said, maybe it was me just taking a hard look at them. For better or for worse, the software dev industry is never going back to they way it was.

sublinear4• 5 months ago

I think you're missing the point. My entire career has been looking up and reusing code written by humans who are objectively better at writing code than AI ever will be (please don't argue about this).

Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.

internet20002• 5 months ago

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

voxl• 5 months ago

If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.

logicprog• 5 months ago

What about mathematics means coding isn't automatible?

Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?

SoftTalker2• 5 months ago

The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."

AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.

cataphract• 5 months ago

I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.

AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.

signatoremo• 5 months ago

AI helps you to focus on the aspects that you are interested in. Perhaps you care about database nifty stuff, but you may need the front end to make an end to end solution. You can delegate that part to AI

tadfisher2• 5 months ago

Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.

It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.

trgn2• 5 months ago

You cant convince anybody an ikea chair is just as good

internet20002• 5 months ago

This analogy falls flat because

a) Carpentry already happens in the real world

b) There's a clear problem being solved (you need furniture).

Stretching your analogy to fit my point: pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander. If you're focused on the chair being built, getting a belt sander to help is great! If you're sanding for the craft (?) of it, focused on the wrist mechanics of rubbing sandpaper up and down, you'd be disappointed.

skuxxlife• 5 months ago

If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.

davnicwil• 5 months ago

I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.

The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.

There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.

ryan_n3• 5 months ago

Is it that hard to comprehend that some people enjoy writing code by hand just for the sake of coding?

jimbokun14• 5 months ago

I’m sure the horses turned into glue were also very happy that the automobile made transportation so much more efficient, too.

tayo423• 5 months ago

I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.

mmmm2• 5 months ago

Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.

It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.

tayo423• 5 months ago

If I didn't have a mortgage and family that would work!

sntran2• 5 months ago

I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.

tryauuum• 5 months ago

any electricians here who want to give a piece of advice?

EddieB• 5 months ago

Had this thought multiple times over the years. However, reality in the UK is training cost and time (~2 years with 2 days a week college + at least ~£5k cost and further 2 years gaining experience) can be quite a blocker- difficult to achieve with dependents for most. Then throw in the reality of domestic work and building up experience. Greener grass and all that

gobeavs• 5 months ago

Curious to read if you want to share a link. I've been thinking about this too.

tayo423• 5 months ago

Yeah sure, Email me by adding @gmail.com to my username and I can send it. I like to tell my self I'm still alittle anonymous online when I post but i blog with my real name.

fortzi• 5 months ago

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft.

Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

gombosg• 5 months ago

Exactly, basically then every desk or office job means sitting next to a box?

antonvs2• 5 months ago

I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?

The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.

Flere-Imsaho• 5 months ago

CSS boxes!

Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.

jhatemyjob• 5 months ago

When I hit that part I was like.... you don't enjoy the work. It has nothing to do with AI. One way or another you're gonna get smoked by the ones who actually like doing this stuff. There's good money in the fitness industry.

RickJWagner• 5 months ago

I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.

One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.

I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.

Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!

Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.

I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.

arjie• 5 months ago

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:

    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90

To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.

Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.

Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.

Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.

Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

pelma• 5 months ago

I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!

lm284693• 5 months ago

We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.

But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!

cheema332• 5 months ago

We're retiring later and later, working more per week

That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.

purchasing power is going down

That is not a new thing.

quality of goods is going down

Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ...

life expectancy is decreasing

On the whole, this is not the case.

child mortality is increasing

Globally?

illiteracy is increasing

Globally?

You seem to have a negative view of things. And sure, many things are not great. But the examples you gave are not it.

deepsun2• 5 months ago

Crime rates going down and down. Purchasing power grows everywhere in the world (but we want much nicer things now, so don't feel it). Travel is more accessible that it ever was in humanity history. Information keeps getting more and more accessible.

And literacy rates are increasing. I don't know why you say it's not, just google "literacy rates trend".

RGamma3• 5 months ago

And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.

pixl974• 5 months ago

This is the history of every empire.

