Reminds me of the classic: "Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)"
Oh hey, that's me; I'm still building furniture! True to form my website still needs an update, but the contact form works. Please feel free to reach out if you have a project to discuss :-)
Shipping is always an option, but it's a lot less if you're a half-day's drive from Vermont. Or somewhere I'd like to go on vacation anyway.
Edited to add: I've got to go stretch my legs after spending the day in front of the computer designing, but I'll check back later and try to field any questions that have popped up.
And I want to become a quantum theorist. I think being able to manipulate symbols on paper and explain the universe is food for the soul. Grass always seems greener on the other side. :-)
> And I want to become a quantum theorist. I think being able to manipulate symbols on paper and explain the universe is food for the soul. Grass always seems greener on the other side. :-)
I don't think this is a case of "grass always seems greener on the other side", but of getting a job as a quantum theorist. It is hard to find (and keep for a long time) a job in your area of academia. :-(
Decades ago, Wiesner left academia, embraced Orthodox Judaism, moved from the US to Israel, and took up work there as a construction laborer—believing (or so he told me) that manual labor was good for the soul.
> In business theres a term called “Total Adressable Market,” or TAM. This is basically everyone in the world who could buy a product in a given category.
What’s the TAM for a product like fishing rods? Well, that would be everyone in the world who likes fishing...
> The reason we mention this is because when Pablo first started selling his art online, he created all his posts strictly in Spanish - his native language.
Over time, he felt that this was limiting him, so he started making posts in both English and Spanish, and then eventually just English.
The bit about cutting out Spanish entirely suggests this is not a lesson in maximizing one’s TAM
I had one interesting thought while reading that section.
It seems that a lot of effort has been put into tooling for translating to and from English. It's probably much more effort invested than for other languages, so by using English he actually is increasing his TAM because the translation tools are better adapted to many other languages from English.
Funny how dominant languages of the past have died but now the lingua angla feels forever. I wonder if that's how it feels to be at the height of some culture's age: it feels immortal. Then it falls and is only remembered as the past: either as humorous, or as sophisticated, but not meant for normal use. We shall cement this one by creating AIs in the American image.
That cement will always crumble, but the next empire will probably be built with it's pieces. It's no accident that the current global language is a derivative of the last 'worldwide' language, Latin, which itself flourished from its relationship to Alexander's Greece, a language which stole its alphabet from the semitic empires. Nothing new under the sun.
The same can be said for empires in general. Dominance seems forever until it isn't, and often the "higher you go the faster you fall" idea plays out.
There are plenty of signs that the US could be in the midst of its own empire failing. Whether that actually plays out is something we wouldn't know for decades or centuries, but there sure are a lot of parallels to failed empires of the past.
The question we need to ask isn't whether Pax Americana is dying, but who is going to succeed it.
So far it seems like it'll be China on account of there being no other country or bloc able to compete at that level, but that would be very unpleasant for us westerners.
In all likelihood, I'd expect it to be a country or a group of countries that we would never really have expected.
Unfortunately I don't think the US would go down quietly if the empire really is failing. Another major war wouldn't be out of the question, clearing the board for a lot of change to take place.
Without a war though, and one can only hope this is the case, I don't see China pulling it off. I both don't think they really have that motivation, and I don't expect they really could transition from such a totalitarian state to an empire driving anything near the level of US dominance.
When the US empire fails, and it has to eventually even if we aren't currently walking that path, the question is whether it falls apart or fails violently. You could point to many parallels with the Roman Empire and guess that it will just fall apart, even if there are fringe wars along the way.
Uncomfortable situations are seed for evolution. Westerners has no real need to do audacious steps, because they don't feel threatened. When China will take over from USA, I would not be surprised that there will be some ingenious way how Western civilization will rebuild itself.
The west, especially the US, likes to view China as our big rival these days. I'm still not sold, economically we're highly dependent on each other and militarily it doesn't make sense.
If the US and China really were to get into direct conflict, the bigger question may be who on earth was least impacted by nukes rather than which of the two countries "wins" (in quotes because we all lose in war).
The view from Disunited Nations seems likely. There need be no successor peace. There could just be a broken ocean. Europe, in particular, has long failed to contribute to the peace it prospers in. The US periodically has to go and pacify the place since they are practically barbarians who will start killing each other in massive genocides given a few moments alone. When the US withdraws, weakened and bruised, no doubt they will turn on each other.
They already did, and the US had to blow up a pipeline to keep them in line. But that capability won't last forever.
There's a very real question hidden in there though, is it even the US's role to "pacify" the "barbarians"?
There's a lot rolled up in such a small idea. What makes another population barbarians, and how is it so different from the US? Assuming there are groups of adversarial barbarians around the world, why should the US step in to "fix" it and how can they even define what the fix is?
I guess that's fair. Americans see it as their role to prevent other people from their recurrent Holocausts. You leave Europe alone for a century and a genocide will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a decade and a war will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a year and violence will ensue. I suppose one could let that happen. But it's hard to say that the extinction of some racial group is a generally acceptable thing.
Irrespective of the origins of America, that is a categorical difference in the scale of death and destruction. To Americans, that is barbarism, but it's possible that Europeans do not see it as such and perhaps see civilization as inherently violent.
They are foreign to us here and speak different languages so perhaps their true minds are forever opaque to us, but we can see their actions: and that is repetitive quarrels with their neighbours with frequent attempts at ethnic extinction. From that, some conclusions can be drawn.
AI generated-articles designed to give computer programmers dopamine hits when they get to correct a small error/issue/discrepancy.
Like Zyns but distracting.
Maybe it’s like a reward. Fix a tough bug and your manager sends you an article where you get to point out that the author is incorrectly using “strawman fallacy.”
Thanks. That's what I found via Google but I don't use them so I wasn't sure of the connection and that it wasn't some app or library that the kids are using these days that I hadn't heard about.
Dual language adds clutter. We are in the age of short attention spans. The part you quoted is just below the Remove as much friction from the buying process as possible one.
And from personal experience, ages ago, landing some jobs when people tought I was native English speaker, and even same country, sometimes is better if they don't know the relation will be across international boundaries until they have half decided to buy/contract. Maybe that has changed in recent years.
If I were to transition from software engineering, I'd prioritize a role that meets the following criteria:
1. Minimizes screen time and doesn't rely heavily on computers for productivity.
2. Allows me to disconnect after work without constant notifications or calls.
3. Offers stability, requiring minimal adaptation to new trends or technologies.
4. Lastly, and more importantly, not easily replaceable by AI in the near future.
I can strongly recommend taking advantage of the engineering salaries while you have access. 15 years in and I finally quit my software career to start up a homestead/farm with no debt.
Closest I've come to a new job so far was almost taking a job at a local sawmill, I just haven't quite tied up my own projects yet to commit the time. Its run by an older local guy who has been milling for decades. The list of things I could learn from him is very, very long and access to good lumber is a great perk.
