If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that's not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There's no way that other thing makes sense.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15205399

Really cool blog post with beautiful photos and starts with a fun and interesting intro, here captured in an image for the the tl;dr but-want-to-comment-anyway among you :

  • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I will never understand why burned up people in IT is so intent of changing a work where you may have intellectual challenges but you don’t need to make strenous physical effort for extreme physical labor. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing one of those jobs, and the idea of wanting them is unfathomable to me.

    • whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I have an outdoors job (biology/ecology), it’s not extreme lmao, although when I go hiking with my tech friends it does seem like maybe it is extreme to them. Your body adapts to what you do. I do office work some days and outdoors work others, and my mental health after more outdoors days just is like exponentially better. I feel connected to nature, I am using my body, I’m touching and smelling and seeing novel things every day. And in my case, doing something that I truly believe matters.

      I enjoy my office days, I get to do planning, mapping, data analysis … but I wouldn’t be caught dead using all my mental energy to stare at a screen every day lol

          • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            I don’t specially dislike it, but everybody talks about the outdoor like the thing they cannot live without. I… actually thrived during COVID, I wasn’t force to tolerate idiots and I didn’t need to leave my house. I didn’t really feel the need to see the external world.

            • whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              That’s not the same thing, I go outdoors constantly and don’t see people. What you have isn’t a dislike of the outdoors, it’s agoraphobia.

              • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                Nope. I don’t have a panic reaction when I go outside (and now I go daily to the office, because it’s near and more confortable than my house). I just don’t have the Nature fetish some people do.

                In my country I went to see the Iguazú falls and my reaction was “Huh. Nice.”

    • witx@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      To me it feels like people romanticising their hobbies/escape activities. If they started doing it as work soon enough they would have lots of pain points and stress. Sure you don’t have CVEs or libraries to update but the deadline for that chair or cabinet you were commissioned is coming and you can’t just get the damn thing right. At the same time you have another customer complaining that you need to check some other stuff you’ve made that isn’t working right … see where I’m going?

      I know a lot of people in the trades and they have very similar or analogous pain points as me in software.

      Doing it as a hobby though? It’s amazing. I don’t really need a car anymore but I’ve been learning how to fix mine and it has been great

      • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I have another impression about romanticizing trades: there’s a deep anti-intellectualism and an exaltation of not having to think. For me that idea is pure hell.

        • whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          You think people in trades don’t think at work? This is actually just classism or something idk. You really don’t think electricians, contractors, plumbers etc aren’t problem solving on the daily? We’re not talking about working on a factory line.

          • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            You really don’t think electricians, contractors, plumbers etc aren’t problem solving on the daily?

            General problem solving, probably. Deep thinking? Nah.

            And besides, I doubt most electricians need to apply Kirchhoff’s Law on a daily basis.

    • thehatfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      There’s satisfaction to be found when labour results in a tangible and lasting result.

      Some of the people I know who quit the IT industry did so because they felt all of the effort they put in never seemed to achieve anything. Too many jobs at startups who exist only to be bought and shut down by bigger fish for some IP etc.

      For some work is not just about wages or challenges, it’s about building something useful and meaningful, whether figuratively or literally.