It's also why every empire in history collapsed.

martin-t3• 5 months ago

Humans are not smart enough.

People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited.

Most people are reactive.

If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created.

And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical.

They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.

RataNova3• 5 months ago

Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.

coldtea• 5 months ago

I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".

dkh• 5 months ago

Funny, I also accidentally formatted my dad’s hard drive, destroying work, while trying to install Red Hat, though in my case it was 6.2 “Zoot” somewhere around 1999.

DonThomasitos2• 5 months ago

Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“ But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.

kakacik2• 5 months ago

I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.

pixl974• 5 months ago

Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.

NickNaraghi• 5 months ago

Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

TobinCavanaugh• 5 months ago

Very interesting, explains why video games CAN be so much fun.

deaux3• 5 months ago

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.

jimbokun14• 5 months ago

I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.

StrangeSound• 5 months ago

Thanks for this, I've ordered it and look forward to reading it!

bloomingeek• 5 months ago

My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.

With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.

jimbokun14• 5 months ago

That’s some powerful self insight you achieved.

electrosphere2• 5 months ago

As I get older I've realized that speaking less and just listening more has a LOT of value

steezeburger3• 5 months ago

I love this! Stealing it! :) It reminds me of T.H.I.N.K. before you speak. Ask yourself if what you are about to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind!

bmikaili• 5 months ago

https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/right-speech

It's hard.

bengale9• 5 months ago

In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.

You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.

Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

nvarsj• 5 months ago

There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

bengale9• 5 months ago

Yeah, and I do get it to some extent. Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I wouldn't swap with another person on this planet.

whaleidk• 5 months ago

People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, just because they don’t want kids doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to others’ happiness lol. People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids

RGamma3• 5 months ago

Childlessness seems to be an increasingly compassionate choice. Degrowth by force.

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act. It is, in fact, the ultimate vanity of which humans are capable. Raising little variations of yourself might make you feel good, but if you think it's a unique path to a fulfilling life I suggest you are the one in the little bubble.

Aurornis3• 5 months ago

but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

It's common in some tech and upper middle class bubbles, but outside of some startups and a few VHCOL cities most of the 40+ people in tech I encounter have families.

I think the mindset is most popular in internet bubbles like Reddit. Reddit went mainstream a decade ago and many people in their 30s and 40s grew up reading a lot of Reddit. Reddit cleaned up their popular subreddits list years ago, but for a while subreddits like r/childfree were constantly in everyone's default feeds. Redditors would talk about people who had kids as "breeders" as a derogatory term and treat them like they'd made terrible decisions with their lives.

I didn't realize how much this carried over into the real world until my friends and I started having kids. I knew a few people who treated our decisions like we were making terrible mistakes and throwing our lives away. I still encounter people from younger generations who are confused when I say that I like spending time with my kids. They can't imagine how that would be enjoyable in any way. When you grow up with your chosen social media telling you that the smart people are maximizing their bank accounts, minimizing their responsibilities, and doing as little as possible to get there, they can't fathom how someone could be happy with kids.

satvikpendem• 5 months ago

I want to do that some of the time, not all the time, that's the difference.

dec0dedab0de• 5 months ago

what does “FIRE” mean in this context? I can’t figure it out

anal_reactor4• 5 months ago

The problem though is that relationships with others are risky. When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with. Even if I could reproduce by budding, this is not an environment I want my kids to grow up in. "Dad, why did you make me into a world full of normies?"

paulryanrogers2• 5 months ago

No one chooses to be born. Once they are, they may find that procreation is impossible for them or just not something they'll do well or even want. None of these is necessarily depressing.

We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.

asdfe3r343• 5 months ago

Sure why not get trapped youself with responsibilities and work your life off making rich people even richer.