Psychologist? Without being ageist :-) I think later in life once you been around the block and got some scars is a good time to be one (of course the formal training and education is 99%) but experience means something. As a bonus you can eventually earn what you were as a developer (probably more in Australia where I am if you are location flexible, for example happy to fill a position somewhere remote)
I think this meets your requirements. It is in danger of AI replacement though. Which would be sad. But reckon there is 20 years of red tape to cut before we get there.
But if you don’t want to talk to people and be on a schedule then carpentry might be a good one. The sort where you make things as oppose to fix architraves in old houses.
AI plus machinery could make “home made” looking stuff but cheapos will keep going to ikea and there will still be a market.
If I didn’t need to make much money and just stay occupied probably do walking tours for free in untouristy places (think the “boring” countryside between cities that ain’t in any guidebooks) or just for a bit of cash walk people’s dogs at the park.
Robots may eventually do these things but to a dog a robot won’t smell like a human so they are the last to be fooled. I imagine in 2050 everyone will have a dog (bred to be small and generally dosile and easy to train) to sniff people for bot detection.
I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.
Are you speaking from experience? Personally - speaking as someone who had needed to plant, hill, water, weed, and harvest plenty of sacks of potatoes by hand as a child - I would say that coding is vastly preferable over farming; and in fact, that most things are preferable over farming.
I've wondered for a while now, how difficult is sustainable farming now if you incorporated all the modern technologies?
It should be ridiculously easy to self sustain with all this stuff we've built! Instead we just work just as long to produce ton of crap that does nothing for our happiness.
I'm doing it with almost none of the modern technologies. Loving it so far, but it definitely isn't for profit. Farming is a losing business these days, few make profit that isn't effectively living off of government subsidies.
I wouldn't trade it for the world at this point though. Its a very strange, and satisfying, experience to raise, butcher or harvest, and cook food that you raised on farm.
I had saved up a good amount of money (before losing it all lol, where I could do this). I was thinking about buying some nice land, setting up an aquaponics farm, and just running some solar farms/generators.
No fret from me if you want to do it all by hand, but there really ought to be a middle ground between living as if it was the 1800s and working 8-10 hours day at a desk.
It very much depends on what you want to grow/raise and how you want to manage it. If your goal is to feed your family, you can pretty easily do that with a few hours of good work in a day when its all setup.
We don't do absolutely everything by hand, but we definitely avoided many of the modern approaches. We have 13 cows, 9 chickens and 20 chicks that just hatched, and a small garden (~3500 sq ft).
There's always certain jobs that take all day or multiple days, like cutting our fields (~50 acres), planting/harvesting, and butchering a pig was a huge undertaking given that we've never done anything like it before. On average, I'd say we put it 6-8 hours a day split between two people, with the occasional days of both working 8-10 hours each.
@redbell If you do go into a profession having to do with "charity" - what is more often referred to as non-profit (or not-for-profit) - please go in with open eyes. I don't want to dissuade you from looking into such careers; simply research things as one might be expected to do whenever looking at a new job/career. I spent 1 year at a well-known non-profit (similar tech leader job to what i've had in corporate world), and it was quite annoying from the perspective that it was the same (or worse!) bureacracy as compared to the corporate world, but with less pay. On the other hand, there were 2 medium-sized projects that i participated (and some portions led) in which have been the absolute best, most fulfilling thing i have ever done professionally in my almost 30 year career. While most of the co-workers were nice and had genuine desire to help their fellow humans, everything else about non-profit work (except for those 2 amazing projects!) was the same crap as corporate work (but again, less pay)! Again, i'm not saying you should not pursue a career in non-profit; simply do your due diligence in research. Goodness knows, we need non-profits to be more effective! Cheers!
> I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.
In my experience tolerating managers and people who don't really care about software is the much more exhausting part of software development.
Masseuse or physical trainer are the only jobs that I can think would qualify.
No screen time, no one needs a midnight massage (although your work hours would probably not be 9-5.), not reliant on technology, and going to take a while for AI to replace.
Many pay well with good benefits if you have a good union. Yes physical labor is hard on your body, but in your 20s and 30s you can probably handle it just fine. You just need to move into a foreman/management position before you get too old.
if you live in a place with lots of sun and rain you can make a pretty good living owning a yard service and employing a small crew. A childhood friend of mine in FL worked as a mower and then bought the business when his boss was ready to retire. I think he does well into 6 figures and supports his family with it.
edit: i will say he and his crew are pretty amazing at what they do. Speed and quality is unbelievable (it's been 20 years since i've seen him work though)
edit2: i've also heard of people buying a backhoe, dump truck, and a trailer and making 6 figures doing random contracts.
These are the roles I seriously considered and actively explored to some degree or another.
1. Electrician. It's not something you can just jump into, even if you're the type who can grok 100% of the theory, equipment, and electrical code overnight. Even after you're all trained up, you have to rank up through various levels, most of which require working under someone else for X number of years. It takes a decade or more before you really have much of a choice of what you get to work on, and start making decent money. In other words, it's a serious career change on-par with doctor or lawyer, just with much less pay.
2. Aircraft mechanic. I love planes. Aircraft are expensive machines. Getting them repaired and maintained and also extremely expensive. So being an aircraft mechanic should be lucrative, right? Sadly, no. I don't know where the money goes, but most aircraft mechanics make significantly under under the median wage and don't have much flexibility on where they can work.
3. Pilot. I would LOVE to fly airplanes and get paid to do it. But this is also another whole career in and of itself. The training costs are extremely exorbitant. A regular job would have me away from home more often than not. According to Real Pilots, airlines are some of the worst employers to work for. But all that aside, I would be a poor pilot because I have a hard time mentally keeping track of numbers. And pilots have to memorize and juggle an insane (to me) amount of numbers just to land safely. I couldn't memorize more than about three numbers for more than 10 seconds or so even at gunpoint.
4. Real estate investor. Lots of people get surprisingly rich from this. But it is a lot of work. The idea is pretty simple: buy a run-down house at a discount, fix it up well enough to rent, re-finance it to get your money back out, and then you effectively have an income-producing property for free. Take that money and go do the same on another one. The problem with this is that the devil is in the details. Every deal is different and unless you're lucky enough to have a mentor willing to share resources and vet your deals, you are GOING to mess it up. I tried this and it didn't work out for two big reasons: 1) I can stay on top of projects, but running all aspects of a business myself is not for me. And I could not find anyone that I trusted to partner with. 2) The sudden large increase in interest rates in the middle of my rehab meant that refinancing was not a viable option. I was forced to sell the property after it was done. I broke even monetarily, but gained a lot of wisdom. I might dip my toes into the water with a simpler strategy in the future, but that's a good 5-10 years off.
5. YouTuber. YT was nice in the beginning, but has consistently been giving the shaft to content creators while keeping all the profits for themselves. On top of that, I found that I really hate editing video.
Right now, I've made peace with the fact that my current destiny is getting paid fairly good money to sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day. The goal at this point is to sock away as much as I can into index funds, to grow it as quickly as possible, and retire early enough that I can essentially devote my whole day every day to hobbies, grandchildren (if I have them), and friends (if I have them).
