I've not a new 'retirement' plan to voluntarily be stuck in the '80s.

> I haven't used a phone or the Internet in my personal life since February 6. To communicate, I use the USPS, or maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat. I love it. I want to be part of a society of people likewise inclined.

I'm not at all certain though. Chad posted it on LinkedIn and Bluesky, so if it is a joke he's definitely committing to the bit.

Here's Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, the person Chad names as taking over the Open Source Pledge, posting about it - https://bsky.app/profile/vlad.website/post/3mmw3jigagk2q - which makes it seem more real.

Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.

I find it intellectually alarming (but not surprising) that someone would say something like "[the north sentinelese tribe] are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday".

"way of life" is doing a lot of obscuring here.

It took centuries of hard work to leave that behind.

The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it.

AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.

Or profession is very young and what annoys me the most: i can do my job only on a computer and i'm very good in knowing how to use it and i also use it for everything.

Privat and work has merged into being in front of a screen.

The joke of starting a bakery or doing other manual labor jobs is quite common.

It might just be time for this to transform.

I would retire yesterday if i could afford it though.

I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.

He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it.

Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still make a huge impact. Either way I respect his decision and hope he finds peace offline. TBH I’m a little jealous.

I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a year or two being frugal. After that it’s anyone’s guess, but I am beyond excited not having to program for a living any more, just on what feels meaningful, in complete autonomy.

Projects lined up: a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, a series of small games that I have been itching to work on, then, of course, the lifelong project of living in a rural house. Stretch goal if I win the lottery: build a solar farm.

Maybe I will be so lucky never to have had to use LLMs in my work. You guys have fun without me. :-P

I would (genuinely) be interested in a follow up on how that works out for them. I've "threatened" to do this many times, but my partner points out that if I thought tech management was full of BS, wait until I am getting ordered about by retail industry management while working the shop floor, dead on my feet, penalised for taking too long a toilet break. I think reality could come down hard here.

Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.

Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside because he doesn't have a robot bodyguard. His UBI would have paid him to stay inside and stare at the wall, but he won't sign up for that cause it requires a smartphone and an identity implant. Probably wind up homeless with a handwritten sign, "Destroy All Clankers! Anything (without an embedded microchip) helps."

Teaching is a massive challenge. The stuff that I teach in computer science I find to be relatively easy after 20 years in industry, but figuring out how to teach it effectively? That's really, really difficult. Such a great challenge to be able to sink my teeth into—so rewarding. And it's for a good cause.

I'm not opposed to going back to industry work. I'd probably use genAI to get a bunch to get stuff done, too, even though I don't use it for my personal projects. But it would have to be some work that I believed in, that was doing some good in the world. I can imagine working for the county, say, or for a non-profit.

It really paints a projection on how much time we all really have in this world and this segment of work.

At best I wonder, do “I” have another 10 - 15 years left in tech?

Do you?

Agreed with the other comments on financial freedom. It does feel that tech is one of the last bastions remaining where you can really solidify being an autodidact to have an exit of your choosing.

Also, how did he post this if he isn't using the Internet?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1jgcfx9/pe...

<joke> I just hope he doesn't start mailing packages to people in the tech industry in the next few years.</joke>

I still want to utilize some free wikis and such to help share ideas.

There are simple things that can improve life for people, especially seniors, that are very low tech, and that's the rub.

Low tech things mean taking action, getting away from the screen, where SO WE THINK, magic happens when we create some new fantabulous code gizmo.

Maybe just bringing a pizza to someone, inventing some gadget to read invisible labels and expiry dates on food, or making an exoskeleton for someone with back pain will do more good than some AI that writes exciting posts on social media, or better, counters some other AI that is coming for your money and creative mind.

We are all overthinking everything, when simple, human problems are neglected in some race to an unknown "endpoint" that is illusory and ever-moving.

The fact so many of us are burning out so hard, so fast, so thoroughly despite tech being a passion genuinely worries me. These are otherwise brilliant people, well-read, modest intellectuals that are just sick of this anti-human society we've built, with the constant braying by Capitalist and Industrialist leaders that this thing is necessary or you will be left behind, in lieu of natural discovery and adoption and integration into our lives. We bought into it initially and for so long, even as time after time after time it proved to be empty, or shallow, or vapid, or hollow. Never life-changing, never society-changing, always enriching those with far too much by taking from those with far too little.

I wish the OP well. I think we all need more offline time, if just to remind ourselves what the role of technology was always meant to be within it.

The hardest part will be beating all the competition for the job.

Find something outside of your "work domain" space. I like to bike and made a conscious decision to not have "e-stuff" on my bikes... just mechanicals. I mean the thought of having to do a firmware update for a derailleur or shifter is rage-inducing to me. Or having to worry about the security of wireless communication being hijacked... gahh.

If CEOs were smart, they'd use the AI craze to identify the AI boosters and then fire them all. This will increase productivity and save them way more money than a Clown Code subscription.

>I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

If memory serves, the note left by a burnt-out engineer on their workstation when they left abruptly.

I do find occasional pleasure in personal projects, creating exotic programming languages that are not text-based, compilers and stuff like that, but otherwise coding work makes me wanna puke.

My previous employer (which I also joined as a startup) ended up in a situation where the head product manager became VP of engineering (it's a complicated story - don't ask). We also had a yes-man director of Eng and together they went all-in on very orthodox scrum, where they sat in the sprint planning/point meeting and overrode every decision of what to take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.

I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.

Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.

If u lost your job already, u didn't choosingly give up a stable(don't know u, so guessing) job as the other person alludes (don't know their situation so people guessing here).

So if u had a stable good paying job, giving it up to start something new while having a new kid can be very hard .. but doable. Still I'll advised.

If u lost your job, based on job market, career switch makes total sense as you need to help provide and a career switch may provide a better or stable opp.

Many people have successful home life/family life with no financial stability or even a job altogether...

If the tech salary is more than the trade salary, every year you hold on is more runway for the eventual transition. Even if it takes you longer to get into the new thing because you were slow jumping ship, the extra runway might cover the difference.

Obviously I've had similar thoughts to the ones you're having. But this is a pretty cushy gig and I don't think leaving it before they make me is the right decision.

There is lots of stable software work outside of SaaS. Not exciting but reliable and pays decently. That's what might take priority when you start a family.