MengerSponge• 5 months ago

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

tock• 5 months ago

Something about FIRE makes people have a visceral reaction. How DARE people not work like the rest of us. I get the purpose part if they were like teachers or doctors or something. Nope. SWE at Meta.

yodsanklai• 5 months ago

Seems like a terribly depressing way to live

This sounds very judgmental. Don't assume there's a single way to live a happy life. People with kids aren't immune to depression or lack of purpose.

nanopasta• 5 months ago

This is a rather uni-dimensional and, might I say, judgemental view of the CF movement. People choosing to be child-free just want to have "no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves" - really? What about women finally taking agency and rejecting the belief that they must have kids to be fulfilled? You also seem to completely ignore the economic state of the world. The economic conditions we grow up in leave a psychological imprint and influence the choices we make, even as adults.

I have the utmost respect for people with kids, but I also think that an individual needs to be 100% ready to have one, and not just reproduce because it would somehow provide them with a purpose.

mock-possum• 5 months ago

I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live

Does it?? That sounds like the perfect life for me - I don’t need to contribute to others to make myself happy, I’m already happy on my own.

To me, this sounds like there’s something wrong with you - your capacity to just be happy by yourself is broken, you need the happiness of others to validate your life, and that’s a terrible way to live, always desperate to get what you need from others.

martopix3• 5 months ago

There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness.

This is very well put.

I think the culture today is what pushes us towards that: we have a very individualistic culture, which I think comes from the US. I'm from southern Europe, where family used to be very important, whereas now we've adopted a much more individual-centered view.

We have "freedom" as a value, but it's hard to tell what to do with it. You are privileged, therefore you can do whatever you want. But what is it that I want? What do I do with my freedom, privilege, options? We also need an objective, and "to be happy" is not a good objective, because we humans are very bad at predicting what will make us happy. Seeing stereotyped photos of happy people on tropical beaches on Instagram makes it even harder to remember what happiness is.

For happiness you need objectives, things you believe in, a sense of purpose.

agumonkey• 5 months ago

I agree with you but i'd add our cultures pushed these psychological profiles (not far from mine) into running for some kind of (supposed) early safety because entering adulthood felt too bland heavy and risky.

From the few ive read about previous decades, people joined adult life earlier, with easier and better integration around adults and cheaper housing or similar needs. This creates a different existential landscape imo

mchinen• 5 months ago

This has clearly triggered a lot of people, with the full spectrum of arguments for and against having kids below. I'm bookmarking this as an example of driving engagement by taking a fairly benign topic ('helping others was rewarding!') with an extreme view on a topic that everyone has a stake in ('an entire generation lost the plot on life').

How amazing and ironic or a reminder it is that the comments below that seem the most reasonable and avoid generalizing an entire group of people or way of life are the ones that are the least likely to drive more comments because they are perfectly reasonable.

chasd005• 5 months ago

Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

For some it works for some it doesn’t. The hard problem is knowing yourself well enough to make the right choice. Personally, I’m in the “you get what you give” camp but I know not everyone is. Again, the key is knowing which camp you actually belong in. I want to add that “knowing yourself well enough” is no small task and can take a lifetime meanwhile you encounter the forks in the road of life almost daily so.. much easier typed than done.

/turning 50 in about 2 months so, while not that old enough to be considered wise, have been around the block once or twice

mlsu• 5 months ago

Yeah it’s kind of crazy. My opinion of course, but I think it’s a big part of growing up to realize that your life being “yours” only lasts about 20-25 years. You have your childhood, then your time as a young adult to have your fun and set yourself up/work towards your own life goals, find your place in the world.

Once that’s done there really isn’t a purpose in life other than to pass it along to someone else. Dare I say that’s your responsibility. What are you gonna do, buy another toy? Go to another bar?

jraby3• 5 months ago

Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel.

My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.

et-al• 5 months ago

Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.

perrygeo• 5 months ago

The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.

No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.

The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".

Swizec• 5 months ago

Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles"

Hey dude these are my emotional support rectangles!

Truth is, anything can be meaningful. We make our own meaning and almost anything will do as long as you believe in it. If optimizing rectangles on the screen makes you happy, that’s great. If it doesn’t, find something else to do.

bitexploder• 5 months ago

These are all value judgements that reflect your disillusionment rather than some universal truth.