I started a side business making custom craft cocktails for events (mostly weddings). It's a stressful job, but mixology is a passion of mine and so it doesn't feel nearly as much like work as my 9-5. I'm still in the early stages and learning a ton as I go, but I'm hoping to streamline my processes and raise my prices/margins enough to make about $80 per hour, which would be enough to allow me to go part-time with software engineering and give me much more free time overall while still earning enough to cover costs and save.
I have family in this field; not only is the pay not great (for the skill level) but there is a layer of stress (and liability) that gets added to jobs where one mistake can mean death for someone else. I wouldn't jump into it without being sure that stress wouldn't affect me.
I guess I forgot to mention that I actually _was_ an aircraft mechanic, although that was in the military which I suspect has next to nothing in common civilian aircraft maintenance. The work itself was fine, if pretty tedious most of the time. I left the service to chase a career in tech which was probably the right call. Although there are days where I wonder what it would have been like to retire with a government pension 5 years ago...
Yeah, I'd hazard a guess that the life/death tradeoff, the error-management process, and individual liability work very differently for military vs civilian roles.
Well, he is using code as a tool, as a mean to reach his goals. I believe this is the best way to write code, after all. Should almost be the only sensible way. It's just that in 2024, having a programming job is 90% of times doing things you don't care with tools you don't want to use. The problem is not programming itself.
You forgot to mention terrible managers, abusive “business” people, and utterly broken processes that put all of the responsibility and none of the agency on the developers themselves.
I recently quit my job as a robotics engineer -- and I've been painting a lot more and have noticed the quality of my work has gone up. In the past few weeks I've had more sales than I had in the year prior as I was doing it nights and weekends.
Super cool to read about other engineers-turned-artists and how they approach their work!
I did this some years ago myself and I want to say the only thing I miss is...agile working! Throw your tomatoes now.
It's fantastic to work in this field and very fulfilling but I consistently find the quality of teamwork and coordination to be much lacking compared to my engineering past. I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upcoming rehearsal.
> I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upcoming rehearsal.
They'd most likely become your little slaves if you paid them. The reason people put up with such bureaucratic systems and bosses is the pay. And many quit in frustration for lower pay and more freedom.
> They'd most likely become your little slaves if you paid them
That would be great but because most of these people are in the "quit out of frustration for lower pay and more freedom" bracket they're not always so easy to persuade with the carrot of cash. More likely they'll just turn down the project and move onto another.
Practice isn't the issue, everyone loves to do that. It's more the mundane things like writing bios for social media, contacting venues, finalising lyrics etc.
I've been playing the piano and composing music for over a decade. Last year, I started getting paid as a ghost composer, and since then, I've been composing more songs per week on average than ever before in my life. I don't regret anything; I love everything I've composed for the person who hired me, and getting paid for it is an incredible bonus. It's almost like a dream come true that I never sought or aimed for. I also didn't feel any less of an artist for accepting payment for my work. I simply believe that we need to take some of the romanticism out of the notion that to be a true artist, you have to starve.
It was by chance, I wasn't looking for it. I was working as a community manager for a musician and I came up with the idea of suggesting co-composing something together, and ended up composing songs for her. If I wanted to reverse engineer it, I could start by proposing the same thing to every musician I know (or even reaching out to musicians I don't know through social media).
I'm pretty sure you are severely understimating the amount of work that goes into quality art pieces, no matter the medium.
Also, thinking of customers as "fools" only makes sense if you believe you are selling/producing garbage. If what you make has value, then whoever buys it is no fool.
You're also underestimating the amount of great quality art that simply doesn't sell. Hence the power of marketing. And the art that sells for lots and lots of money is also marketing and financial gimmicks the art world does behind the scenes. Unfortunately it's not quality that matters, it's the notoriety of the artist. It goes back to marketing in circles.
No need to be this jaded IMO. Dude is making art (FWIW, art I quite enjoy), and marketing it accordingly. Just saying he's "Instagramming full time" sounds like unnecessary aspersions - it's not like he's just making duck faces into the camera or showing random shit he bought, and he's not doing some lame "influencer" track. He's just marketing and selling stuff that he created. We should celebrate that, especially on a website like Hacker News.
This is why I never really tried. I thought I could sell art but it's a grind and political. It seems like either you can work constantly to sell art to fund making art or half ass it at some corporate job, make a ton of money and make art?
I saw a graph somewhere that vast majority of income from OnlyFans is earned by a small number of top performers. I assume that something similar happens in the furry community.
Not really. Onlyfans creators are selling the same content to lots of people, while furry artists are selling their time slots for custom art. The top artists can charge more for their time, but there is still a limit to how many pieces of work they can put out each week so the money is pretty well spread down to the less popular artists who are more readily available to take on work.
Bruh I was just opening up my computer to apply for a CS masters to advance my career as a languages & humanities degree holder turned SE who always wanted to do art. Now I'm back to thinking I should try and work on art until it can take over my career.
It's sort of upsetting that doing something I'm bad at (SE) makes me more money than anything I'm good at. Feels like it traps me.
You can make art with code and make a living from it. Start looking at generative and algorithmic artists for some inspiration. Owning one of these pen plotters (look at the axidraw and next draw) helps too.
i'm also a humanities degree holder turned software engineer. i recently quit my job so i can work on my art. do it!!!!! my spirit is so much better. fuck computers.
Funny that "always be selling" is a core principle of his art. I would describe him more of a businessman than artist. Maybe designer. But an artist does not care about money. The art comes first. Buyers must wait.
I've been playing the piano and composing music for over a decade. Last year, I started getting paid as a ghost composer, and since then, I've been composing more songs per week on average than ever before in my life. I don't regret anything; I love everything I've composed for the person who hired me, and getting paid for it is an incredible bonus. It's almost like a dream come true that I never sought or aimed for. I also didn't feel any less of an artist for accepting payment for my work. I simply believe that we need to take some of the romanticism out of the notion that to be a true artist, you have to starve.
> “If you’re getting hate, that’s a good sign.” ...In the past, he used to engage with them...Now, he doesn’t get too involved.
Did he mean to say "passion" in this case? How is hate a "good" sign of engagement? If someone has an opinion and is willing to share it with me, I'd hope they could do it in a constructive way (but I wouldn't call that "hate", and this is the Internet he's talking about).
Imagine being surrounded by 100 people hurling insults at you, telling you you're no good and your product / service / art sucks. How is that a "good sign"?
Edit: Maybe the assumption is "For every hater, I find 10 people that _do_ like it", so the realization is that "I'm reaching people," and the underlying prayer is that "And hopefully, they're not _all_ haters."
I think the argument here is that hate (which is a subset of passion) is not the purely negative thing that we immediately think it is. Especially in art. When people _hate_ art the art has served its purpose. Art's intention (to paint with heinously broad strokes) is to create emotions and drive thoughts. That's a very different intention than a product/service and they shouldn't be compared in that sense.
But also:
> Afterall, it’s good for engagement and the Instagram algorithm.
