alt Hacker NewsFunny, 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
Replies
Nothing like retiring with only 3 years worth of savings and no plan on what to do after that.
Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless.
I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.
> last me a year or two being frugal
Word of advice.
Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal.
The two years are going to fly by.
EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.