No one is attached to some mythical objective reality. Everyone is imprisoned by the same social, economic and thought prisons.

jimbokun14• 5 months ago

It’s really just because those of us choosing this profession are also very good at optimizing chosen metrics. But don’t always ask whether they are good metrics and whether they become counterproductive past some point.

slopinthebag• 5 months ago

This is one of the reasons why I'm so disgusted by the mainstream voices around AI. As if I'm going to be "left behind" because my only priority isn't increasing shareholder value or building a saas that makes the world a worse place.

popalchemist6• 5 months ago

Even if it's the oldest lesson, it's one we all need to learn, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday was the best time to have learned it. 2nd best is always today.

There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.

pickledish2• 5 months ago

Agreed! I'm not sure why the GP comment has a somewhat negative attitude about it, I think it's great for people to realize this and talk about it, every year a whole new year's worth of young adults turn up not knowing it! Insert XKCD lucky 10,000 comic here

steeleyespan• 5 months ago

I’ve spent too much time talking to Claude, because this sounds exactly like one of its messages

bengale9• 5 months ago

Absolutely! That’s a great point.

For real though, I’m not wasting tokens on comments. I do wonder if we will pick up habits when interacting with them a lot though.

Fr0styMatt88• 5 months ago

Yep yep and yep. The massive move towards individualism in our culture is making people lonely and empty.

card_zero5• 5 months ago

Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.

Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".

bengale9• 5 months ago

This feels like a bit of a staw man argument, I'm not sure there's any reason to read into it that you could help someone do morally bad things and feel good about it.

To be clear though feeling good is not the justification per se, it's pretty much just the signal that you're aligned correctly. When you aim outward, morality becomes less about self image and more about stewardship which is why it tends to work.

I’m also not claiming morality is relative or "attained" particularly beyond normal development as an adult. I would assert that we already know what’s right, the problem isn’t discovering the moral law, it’s obsessing over our own righteousness instead of living it.

joshkojoras• 5 months ago

^^ This comment sums up the entire philosophy of happiness very well, although you first have to go through life to get the context to understand it.

I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.

I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.

I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.

And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.

I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

JuniperMesos• 5 months ago

Children are not typically known for sitting quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal himself was unmarried and childless, and died at the relatively young age of 39.

ane• 5 months ago

It is a good reminder that most of us that work in software engineering will never build anything remarkable and will fade into history. Even if you do brilliant engineering work for a company, said work was commissioned by the company and the intellectual property rights belong to said company. It wasn't yours to begin with.

abc123abc1235• 5 months ago

Plenty of time left. Create a tinder account, or adopt a child. Adpoting a child is the most self-less thing you could do. There are countries where single men are allowed to adopt. If you are rich, move there, become resident, adopt, and move back. Problem solved! As a bonus, being a single father then makes it more probable for you to meet a woman.

littlexsparkee12• 5 months ago

Just because you can't relate to a way of living doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

throwaway920102• 5 months ago

You could easily still have a marriage and children.

mr_toad• 5 months ago

That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.

I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.

This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.

nunez4• 5 months ago

So, as you saw, this provoked the age-old parenting vs CF "debate." (There isn't a right answer.)

I'm child-free by choice, so I can only offer the CF perspective. If you're a parent who wants to better understand our viewpoint, or if you're not a parent but are on the fence about kids, I recommend reading "Childfree by Choice" by Dr. Amy Blackstone. It's an extremely comprehensive book that deeply explores why we choose this life and how we find fulfillment beyond the material benefits that come with this decision.

(I want to be clear: There are loads of happy and very fulfilled parents out there, and it is possible to have a rich life with kids!)

bengale9• 5 months ago

I didn't even mention them being his kids, the point really is that focussing on giving to others is the path to happiness and fulfilment vs focus on self. It doesn't have to specifically be children at all.

I guess I get why that irks a lot of the child-free people but it wasn't really the point I was making.

gedy• 5 months ago

I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.

freetime22• 5 months ago

I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.

Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.