Arts intention is whatever the artist makes it out to be. If an artist wants their work to be loved, not hated... Well then this doesn't really apply does it
Does the artist control that outcome, though? The clear communication of their art's intention? Whether their work is loved or hated?
If you're creating art because you enjoy doing it, and if you're performing / putting it on display because you think it has value and others might enjoy it too, then I can't think of any reaction other than love and encouragement (implicitly via purchasing or explicitly via encouragement) that would suffice in keeping one motivated to share it with others.
Now, amidst any hate I might ask myself "Did I do the absolute best according to my ability? Is there anything else I can improve?" From this perspective, hate is amazing as fuel because it's an effective way to eliminate your perceived faults (assuming you take it personally, which I'd wager most artists do).
Even if the artist wrote their own citation of a work saying "I intended it for it to be loved, and that's the only correct interpretation", it's still not correct if one subscribes, as I do, to the literary-focused "the death of the author('s authority)" once they release it. They really don't get a say how it's taken once someone else perceives it.
I think the parent's free use of 'hate' stands in for a conflict in emotion and interpretation this way, and less it being completely despised or loathed.
Your edit is the goal, it's why content creators have a new influx in views after getting "canceled". People who forgot the youtuber existed before cancellation come back to see what's going on.
In this case, hate is attention that helps algorithms. It's why shortform media is usually inflammatory, you get more engagement out of it.
Hate and other powerful emotions are a good sign, they can promote you to people who don't hate you.
I think this is just a "content creator" realizing, but not admitting to themselves, that the algorithms that spread their content (that they're banking on to get paid) have "figured out" that humans' strong negative emotional reaction has a higher engagement potential than strong positive reactions, thus those who generate the most hate are those who get seen/paid the most.
If you’re selling a product or service promising objective utility for a user, maybe. Art is just...there, though. Maybe games can promise functionality that a consumer can expect to have working, but most mediums don’t.
Without objective functionality, “Haters” in an art context only have one thing to be vitriolic about - their own subjective aesthetic taste. Thus their words cannot contain anything of value to the artist.
In the movie biography of Tom Wolfe (RIP), his daughter tells of reading some of the vicious things people said about him, and asking him if this didn't bother him.
He said, "No, of course not. You're nobody 'til somebody hates you."
So if you despised them first and said something that touched them that deeply, I could see considering that a success.
It's what artists do to lie to themselves so their entire life doesn't seem like a waste of time. I went from music to tech. Art is full of completely delusional hacks.
Nah, steady paycheck, health insurance, don't need roommates, can afford the nicer things in life. Gigging and touring is fun in your 20s, but starts to drain you. This is much better.
I made a career out of it and made it to regional status. If you want to pay your bills, you need to hit national level or teach music. It's a fucking grind and you naturally age out.
I've been watching one of my friends keep on pushing at the grind and it looks super gruelling, he's been drifting from programming to running the mixer board at a lot of local shows and it's impossible to hook up with him to hang out any more. I dunno how he does it.
I'd rather hang with people that have a rudimentary idea of logic than talk about karma, auras, moon phases, vibrations, and energy. It seems to come from a good place but it's fucking exhausting.
Not if you're truly into marketing and art is a second thought. Most 'artists' of this type sell copies because that easy money. But if you're not good with marketing you end up stockpiling copies of your art that nobody wants.
Regardless of AI, isn’t it equally hard to start a business (no matter how small)? OP made it (it seems), but chances are against one. I think this applies now, 10 years ago and will apply 10 years from now.
AI is hitting engineering now too, no? (Sure in small ways now, but I imagine it would be one of the first targets considering it is engineers doing it)
Since covid I left tech and have been working at ayahuasca retreat centers (assisting and managing) and apprenticing. Frankly I can't imagine a career less at risk to AI replacement!
Maybe someone should start a job board for AI-proof gigs.
Who do you think is going to pay for the retreats when all the high paying white collar jobs are gone? the economy will collapse which inevitably will affect you regardless of your job
The majority of our clientele don't really fit that demographic, our prices are pretty reasonable and we probably could lower them further. I don't think we'd be terribly affected unless something catastrophic happens.
Reminds me of the classic: "Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)"
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
Oh hey, that's me; I'm still building furniture! True to form my website still needs an update, but the contact form works. Please feel free to reach out if you have a project to discuss :-)
Shipping is always an option, but it's a lot less if you're a half-day's drive from Vermont. Or somewhere I'd like to go on vacation anyway.
Edited to add: I've got to go stretch my legs after spending the day in front of the computer designing, but I'll check back later and try to field any questions that have popped up.
Keep on keeping on!
I missed this! HN discussion (with an elaboration by the author/woodworker) here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964
I remember a quantum information theorist went to become a hard labourer in construction because he thought "physical labour is food for the soul"
And I want to become a quantum theorist. I think being able to manipulate symbols on paper and explain the universe is food for the soul. Grass always seems greener on the other side. :-)
> And I want to become a quantum theorist. I think being able to manipulate symbols on paper and explain the universe is food for the soul. Grass always seems greener on the other side. :-)
I don't think this is a case of "grass always seems greener on the other side", but of getting a job as a quantum theorist. It is hard to find (and keep for a long time) a job in your area of academia. :-(
Honestly I would say labor/exercise is food for the brain. Of course moderation in everything.
Decades ago, Wiesner left academia, embraced Orthodox Judaism, moved from the US to Israel, and took up work there as a construction laborer—believing (or so he told me) that manual labor was good for the soul.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5730
Stephen J. Wiesner (1942 – August 12, 2021)[1] was an American-Israeli research physicist, inventor and construction laborer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiesner
[dead]
and that right there is why RSS is dying. :)
RSS is fine. A thing doesn't have to make headlines with VC rounds and take over the world to be alive and well.
Could they add AI to that table saw so it removes fingers more efficiently, that’s the pressing question we’re facing today.
no AI just natural stupidity
> In business theres a term called “Total Adressable Market,” or TAM. This is basically everyone in the world who could buy a product in a given category. What’s the TAM for a product like fishing rods? Well, that would be everyone in the world who likes fishing...
> The reason we mention this is because when Pablo first started selling his art online, he created all his posts strictly in Spanish - his native language. Over time, he felt that this was limiting him, so he started making posts in both English and Spanish, and then eventually just English.
The bit about cutting out Spanish entirely suggests this is not a lesson in maximizing one’s TAM
I had one interesting thought while reading that section.
It seems that a lot of effort has been put into tooling for translating to and from English. It's probably much more effort invested than for other languages, so by using English he actually is increasing his TAM because the translation tools are better adapted to many other languages from English.
Or to put it another way:
Spanish can understand English.
English can't understand Spanish.
Speaking English you can communicate with English and Spanish without also speaking Spanish, kill two birds with one stone.
The virtues of a lingua franca.
Funny how dominant languages of the past have died but now the lingua angla feels forever. I wonder if that's how it feels to be at the height of some culture's age: it feels immortal. Then it falls and is only remembered as the past: either as humorous, or as sophisticated, but not meant for normal use. We shall cement this one by creating AIs in the American image.
