I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline

I just retired after 40 years writing code.

The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted.

For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired.

I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.

Is that AI? Or is it me?

Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I don’t miss tech.

Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)

For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care?

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.

Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years.

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

Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.

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.

Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!

I overlapped a bit with Chad in 2015, as he was navigating a professional transition. I wasn't in an especially high role back then- just a guy in the back of the room.

In the times I saw him since, I consistently saw someone who thought hard every day about how to help others, and didn't lose sight of the human element. Sentry worked hard to create a viable business, without losing sight of open source goals. (you can see some of his efforts at https://blog.sentry.io/authors/chad-whitacre/ )

I tell my younger colleagues to do the best work they can sustainably do... but too often in this field, the big roles become too intense to be sustained forever. I hope his new role shows him the same warmth and support that he tried to put out there for others.

This resonates with me as well. For more reasons than one: with the rise of AI (Mythos is but a pale forerunner) digital security — and by extension, digital privacy — has ceased to exist. The bomber will always win. The only way to win is not to play.

Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intuition led me down the right road at the right time. Always trust your gut.

I got into teaching several years ago, leaving industry behind. It's great! I had gotten a little bit tired of programming other people's stuff. It wasn't the programming itself that was dull, but I found most products that people wanted were actually kind of boring and formulaic. And none of them really worked for the betterment of humanity.

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.

Chad is one of the kindest souls I've ever met. Good luck off the grid!

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

thank you for this. what a sacred journey you're embarking on. i hope to follow you - talking with a close friend now about becoming an elevator mechanic. my wife is pregnant so i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand. i think the world you envision is possible, and closer.

It is amusing and depressing to see so many people exit tech. I remember this happened in similar “vibes/strides around 08 and then for Covid, which ironically doubled down on remote work. And now for AI.

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.

I was about to comment something like "happy for OP, he's very fortunate to have enough to be able to simply retire" when I read the bit about Home Depot.

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

The ideal career path

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

This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him.

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."

I think we're going to see a ton of this in the coming years. A return to the 60s/70s when people were going off the grid, moving to a farm, or just disconnecting

I retired to the country, where any friends are 50 miles away, and most don't even reply to emails and messages.

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.

Fair play to the chap, it was refreshing to read a scan of a letter typed from a typewriter.

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

I'll never give up tech. It's a passion I've had since childhood, and a large part of what keeps me going in society is seeing the lights of the eyes brighten when someone discovers something new with technology that genuinely makes their life that much better than it was a moment ago. Not merely the flame of some dopamine hit of something shiny, but that genuine, "Thank you for helping me save an hour of my time/cross this chore off my list forever/give me back time, to live my life" sense.

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.

While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.

did Chad, or whoever posted this for him, post this as a jpg with no alt text? wow, thought Chad was a bit better than that (I can't even read this thing easily and im not considered to be visually impaired)

"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"

yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.

I love my current job, but also part of me thinks a Garbage Man would provide a cool experience. (I'm ok with the stinkiness). I just think about careening through the city at the crack of dawn, exploring every nook of my city. That or group fitness instructor.

I dream of being the Zamboni driver for my town's arena. I have a plan I'm successfully executing to get to be that before I'm 50.

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

If this is viral marketing for a typewriter company, it's genius.

Software dev is so much infested with mediocre people who follow any line dictated by management and politics and force others to do it.

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.

Echoes of _The Soul of a New Machine_

>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.

While I share the sentiment, this feels like an extreme, nuclear reaction which might be irreversible. I understand the fatigue, and resentment, but if you are about to be a family, you are going to find that typewriters aren't the acceptable mode of communication nowadays, and that you need some money to raise children.

Even if you are already wealthy and don't actually need to work anymore, going off the grid completely is still the wrong move. There's a lot of ways to spend less time online, improve your privacy and reduce tracking.

Been thinking the same lately…

> 1980. Neo-Amish.

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

Lol, had to tell the internet on his way out huh. He'll be back of course as he clearly values the internet and makes it part of his ego.

i got 9.5 years. 9.5 years and then I'm finally climbing off the stage, picking up my tips, and my dancing days are over. i'm counting it down.

I've been smartphone free for over 5 years now. It's been liberating, but its just not enough. I still use my computer to doomscroll for an hour or 2 a day. It takes me hours of hiking alone in the woods afterwards too unwind all the stress and distraction that comes with being connected.

Ironically right around February I started to have similar thoughts as Chad, that perhaps I should become Neo Amish as he calls it. Like Chad, I like disconnected, non-AI technology just fine. But anything that spies on me or tries to modify my behavior needs to go.

Maybe I'll mail Chad a letter and see if he wants to be my penpal.

I think about this a lot but I also kind of feel like I'll never truly be able to retire in a way that matters.

I am very fatigued by tech and AI too.

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.

Am I the only person in this thread who thought this might be a joke? The job at Home Depot in particular, and this bit:

> 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.

Update: more evidence in-favor of "not a joke" is this older video from Chad's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc

I wish I could do the same.

I wish I could retire...

This is a great choice

wait home depot is hiring??

I am clearly in the minority in these parts.

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.

Then they came for the programmers but there were no one to come for because they all have taken up farming.

Even good ideas can be ridiculous if you take it 100% radically literal.

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

Very nice performative piece.

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.

Legend

Must be nice.

This isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure.

I'm curious about one thing thouhg:

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.

Good luck with what you're doing. It feels like everyone's shipping more but thinking less and with open source you really feel it with the PRs and issues. All the best!