Aeolun5• 5 months ago

Pretty certain the coaching is their job for the soccer coaches at our elementary school. 6 years of kids each with 3 practices a week + matches.

bdangubic• 5 months ago

except it is not, no one’s actual profession (and only job) is youth soccer coach (few exception are retired people etc). it would be impossible to make a living if this was your only job

watermelon593• 5 months ago

As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot.

Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.

Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?

freetime22• 5 months ago

I live in Japan, so it's not just an American phenomenon.

I think most schools provide transportation to away games. But in my city official school sports clubs don't start until high school - before that it's all private club teams.

In my kids' club, the team will provide transportation to far away games in other prefectures, or sometimes for games on school holidays when parents may be working. But it's very common for parents to have to drive their kids an hour or more to other cities within our prefecture. Carpooling is very common.

But most parents want to watch their kids' games as much as possible. Even when the team provides transportation to a game, there are a handful of parents who will make the drive separately to support the team. My son asked me to drive 3 hours to watch an upcoming big game and support the team, and of course I'm not going to say no. To be able to see how far he has progressed, and to know that he wants me there to support him, is special. But also still exhausting at times.

Markoff2• 5 months ago

I mean if you have already adult kids (or no kids at all) you have lot of spare time, my kid's head coach is 68yo, so he has time to train them twice a week (sometimes accompanied his similar aged friend), he also goes with them to matches (not that often 1-2 a month) while giving lectures at university, third training a week is made by some regular IT guy in his 30s with own small kid(s), but he does it only once a week for 1-2 hours, so certainly doable.

Btw. this is in Central Europe, my kid can go to training by himself with tram/bus. As for the matches, I accompany him if it is in our city, but if it's outside the city then he can either join coach(es), they usually ride kids or not participate in match. We don't have car so can't drive him there. Though soon kid will have to move to higher age league, so not sure what club we will find eventually, the one they are cooperating with is outside the city with like 1+ hour commute one way by public transport, so will certainly look into something closer.

TLDR if my kids were already adult I would have also lot of spare time and teaching/helping kids it's sure more fullfiling than doomscrolling at home. Though I am lazy person, but I was in recent years thinking about helping people instead of doing my work for money, the issue is I don't like most of the people, who need help.

jebarker3• 5 months ago

Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.

daxfohl2• 5 months ago

Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good.

But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.

So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.

RataNova3• 5 months ago

A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability

colinnordin• 5 months ago

But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.

I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.

matthewpick• 5 months ago

I miss mentoring junior engineers in-person

RataNova3• 5 months ago

I suspect a lot of people don't actually dislike software development, they dislike developing without anyone invested in their development

data-ottawa• 5 months ago

I have had managers like this and it was fantastic. I’ve tried to be a mentor like this and enjoyed it too.

It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.

shermantanktop• 5 months ago

My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.

I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.

On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.

billylo• 5 months ago

I use my spare time helping kids at a FIRST robotics team. It's fun.

pppoiuy• 5 months ago

gggoip

santram• 5 months ago

gggoip

carabiner• 5 months ago

Just a reminder of how millennial-centric HN is. Everyone here is in their 40s and moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and this article provides validation.

ryan_n3• 5 months ago

It is kind of funny that people here tend to dump on Reddit a lot (often times warranted, don’t get me wrong), when this place is an echo chamber in a similar way.

0898• 5 months ago

Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.

hinkley• 5 months ago

To ask the question Ted Lasso never answers:

What is a Hoosier?

light_triad• 5 months ago

Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.

But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.

AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.

Aeolun5• 5 months ago

I don’t think this whole thing had anything to do with AI or not. It has to do with ‘teaching kids in a gym’ or ‘sitting in front of a screen in an office’.

jimbokun14• 5 months ago

What does this word salad mean?

ioudep2• 5 months ago

“Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value.”

People anchor identity to the hardest part of their work. • Assembly → craftsmanship • Hand coding → engineering skill • Complex stacks → seniority • Writing longform → intellectual authority

The difficulty of the tool becomes proof of worth. “If few people can do this, then my contribution matters.”

So value feels intrinsic to the technical act itself.

⸻

“Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.”

Historically, this always happens.