That cement will always crumble, but the next empire will probably be built with it's pieces. It's no accident that the current global language is a derivative of the last 'worldwide' language, Latin, which itself flourished from its relationship to Alexander's Greece, a language which stole its alphabet from the semitic empires. Nothing new under the sun.
The same can be said for empires in general. Dominance seems forever until it isn't, and often the "higher you go the faster you fall" idea plays out.
There are plenty of signs that the US could be in the midst of its own empire failing. Whether that actually plays out is something we wouldn't know for decades or centuries, but there sure are a lot of parallels to failed empires of the past.
The question we need to ask isn't whether Pax Americana is dying, but who is going to succeed it.
So far it seems like it'll be China on account of there being no other country or bloc able to compete at that level, but that would be very unpleasant for us westerners.
In all likelihood, I'd expect it to be a country or a group of countries that we would never really have expected.
Unfortunately I don't think the US would go down quietly if the empire really is failing. Another major war wouldn't be out of the question, clearing the board for a lot of change to take place.
Without a war though, and one can only hope this is the case, I don't see China pulling it off. I both don't think they really have that motivation, and I don't expect they really could transition from such a totalitarian state to an empire driving anything near the level of US dominance.
When the US empire fails, and it has to eventually even if we aren't currently walking that path, the question is whether it falls apart or fails violently. You could point to many parallels with the Roman Empire and guess that it will just fall apart, even if there are fringe wars along the way.
Uncomfortable situations are seed for evolution. Westerners has no real need to do audacious steps, because they don't feel threatened. When China will take over from USA, I would not be surprised that there will be some ingenious way how Western civilization will rebuild itself.
The west, especially the US, likes to view China as our big rival these days. I'm still not sold, economically we're highly dependent on each other and militarily it doesn't make sense.
If the US and China really were to get into direct conflict, the bigger question may be who on earth was least impacted by nukes rather than which of the two countries "wins" (in quotes because we all lose in war).
The view from Disunited Nations seems likely. There need be no successor peace. There could just be a broken ocean. Europe, in particular, has long failed to contribute to the peace it prospers in. The US periodically has to go and pacify the place since they are practically barbarians who will start killing each other in massive genocides given a few moments alone. When the US withdraws, weakened and bruised, no doubt they will turn on each other.
They already did, and the US had to blow up a pipeline to keep them in line. But that capability won't last forever.
There's a very real question hidden in there though, is it even the US's role to "pacify" the "barbarians"?
There's a lot rolled up in such a small idea. What makes another population barbarians, and how is it so different from the US? Assuming there are groups of adversarial barbarians around the world, why should the US step in to "fix" it and how can they even define what the fix is?
I guess that's fair. Americans see it as their role to prevent other people from their recurrent Holocausts. You leave Europe alone for a century and a genocide will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a decade and a war will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a year and violence will ensue. I suppose one could let that happen. But it's hard to say that the extinction of some racial group is a generally acceptable thing.
Irrespective of the origins of America, that is a categorical difference in the scale of death and destruction. To Americans, that is barbarism, but it's possible that Europeans do not see it as such and perhaps see civilization as inherently violent.
They are foreign to us here and speak different languages so perhaps their true minds are forever opaque to us, but we can see their actions: and that is repetitive quarrels with their neighbours with frequent attempts at ethnic extinction. From that, some conclusions can be drawn.
The Roman Empire seemed forever for those living within it too!
> Spanish can understand English.
> English can't understand Spanish.
Many Spanish-speaking people are bad at English.
YC startup idea:
AI generated-articles designed to give computer programmers dopamine hits when they get to correct a small error/issue/discrepancy.
Like Zyns but distracting.
Maybe it’s like a reward. Fix a tough bug and your manager sends you an article where you get to point out that the author is incorrectly using “strawman fallacy.”
You could probably get a better ROI offering opportunities to make snarky, condescending comments
Go through my comment history lol. I’ve been giving it away for years!
This is basically the idea behind various word puzzles. See: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords
Great point. Sudoku is one of my favorites in the word puzzle genre.
Zyns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyn_(nicotine_pouches)
Thanks. That's what I found via Google but I don't use them so I wasn't sure of the connection and that it wasn't some app or library that the kids are using these days that I hadn't heard about.
Nah, just a physical item representation of "single serving thing that makes the happy neurotransmitters"
Dual language adds clutter. We are in the age of short attention spans. The part you quoted is just below the Remove as much friction from the buying process as possible one.
And from personal experience, ages ago, landing some jobs when people tought I was native English speaker, and even same country, sometimes is better if they don't know the relation will be across international boundaries until they have half decided to buy/contract. Maybe that has changed in recent years.
Yeah, it's more like min-max'ing your TAM. Minimize effort in areas that don't have any return and maximize the areas that do. Business 101.
TAM vs ROI is a thing… obviously.
If I were to transition from software engineering, I'd prioritize a role that meets the following criteria:
I can strongly recommend taking advantage of the engineering salaries while you have access. 15 years in and I finally quit my software career to start up a homestead/farm with no debt.
Closest I've come to a new job so far was almost taking a job at a local sawmill, I just haven't quite tied up my own projects yet to commit the time. Its run by an older local guy who has been milling for decades. The list of things I could learn from him is very, very long and access to good lumber is a great perk.
you win life.
Psychologist? Without being ageist :-) I think later in life once you been around the block and got some scars is a good time to be one (of course the formal training and education is 99%) but experience means something. As a bonus you can eventually earn what you were as a developer (probably more in Australia where I am if you are location flexible, for example happy to fill a position somewhere remote)
I think this meets your requirements. It is in danger of AI replacement though. Which would be sad. But reckon there is 20 years of red tape to cut before we get there.
But if you don’t want to talk to people and be on a schedule then carpentry might be a good one. The sort where you make things as oppose to fix architraves in old houses.
AI plus machinery could make “home made” looking stuff but cheapos will keep going to ikea and there will still be a market.
If I didn’t need to make much money and just stay occupied probably do walking tours for free in untouristy places (think the “boring” countryside between cities that ain’t in any guidebooks) or just for a bit of cash walk people’s dogs at the park.
Robots may eventually do these things but to a dog a robot won’t smell like a human so they are the last to be fooled. I imagine in 2050 everyone will have a dog (bred to be small and generally dosile and easy to train) to sniff people for bot detection.
Any ideas on actual roles?
I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.
IMHO, Farming is the ideal switch for a techie. Technically, you are switching from the likes of Matrix to speaking to animals.
Another activity that I believe would bring more joy than 99% of jobs, if not all, is charity.
Are you speaking from experience? Personally - speaking as someone who had needed to plant, hill, water, weed, and harvest plenty of sacks of potatoes by hand as a child - I would say that coding is vastly preferable over farming; and in fact, that most things are preferable over farming.
I've wondered for a while now, how difficult is sustainable farming now if you incorporated all the modern technologies?
It should be ridiculously easy to self sustain with all this stuff we've built! Instead we just work just as long to produce ton of crap that does nothing for our happiness.
