If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that's not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There's no way that other thing makes sense.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15205399

Really cool blog post with beautiful photos and starts with a fun and interesting intro, here captured in an image for the the tl;dr but-want-to-comment-anyway among you :

  • @[email protected]English
    7•7 months ago

    To me it feels like people romanticising their hobbies/escape activities. If they started doing it as work soon enough they would have lots of pain points and stress. Sure you don’t have CVEs or libraries to update but the deadline for that chair or cabinet you were commissioned is coming and you can’t just get the damn thing right. At the same time you have another customer complaining that you need to check some other stuff you’ve made that isn’t working right … see where I’m going?

    I know a lot of people in the trades and they have very similar or analogous pain points as me in software.

    Doing it as a hobby though? It’s amazing. I don’t really need a car anymore but I’ve been learning how to fix mine and it has been great

    • BalderEnglish
      4•7 months ago

      Not counting the “projects patterns” that would be invented because some manager thinks it’ll be cheaper and machines taking the fun part, leaving you to do the boring or frustrating part.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•7 months ago

      In IT sometimes you open an old project and wonder who the fuck wrote this shit.

      As a contractor you tear down a wall and discover the house wasn’t built as you expected, and wonder who the fuck built it this way.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•7 months ago

      Nah I do biology as a hobby and also for work, it’s great. There are the usual trappings of work, but I’ve had jobs I’m not passionate about and it’s definitely worse lol. I feel like what you’re saying is a cope people say when they don’t follow their passions.

    • @[email protected]English
      0•7 months ago

      I have another impression about romanticizing trades: there’s a deep anti-intellectualism and an exaltation of not having to think. For me that idea is pure hell.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•7 months ago

        You think people in trades don’t think at work? This is actually just classism or something idk. You really don’t think electricians, contractors, plumbers etc aren’t problem solving on the daily? We’re not talking about working on a factory line.

        • @[email protected]English
          -1•7 months ago

          You really don’t think electricians, contractors, plumbers etc aren’t problem solving on the daily?

          General problem solving, probably. Deep thinking? Nah.

          And besides, I doubt most electricians need to apply Kirchhoff’s Law on a daily basis.