Compilers replaced assembly expertise. Frameworks replaced boilerplate knowledge. Cloud replaced infrastructure mastery. AI replaces a lot of implementation effort.

Each time, people initially interpret it as:

the skill is dying

But what actually dies is the old measurement of importance.

Value moves up a level: from execution → judgment → direction → taste → responsibility

⸻

“But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.”

This rejects the common fear narrative.

The activities persist, what changes is why they matter.

You still code, but code is no longer scarce. You still write, but writing is no longer the bottleneck. You still design, but layout isn’t the achievement.

The work shifts from producing artifacts to choosing which artifacts deserve to exist.

⸻

“AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up.”

This is the core claim.

Old model:

effort → output → value

New model:

judgment → outcome → value

Previously you proved worth by volume, speed, or complexity.

Now production is abundant, so the scarce thing is: causal impact

Not:

Did you make something?

But:

Did reality change because you were involved?

You’re moving from manufacturing to intervention.

⸻

“The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.”

So the post ends optimistic.

AI doesn’t reduce agency, it removes the cost barrier to acting.

Before: You needed a team, funding, or org permission to affect the world.

Now: A single person can teach, fix, organize, build tools, or help communities directly.

Meaning shifts from scale (reach) to consequence (effect).

⸻

In one sentence

The post argues that AI doesn’t eliminate human contribution, it removes technical scarcity, forcing value to relocate from producing things to changing outcomes.

engineer_22• 5 months ago

I had a similar coaching experience. I took 2 years off and I'm excited to jump back into it this spring. It's tremendous fun and the impact is easy to discern.

tap-snap-or-nap• 5 months ago

We are just priced out of having this type of happiness due to high cost of living in a first world urban environment.

Aeolun5• 5 months ago

Every single environment that has a critical mass of people will have an elementary and middle school. How could you possibly be priced out of this?

deaux3• 5 months ago

This entire concept doesn't exist in much of the world. The incredible prevalence of intramural sports, and the seriousness of it, at all kinds of age groups is a very US phenomenon. Let alone random neighborhood people coaching teams.

In most of the world it's more club-based rather than school-based, and that's quite different.

Markoff2• 5 months ago

I assume he meant coaching full time would not pay the bills for living. My kids elementary school doesn't have their own teams/coeaches, everything is managed through different NGO/non-profit which has contracts to use gyms in various schools. The yearly fee for being member of a sport club varies between 100-250EUR which certainly is not enough to pay the coaches full time.

stopping• 5 months ago

I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line.

I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.

I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.

Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.

Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.

I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.

Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.

lr4444lr2• 5 months ago

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

grimgrin• 5 months ago

I'm sure we've all met an unhappy teacher. As well, ain't no way you're pulling me back into an office ;)

daxfohl2• 5 months ago

Thanks for saying that! I was worried I was the only one. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I was happy to get back to a little more determinism in my day to day.

electrosphere2• 5 months ago

I work mostly remotely, recently our Fibre internet upgrade left us without internet for a week. It forced me to work from a nearby university library - which turned out to do wonders for my mental health.

I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.

gehsty2• 5 months ago

Super interesting to hear your experience, I agree that it is very dystopian. I have put up with it (with effect on my performance and somewhat my mental health), to be around my family more. Things like doing pick up and drop offs at school consistently has been wonderful.

kj4211cash• 5 months ago

So interesting. I also found work in tech, as a DS, more gratifying than teaching. But part of that was finding remote work freeing. Office work is Kafkaesque. I can easily work 40 hours a week or produce more than the equivalent amount of progress on assigned tickets, but I just can't fake being a good officemate for 8 hours a day straight. Plus progress seems so slow in the office. So many distractions and interruptions. With no opportunity to decompress.

3D30497420• 5 months ago

I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

I recall being pretty miserable working in a maze of cubicles surrounded by coworkers. I don't think there are single solutions for any of these questions. What works well for one person will not work well for another.

watermelon593• 5 months ago

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was

Would you mind elaborating on why that was the case? I’m super curious because I’ve considered switching careers to become a teacher.

lr4444lr2• 5 months ago

To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to.