I'm doing it with almost none of the modern technologies. Loving it so far, but it definitely isn't for profit. Farming is a losing business these days, few make profit that isn't effectively living off of government subsidies.
I wouldn't trade it for the world at this point though. Its a very strange, and satisfying, experience to raise, butcher or harvest, and cook food that you raised on farm.
How long does it take you in a day?
I had saved up a good amount of money (before losing it all lol, where I could do this). I was thinking about buying some nice land, setting up an aquaponics farm, and just running some solar farms/generators.
No fret from me if you want to do it all by hand, but there really ought to be a middle ground between living as if it was the 1800s and working 8-10 hours day at a desk.
It very much depends on what you want to grow/raise and how you want to manage it. If your goal is to feed your family, you can pretty easily do that with a few hours of good work in a day when its all setup.
We don't do absolutely everything by hand, but we definitely avoided many of the modern approaches. We have 13 cows, 9 chickens and 20 chicks that just hatched, and a small garden (~3500 sq ft).
There's always certain jobs that take all day or multiple days, like cutting our fields (~50 acres), planting/harvesting, and butchering a pig was a huge undertaking given that we've never done anything like it before. On average, I'd say we put it 6-8 hours a day split between two people, with the occasional days of both working 8-10 hours each.
@redbell If you do go into a profession having to do with "charity" - what is more often referred to as non-profit (or not-for-profit) - please go in with open eyes. I don't want to dissuade you from looking into such careers; simply research things as one might be expected to do whenever looking at a new job/career. I spent 1 year at a well-known non-profit (similar tech leader job to what i've had in corporate world), and it was quite annoying from the perspective that it was the same (or worse!) bureacracy as compared to the corporate world, but with less pay. On the other hand, there were 2 medium-sized projects that i participated (and some portions led) in which have been the absolute best, most fulfilling thing i have ever done professionally in my almost 30 year career. While most of the co-workers were nice and had genuine desire to help their fellow humans, everything else about non-profit work (except for those 2 amazing projects!) was the same crap as corporate work (but again, less pay)! Again, i'm not saying you should not pursue a career in non-profit; simply do your due diligence in research. Goodness knows, we need non-profits to be more effective! Cheers!
> I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.
In my experience tolerating managers and people who don't really care about software is the much more exhausting part of software development.
Construction trades (e.g., any role involved in building a house).
Also, woodworking (furniture, cabinetry, etc.).
Get a portable Laguna or Woodmizer saw mill. Optional kiln.
Teacher seems to fit some of those.
If you can relax requirement #3 then stand up comedy comes close.
p.s : professional stand up comic here, been trying to quit my day job for 14 years :-)
Something that fits all of that is a career as a professional athlete. Are you any good at golf? ;)
Masseuse or physical trainer are the only jobs that I can think would qualify.
No screen time, no one needs a midnight massage (although your work hours would probably not be 9-5.), not reliant on technology, and going to take a while for AI to replace.
Very few good jobs fulfill criteria number 2.
Don't most physical labor jobs and trades fulfill number 2?
Not necessarily. A lot of contractors are on call at a moments notice, work crazy hours, and take home all sorts of health related problems.
I was thinking a good union shop job. Yeah independent guys working for themselves is a different story.
Those generally aren't good jobs. In particular they tend to pay poorly and destroy your body.
Many pay well with good benefits if you have a good union. Yes physical labor is hard on your body, but in your 20s and 30s you can probably handle it just fine. You just need to move into a foreman/management position before you get too old.
if you live in a place with lots of sun and rain you can make a pretty good living owning a yard service and employing a small crew. A childhood friend of mine in FL worked as a mower and then bought the business when his boss was ready to retire. I think he does well into 6 figures and supports his family with it.
edit: i will say he and his crew are pretty amazing at what they do. Speed and quality is unbelievable (it's been 20 years since i've seen him work though)
edit2: i've also heard of people buying a backhoe, dump truck, and a trailer and making 6 figures doing random contracts.
These are the roles I seriously considered and actively explored to some degree or another.
1. Electrician. It's not something you can just jump into, even if you're the type who can grok 100% of the theory, equipment, and electrical code overnight. Even after you're all trained up, you have to rank up through various levels, most of which require working under someone else for X number of years. It takes a decade or more before you really have much of a choice of what you get to work on, and start making decent money. In other words, it's a serious career change on-par with doctor or lawyer, just with much less pay.
2. Aircraft mechanic. I love planes. Aircraft are expensive machines. Getting them repaired and maintained and also extremely expensive. So being an aircraft mechanic should be lucrative, right? Sadly, no. I don't know where the money goes, but most aircraft mechanics make significantly under under the median wage and don't have much flexibility on where they can work.
3. Pilot. I would LOVE to fly airplanes and get paid to do it. But this is also another whole career in and of itself. The training costs are extremely exorbitant. A regular job would have me away from home more often than not. According to Real Pilots, airlines are some of the worst employers to work for. But all that aside, I would be a poor pilot because I have a hard time mentally keeping track of numbers. And pilots have to memorize and juggle an insane (to me) amount of numbers just to land safely. I couldn't memorize more than about three numbers for more than 10 seconds or so even at gunpoint.
4. Real estate investor. Lots of people get surprisingly rich from this. But it is a lot of work. The idea is pretty simple: buy a run-down house at a discount, fix it up well enough to rent, re-finance it to get your money back out, and then you effectively have an income-producing property for free. Take that money and go do the same on another one. The problem with this is that the devil is in the details. Every deal is different and unless you're lucky enough to have a mentor willing to share resources and vet your deals, you are GOING to mess it up. I tried this and it didn't work out for two big reasons: 1) I can stay on top of projects, but running all aspects of a business myself is not for me. And I could not find anyone that I trusted to partner with. 2) The sudden large increase in interest rates in the middle of my rehab meant that refinancing was not a viable option. I was forced to sell the property after it was done. I broke even monetarily, but gained a lot of wisdom. I might dip my toes into the water with a simpler strategy in the future, but that's a good 5-10 years off.
5. YouTuber. YT was nice in the beginning, but has consistently been giving the shaft to content creators while keeping all the profits for themselves. On top of that, I found that I really hate editing video.
Right now, I've made peace with the fact that my current destiny is getting paid fairly good money to sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day. The goal at this point is to sock away as much as I can into index funds, to grow it as quickly as possible, and retire early enough that I can essentially devote my whole day every day to hobbies, grandchildren (if I have them), and friends (if I have them).
I think if most disgruntled devs put honest thought into it like you did, they would reach the same conclusion, I certainly did, esp with a family.
I have also started to try getting more aggressive with investments
ditto
I started a side business making custom craft cocktails for events (mostly weddings). It's a stressful job, but mixology is a passion of mine and so it doesn't feel nearly as much like work as my 9-5. I'm still in the early stages and learning a ton as I go, but I'm hoping to streamline my processes and raise my prices/margins enough to make about $80 per hour, which would be enough to allow me to go part-time with software engineering and give me much more free time overall while still earning enough to cover costs and save.
Happy for you that you have a decently monetizable passion!
