You may have missed that they're from the developing world, where menial labor is far less well paid and far more backbreaking and dangerous than in the US.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I've been working toward transitioning from software to para-medicine. Spending my days working on random bullshit to 'increase shareholder value', which is at best neutral for society, is depressing. Actually doing something useful for real people in the real world seems like a way out.

But I feel very scared, and sort of stupid and ungrateful, to be considering taking a job with worse hours and benefits for a 1/4 of the pay.

What from the book inspired you?

> If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.

Hah, first time I hear this piece of advice, but I totally buy it.

But... why are you here on this orange website? Isn't a part of you longing for the ones and zeroes still?

> I quit programming to make candles for years, then apartment maintenance, now in the trades. I make 1/3 what I was making doing digital work, and I’d take a pay cut before returning.

This honestly brings me hope in a sort of fantasy way. I want to do this, but I do not have the courage to do it.

> The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall

This hits even harder for me. I desire this too, but it's a necessary evil so long as I remain in tech.

In poor countries like mine (and looks like GP's too), IT positions are very limited indeed. Nevertheless, it has been one of the very few sectors open to nobodies, helping us to pull ourselves out of poverty, open to those who weren't born to the right family with the right connections, or to a sugar daddy who can cover the first 25 years of our lives to go get a good education in Europe or the US.

Looks like it's being slowly taken away from us to make a few billionaires into proper trillionaires. Can't see this ending well for humanity.

And the common advice you hear on this site ("just migrate to country X") doesn't really apply to most of us. Even if you can name many examples of people doing just that, you're seeing a very narrow slice of the population; I can find many more counterexamples for each one of them.

Your weak passport won't impress anybody, almost all of the world is closed to you, you can't travel anywhere (forget migrate) without going through a lengthy and expensive process where you're treated with suspicion, and can be denied with no compensation, on every step of the way. I'm still talking about traveling here; finding work is much more difficult.

So it's really hard to move anywhere decent if you're not at the top of your profession, which in large part depends on your innate abilities, not just how many hours you put in.

I've become jaded and extremely cynical; if worst comes to worst, there's always one universal way out, which is what keeps me going for now.

Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself.

However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.

Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.

But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.

So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.

It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.

Good writing! Thanks

I'm writing this from East Asia, not the US. Over here, there is a suffocating cultural expectation: if you aren't in a specific tier of jobs by a certain age, you are branded a loser. Furthermore, the economy is so heavily centralized that there are very few tech jobs outside of Seoul. I tried to make it there, but after being heavily scammed, I had no choice but to return to my rural hometown.

My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward

Sounds like you want a stable of young slaves to serve you.

Soil has degraded mineral-wise so much that you won't survive even off grid and develop mineral deficiencies quickly.

That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".

The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?

EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.

I am unfamiliar with the history of the piece. Many things are possible. He may have "mostly wrote" it in 1992 and then "polished it" for a 1994 Oita conference, but was somewhat sloppy in internally updating everything date-dependent like the coup part. People also can be very flowery/metaphorical about using the word "coup". Not sure if they even have attendee/speaker lists online for those Oita conferences anymore, but that might also help if he wasn't at all of them. Bitrot / entropy can corrupt the digital world as well as the physical, just with more checksums if the referents still exist. ;-)

Wholeheartedly agree. As an American, I get SO tired of the "rugged American individual" narrative...

What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff...

While I think he's pretty obviously speaking to an audience of office workers, I'll point out that there's a significant difference between cooking or building something a thousand times per day and shipping it out versus seeing the ongoing function of something you made with your own hands.

I've worked in food service, and I've done metal fabrication as a hobby. I can say that I get ongoing satisfaction from using something that I've invented and built with my own hands, versus all those sandwiches and fried foods that I passed to customers.

I've occasionally lamented that I didn't pursue civil engineering instead of software. Most or all of the software that I wrote for companies has disappeared from the world. I believe that I would've taken great satisfaction from seeing a bridge or other infrastructure that I might've had a hand in creating.

I think he is saying Barlow is more of a Walter than The Dude. ,;)

Gen Z needs to chill on this expectation of unrelenting positivity. Or I guess y'all can just keep vaping to deal with the stress.

This piece was written over 30 years ago.

I think he is suggesting that this article is heavily exaggerated, or possibly written more as entrainment rather than to express fact. He quotes the misuse of rule of law to prove his point.

Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.

I’ve lived much of my life in the upper Midwest and have close relatives in Wyoming.

Nobody behaves like that. Ever.

The environment is harsh and people unfailingly help each other. Law and order is respected. The culture is one of independence, but rooted strongly in public good.

What the author wrote must surely have been an attempt at humor in the Patrick F. McManus vein.