You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.

dejawu• 5 months ago

This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.

watermelon593• 5 months ago

Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time?

I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.

saltcod• 5 months ago

Great post. I coach my son’s club and school teams. 4 practices + games each week. A huge commitment but pays off in so many ways. Good for you for volunteering!

DGAP• 5 months ago

This is a nice sentiment and all but the issue is that I need to make money to pay for goods and services.

sbussard• 5 months ago

I accepted the propaganda that my value to this world only went as far as my product could scale. At 28, I’m finally beginning to challenge that.

this struck me

deaux3• 5 months ago

You know those bullshit leadership positions we all had in high school and college? Like how you were “VP of Operations” for some club, and all you did was order pizza?

This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.

sardukardboard• 5 months ago

It’s not exactly nominative determinism, but maybe this could all be explained by every Ben Wallace being destined for basketball greatness (middle school or nba or otherwise)

jasleenchhabra• 5 months ago

really good

kurttheviking• 5 months ago

I started coaching my son's little league baseball team a few years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could keep him interested it and I just wanted him to keep playing a team sport. But, that first season showed me how incredibly rewarding the whole process can be. Every practice, every game, you see them improve. And the more you work at designing a good practice, helping each player develop skills, the better they get! And, the joy...the pure, unadulterated joy of a short stop making a a clean throw to first for an out, a hit into the grass with a quick slide into second for a double, a dash across home after a wild pitch rolls into the cage for a run on the steal! I don't get paid, of course, but it's the best job I've ever had.

Kiro• 5 months ago

If I could give any advice to someone who needs it, I’d tell them to write down the things that have made them happy, and then explore why.
But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe.

What if sitting in front of a rectangle is the thing that makes you happy?

gehsty2• 5 months ago

Amazing story congrats on being a great coach - this kids will remember you and that experience.

My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon.

We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure…

Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!

gorgoiler• 5 months ago

If you love helping children and also love moving small rectangles around a larger rectangle then Code Club from The Raspberry Pi Foundation is crushing it, and needs volunteers:

https://codeclub.org/

martopix3• 5 months ago

I've quit my career in academia three years ago and teach high school kids instead. I can totally relate, I'm just so much happier: I love those four things he listed, except the fourth for me is physics instead of basketball.

abhaynayar• 5 months ago

It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though.

Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.

Toorkit• 5 months ago

My happiness peaked sometime around 10-11 years old, it's been downhill ever since

toddmorey• 5 months ago

“ For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place.”

Best summation of my current feelings yet.

quirk3• 5 months ago

There is another, deeper level of happiness, not mentioned in any of these comments. Around 62% of the US population has found it. That number used to be higher. In the tech world it's much smaller percentage. The powerful love you feel as a father or mother can actually be compounded, even when didn't think that was possible. It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.

srean• 5 months ago

It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.

If you are talking about Euclid's Elements, it has certainly been a joy to work through them again in my retirement.

Another joy, spend money on someone in need, someone in need of help.

quirk3• 5 months ago

I don't think that one's even on the list of top 1,000. It's incredible how hard we try to avoid hard things.

jjbiotech• 5 months ago

And turns out the patterns and metaphor in this book can be co opted. Without belief in the supernatural, or submission to human authority structures. Though still receiving and giving the same benefits.

Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.

quirk3• 5 months ago

Who built it?

dismalaf• 5 months ago

In a similar but slightly different vein, I found that doing things with my own child (now 3.5 years old) is far more rewarding than I ever imagined. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the joy in his eyes when he discovers something new, accomplishes something or even just gets excited when I come home from work.

I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.

globular-toast• 5 months ago

Odd. I never felt that moving rectangles around was my shot at happiness. My whole career I've spent doing things I genuinely believe are useful and help people. If moving rectangles is no longer useful then so be it, I'll do something else.

I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example.

What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs.

It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.

whattheheckheck• 5 months ago

Read some Denial of Death and pick an immortality project that won't cause undue suffering

The happiest I've ever been

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