> Aircraft mechanic.
I have family in this field; not only is the pay not great (for the skill level) but there is a layer of stress (and liability) that gets added to jobs where one mistake can mean death for someone else. I wouldn't jump into it without being sure that stress wouldn't affect me.
I guess I forgot to mention that I actually _was_ an aircraft mechanic, although that was in the military which I suspect has next to nothing in common civilian aircraft maintenance. The work itself was fine, if pretty tedious most of the time. I left the service to chase a career in tech which was probably the right call. Although there are days where I wonder what it would have been like to retire with a government pension 5 years ago...
Yeah, I'd hazard a guess that the life/death tradeoff, the error-management process, and individual liability work very differently for military vs civilian roles.
I hear that being a utilities locator is good work. Pretty much all your requirements, plus:
- lots of outside time and exercise built into the day
- independent work
- low credential barrier to entry
In case anyone is looking for the dead opposite, I highly suggest practicing law.
Well, he is using code as a tool, as a mean to reach his goals. I believe this is the best way to write code, after all. Should almost be the only sensible way. It's just that in 2024, having a programming job is 90% of times doing things you don't care with tools you don't want to use. The problem is not programming itself.
You forgot to mention terrible managers, abusive “business” people, and utterly broken processes that put all of the responsibility and none of the agency on the developers themselves.
Yes, you are right. Often the "environment" sucks as well.
90% may even be generous.
This really hits home.
I recently quit my job as a robotics engineer -- and I've been painting a lot more and have noticed the quality of my work has gone up. In the past few weeks I've had more sales than I had in the year prior as I was doing it nights and weekends.
Super cool to read about other engineers-turned-artists and how they approach their work!
I did this some years ago myself and I want to say the only thing I miss is...agile working! Throw your tomatoes now.
It's fantastic to work in this field and very fulfilling but I consistently find the quality of teamwork and coordination to be much lacking compared to my engineering past. I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upcoming rehearsal.
> I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upcoming rehearsal.
They'd most likely become your little slaves if you paid them. The reason people put up with such bureaucratic systems and bosses is the pay. And many quit in frustration for lower pay and more freedom.
> They'd most likely become your little slaves if you paid them
That would be great but because most of these people are in the "quit out of frustration for lower pay and more freedom" bracket they're not always so easy to persuade with the carrot of cash. More likely they'll just turn down the project and move onto another.
i've never met a great instrument player who needed jira for solo practice. tomato ** 100000, with a chorus of violins.
Practice isn't the issue, everyone loves to do that. It's more the mundane things like writing bios for social media, contacting venues, finalising lyrics etc.
What happened to people before processes?
Who knows, can’t find any JIRA ticket about it and anyone working at the time has long since quit/been laid off.
I've been playing the piano and composing music for over a decade. Last year, I started getting paid as a ghost composer, and since then, I've been composing more songs per week on average than ever before in my life. I don't regret anything; I love everything I've composed for the person who hired me, and getting paid for it is an incredible bonus. It's almost like a dream come true that I never sought or aimed for. I also didn't feel any less of an artist for accepting payment for my work. I simply believe that we need to take some of the romanticism out of the notion that to be a true artist, you have to starve.
How did you find work as a ghost composer? By having a lot of your own work out there in public?
It was by chance, I wasn't looking for it. I was working as a community manager for a musician and I came up with the idea of suggesting co-composing something together, and ended up composing songs for her. If I wanted to reverse engineer it, I could start by proposing the same thing to every musician I know (or even reaching out to musicians I don't know through social media).
This looks more like pursuing Instagramming full time.
Instagram is the marketing channel but you still need to put in the work to have something to promote.
fiddling with printers and plotters isn't the hard part, most likely the marketing part is because anything sells if you find the fools.
The whole stick of this article strikes me as marketing in the first place.
I'm pretty sure you are severely understimating the amount of work that goes into quality art pieces, no matter the medium.
Also, thinking of customers as "fools" only makes sense if you believe you are selling/producing garbage. If what you make has value, then whoever buys it is no fool.
You're also underestimating the amount of great quality art that simply doesn't sell. Hence the power of marketing. And the art that sells for lots and lots of money is also marketing and financial gimmicks the art world does behind the scenes. Unfortunately it's not quality that matters, it's the notoriety of the artist. It goes back to marketing in circles.
Perhaps the same can be said of tech.
Oh, absolutely.
Maybe you're overestimating the amount of art in those art pieces!
If someone buys something voluntarily, it's because it holds value for that person, not because they're a fool. The key lies in the 'voluntarily'.
No need to be this jaded IMO. Dude is making art (FWIW, art I quite enjoy), and marketing it accordingly. Just saying he's "Instagramming full time" sounds like unnecessary aspersions - it's not like he's just making duck faces into the camera or showing random shit he bought, and he's not doing some lame "influencer" track. He's just marketing and selling stuff that he created. We should celebrate that, especially on a website like Hacker News.
> Just get started. Start selling in the real world
That's all nice, the problem is though that the market is in decline right now
There are billions of dollars floating around in the market, it's just a matter of knowing how to catch them
"robots known as pen plotters" is a nice marketing twist that I don't think I've heard before.
https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?class=4&cat=24
This is why I never really tried. I thought I could sell art but it's a grind and political. It seems like either you can work constantly to sell art to fund making art or half ass it at some corporate job, make a ton of money and make art?
Corporate jobs don't leave much time to really make art unless it's halfassed garbage.
Thanks I guess I've been making half assed garbage lol
Sorry friend. It's my fate as well.
People seem to make a decent living doing furry art commissions. Looks like far less grind than other kinds of art and also not corporate.
I saw a graph somewhere that vast majority of income from OnlyFans is earned by a small number of top performers. I assume that something similar happens in the furry community.
Not really. Onlyfans creators are selling the same content to lots of people, while furry artists are selling their time slots for custom art. The top artists can charge more for their time, but there is still a limit to how many pieces of work they can put out each week so the money is pretty well spread down to the less popular artists who are more readily available to take on work.
Yes, but there's also Patreon for people who are ready to financially support artists, while they don't want to buy commissions.
I wonder what the ratio between these two is
I dunno, the 500th commission of Bandit and Lucky’s Dad doing *censored* probably gets pretty tiresome as well.
Bruh I was just opening up my computer to apply for a CS masters to advance my career as a languages & humanities degree holder turned SE who always wanted to do art. Now I'm back to thinking I should try and work on art until it can take over my career.
It's sort of upsetting that doing something I'm bad at (SE) makes me more money than anything I'm good at. Feels like it traps me.
I went from art to software. I feel like software is the ultimate form of creative expression.
You can make art with code and make a living from it. Start looking at generative and algorithmic artists for some inspiration. Owning one of these pen plotters (look at the axidraw and next draw) helps too.
i'm also a humanities degree holder turned software engineer. i recently quit my job so i can work on my art. do it!!!!! my spirit is so much better. fuck computers.
Funny that "always be selling" is a core principle of his art. I would describe him more of a businessman than artist. Maybe designer. But an artist does not care about money. The art comes first. Buyers must wait.
