Cottagecore Programmers

Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some point. Often, the sentiment is accompanied by a general dissatisfaction with the impact of the speaker’s work or profession. Maybe someone just got a particularly mind-numbing feature request, or spent several weeks arguing in meetings about several pixels of padding for text on a button on a support page in a single app. One of the first examples that got me to notice this ongoing trend was back around the end of 2020, when a number of my friends shared and commented on a hackernews thread about someone who had responded to a request to add an RSS feed to a DBMS with the news that he had quit programming and switched to carpentry, in a particularly pithy manner (as an asi ... Read full article.