I've been playing the piano and composing music for over a decade. Last year, I started getting paid as a ghost composer, and since then, I've been composing more songs per week on average than ever before in my life. I don't regret anything; I love everything I've composed for the person who hired me, and getting paid for it is an incredible bonus. It's almost like a dream come true that I never sought or aimed for. I also didn't feel any less of an artist for accepting payment for my work. I simply believe that we need to take some of the romanticism out of the notion that to be a true artist, you have to starve.
> “If you’re getting hate, that’s a good sign.” ...In the past, he used to engage with them...Now, he doesn’t get too involved.
Did he mean to say "passion" in this case? How is hate a "good" sign of engagement? If someone has an opinion and is willing to share it with me, I'd hope they could do it in a constructive way (but I wouldn't call that "hate", and this is the Internet he's talking about).
Imagine being surrounded by 100 people hurling insults at you, telling you you're no good and your product / service / art sucks. How is that a "good sign"?
Edit: Maybe the assumption is "For every hater, I find 10 people that _do_ like it", so the realization is that "I'm reaching people," and the underlying prayer is that "And hopefully, they're not _all_ haters."
I think the argument here is that hate (which is a subset of passion) is not the purely negative thing that we immediately think it is. Especially in art. When people _hate_ art the art has served its purpose. Art's intention (to paint with heinously broad strokes) is to create emotions and drive thoughts. That's a very different intention than a product/service and they shouldn't be compared in that sense.
But also:
> Afterall, it’s good for engagement and the Instagram algorithm.
Arts intention is whatever the artist makes it out to be. If an artist wants their work to be loved, not hated... Well then this doesn't really apply does it
Does the artist control that outcome, though? The clear communication of their art's intention? Whether their work is loved or hated?
If you're creating art because you enjoy doing it, and if you're performing / putting it on display because you think it has value and others might enjoy it too, then I can't think of any reaction other than love and encouragement (implicitly via purchasing or explicitly via encouragement) that would suffice in keeping one motivated to share it with others.
Now, amidst any hate I might ask myself "Did I do the absolute best according to my ability? Is there anything else I can improve?" From this perspective, hate is amazing as fuel because it's an effective way to eliminate your perceived faults (assuming you take it personally, which I'd wager most artists do).
Even if the artist wrote their own citation of a work saying "I intended it for it to be loved, and that's the only correct interpretation", it's still not correct if one subscribes, as I do, to the literary-focused "the death of the author('s authority)" once they release it. They really don't get a say how it's taken once someone else perceives it.
I think the parent's free use of 'hate' stands in for a conflict in emotion and interpretation this way, and less it being completely despised or loathed.
It’s the unrecognized but genius artist fallacy: many great artists were unknown and poor when they did their best work.
Therefore, since I am unknown and poor, I must be a great artist.
That’s not it at all. Almost all art is just quietly ignored. If people have strong feelings about your art then that’s a huge win.
Your edit is the goal, it's why content creators have a new influx in views after getting "canceled". People who forgot the youtuber existed before cancellation come back to see what's going on.
In this case, hate is attention that helps algorithms. It's why shortform media is usually inflammatory, you get more engagement out of it.
Hate and other powerful emotions are a good sign, they can promote you to people who don't hate you.
I think this is just a "content creator" realizing, but not admitting to themselves, that the algorithms that spread their content (that they're banking on to get paid) have "figured out" that humans' strong negative emotional reaction has a higher engagement potential than strong positive reactions, thus those who generate the most hate are those who get seen/paid the most.
If you’re selling a product or service promising objective utility for a user, maybe. Art is just...there, though. Maybe games can promise functionality that a consumer can expect to have working, but most mediums don’t.
Without objective functionality, “Haters” in an art context only have one thing to be vitriolic about - their own subjective aesthetic taste. Thus their words cannot contain anything of value to the artist.
In the movie biography of Tom Wolfe (RIP), his daughter tells of reading some of the vicious things people said about him, and asking him if this didn't bother him.
He said, "No, of course not. You're nobody 'til somebody hates you."
So if you despised them first and said something that touched them that deeply, I could see considering that a success.
It's what artists do to lie to themselves so their entire life doesn't seem like a waste of time. I went from music to tech. Art is full of completely delusional hacks.
I assure you that your life in tech, waging for a boss, is a waste of time.
Nah, steady paycheck, health insurance, don't need roommates, can afford the nicer things in life. Gigging and touring is fun in your 20s, but starts to drain you. This is much better.
I mean, that does sound like something someone who switched from music to tech would say, but it’s also a little true.
I made a career out of it and made it to regional status. If you want to pay your bills, you need to hit national level or teach music. It's a fucking grind and you naturally age out.
I've been watching one of my friends keep on pushing at the grind and it looks super gruelling, he's been drifting from programming to running the mixer board at a lot of local shows and it's impossible to hook up with him to hang out any more. I dunno how he does it.
Hey good job man.
Tech is also full of delusional hacks. You find them everywhere. Delusional hack artists are more fun.
I'd rather hang with people that have a rudimentary idea of logic than talk about karma, auras, moon phases, vibrations, and energy. It seems to come from a good place but it's fucking exhausting.
You and I know very different artists. "Logical" people have their woo, too.
I’ve known a couple guys who’ve done this. In 18 months both were back to work as full time programmers.
Talk about failing upwards
What sort of Engineer? I am guessing a mechanical engineer?
Live the dream, and create something beautiful.
Some retire early =)
Hell yeah
Congrats on following your passion. The Universe will reward you ( one way or another )
just curious, with 245K followers on Insta.. how many units/month are you selling?
With AI hitting Art, and the Engineering Job Market right now, is it a toss which is the worse choice?
Art has been a poor career choice for a long time before the current state of AI
Not if you're truly into marketing and art is a second thought. Most 'artists' of this type sell copies because that easy money. But if you're not good with marketing you end up stockpiling copies of your art that nobody wants.
Ai isn't making paintings, taking photographs, sculpting or making things.
Ai does a very narrow part of what art is.
It can enhance it though. I can draw my own painting ask my local ai to fill in the gaps or to upscale it a bit etc. Is the art part gone then?
Regardless of AI, isn’t it equally hard to start a business (no matter how small)? OP made it (it seems), but chances are against one. I think this applies now, 10 years ago and will apply 10 years from now.
We only see posts of the successful ones, though.
AI is hitting engineering now too, no? (Sure in small ways now, but I imagine it would be one of the first targets considering it is engineers doing it)
Since covid I left tech and have been working at ayahuasca retreat centers (assisting and managing) and apprenticing. Frankly I can't imagine a career less at risk to AI replacement!
Maybe someone should start a job board for AI-proof gigs.
Who do you think is going to pay for the retreats when all the high paying white collar jobs are gone? the economy will collapse which inevitably will affect you regardless of your job
The majority of our clientele don't really fit that demographic, our prices are pretty reasonable and we probably could lower them further. I don't think we'd be terribly affected unless something catastrophic happens.