It does not surprise me that these guys are writers. This reads very much like a project intended to produce a content product as much as a cabin. It's romantic and they have plenty of meticulously framed videos and photos. Maybe they did some youtube videos with dramatic moments -- maybe even the moment they open the piece with -- anger, violence, frustration boiling over. But now they are taking woodworking courses. I'm sure we'll see plenty of content about their experience.
YouTube has upped its recommendations for this kind of stuff in the last few months. Everything is van life, off-grid, travel, tiny home building, etc. It's really curious and I'm not sure what to think about it. Everything is about being a creator and getting an audience for your YouTube, Substack, Patreon, etc. I'm pretty conflicted over this.
YouTube's recommendations may be more a reflection of your watch history than a shift in content or a change in the algorithm. I have not seen any van life, off-grid, or tiny home videos on YouTube.
I carefully curate my youtube viewing by using lots of incognito windows to view things I don't want showing up in my recommendations. All it takes is one errant click to throw the whole thing off. Oh why did I not incognito that terrible comedian?
I've noticed that watching literally part of one video will cause youtube to recommend a lot more of that category of content.
For one recent example, there was an article about Elon Musk and his girlfriend who releases music as Grimes. I clicked play on one of the embedded music videos and watched about half of it. Ever since then youtube has recommended tons of Grimes videos to me.
I've also noticed that videos my wife or kids watch get recommended to me sometimes.
Just open an incognito and count the van-life videos. Zero. It's all popular lowest-common denominator videos until you start clicking and teaching Youtube about your preferences.
My work and home gmail accounts get completely different videos because of how I use them. At work it's all background music and albums and at home it's more fun stuff.
There's nothing left to worship, so you're seeing a confluence of 2 forms of modern worship: a return to nature / primitive living (where we can imagine away the distractions of modern living), and worship of the self / fame, where we create these myths of ourselves and tell that story / get a bunch of people to be interested. I suspect neither one is very fulfilling, but I understand the impulse (especially the first one).
“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, by the seashore, in the mountains; and you too are wont to desire such things very much. But this is a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you choose to retire within yourself.”
Marcus Aurelius, ~1800 years ago
Well my youtube recommendations have certainly gone that way too, but I think it is a reflection of my growing hatred for IT as an industry and my desire to leave it behind forever.
If I may add something: I became dissatisfied with "IT as an industry" in the sense that, despite where I was working (a tiny shop, with tiny projects, flyover state, nothing is ever going to go viral or hit big), some people were apparently prepping for FAANG careers and generally trying to turn things into some Agile megashop with dozens of layers of technology, on and on, for some rinky-dink projects. I liked doing the rinky-dink projects but all of the overhead of play-acting like we needed to scale like Cloudflare was wearying.
I took up with some TechShop stuff -- before it folded -- and enjoyed my work on laser engravers, and the CNC machines, and the lathes, and whatnot. My educational background and IT experience were certainly a help, and I thought, "Dang, it sure is nice to construct a physical object at the end of the day instead of an arrangement of magnetic fields that will simply be blown away when some high muckety-muck notices whatever fad has changed."
I jumped ship for something adjacent where I use my IT skill constantly. Programming wasn't in the job description, but my ability to program brings a certain level of power. All of my decades of IT experience is very helpful here and I still feel like I am doing something with an actual concrete output and utility.
So, I sympathize with the urge to pull the ripcord on some kind of jetpack and blast far away into the sky, but there are plenty of places that are not what HackerNews thinks of when they think IT that need all of your skills. Perhaps I like being a medium-sized fish in a smaller pond, it could be that, but it does feel fairly nice.
Can you tell me a little more about this? I'm enjoying my current job as a coder, but I'm also feeling a hankering for something like what you describe. Feeling like I'm producing something a little more tangible would be nice.
I work performing a lot of GIS (geospatial information systems) work for emergency services. Sometimes, I produce maps. Sometimes, someone wants to know where they ought to locate a five million dollar building for maximum results.
My computing interests lie in automating tasks previously performed by humans, ETL, and analysis. I was doing web stuff back in the 1990s and went through so very many CRUD apps, but this is where my interests lie. What this means in my current job is that I find time-consuming tasks done by my predecessor and say, "Let's make this faster." Or I can look for subtle errors.
Just as an example, because I am routing emergency services to houses and workplaces, I have a network of streets to deal with. Imagine them as a graph, where most of the data is attached to the edge rather than the node. Now, people have drawn these streets in using tools like ArcMap, but there can be problems. How many different kinds of mistakes might exist in connecting roads together? Try to enumerate the cases.
I have found ten thus far. Each case is something that, if a human eyeballs it up close, they could say "oh yes," but it is not readily apparent. And so I have written code for a number of these cases that takes my human domain expertise of what is wrong with something and translates it into something even a rock (silicon) can understand. And the end result of finding these little mistakes is very real: help gets to someone just a few seconds faster.
I interface with organizations that are not other IT organizations: property records, postal records, phone records, and so on. Sometimes this means wrangling proposed plats from developers. It's all real stuff, and it's all done in service of helping people who have immediate needs.
It's very different from being in a room full of people who have little stickers on their Macs making Agile noises about whatever random shifts have occurred in the "client??" (and doesn't that word encompass a multitude of sins)'s latest wishlist.
Great post, thanks for writing this up. I'm relatively new to the industry and have already been feeling annoyance/fatigue at the IT/agile "culture" (experienced at a failing startup and now at a large corporation) My fiancé and I are hoping to move out of the city before long, and I hope to find something as interesting and unique as what you're doing. Feeling inspired and hopeful that I can find a job that uses programming/technology but isn't a "tech job."
I got my startup failure story out of the way in 2000, so I am lucky there. But yes, Agile has some fatigue for some who are tired of the faddishness. Some people find it invigorating, and more power to them.
My guess is that tons of these kinds of jobs are out there because the real world still exists and the people in it are often using computers, but perhaps not as "centrally" to their jobs. However, people like you and I can provide options to them that they did not have before, and sometimes may not have even envisioned. Just as a case in point, this new place was setting up some machines and had a few tedious configuration problems, so I used batch files and a few more things to save them time and add reproducible results. They were shocked but this was stuff for me where I had to dust off things I had forgotten a decade prior.
In my previous job, I found areas of satisfaction as I noticed above, and they were all tied to people (not users), to physical objects (rather than instatiations of some class), and so on. I noticed how much churn there was, how often things would have to be redone not because anything realistic demanded it, but because of style, or some kind of platform migration, or something else End-of-Lifed, and so on. Indeed, constant platform migration made me realize that nomads are not known for their lasting works of architecture.
Can I ask one more question: how did you make the move? And did you have a quantitative education? I know everyone's path is different, but I'm curious how you found your current role once you decided to get out of IT proper.
My education, as such, was pretty hit or miss. I got a BSc in the hard sciences, but had enough electives open due to other circumstances that I went a little wild, did more comp sci and math than were strictly required, tried some science classes unrelated to my degree for giggles.
I was part of that big "brain drain" where someone says, "Hey, you are good with computers, right?" and off I went. I had figured out that the sciences would be long and without a lot of payoff, so I did not look back too hard.
I suppose I got a reputation as someone who gets a far-off look when an interesting problem is described and was asked to apply to my current job because of it, despite it being a different sector and problem set.
I feel the same way. If i am going to continue in this business it's going to be "very freelance", "very on my own terms" whatever that means.
I am in my thirties, and a career shift seems more and more inevitable. I seem to have swallowed several blackpills about various industrial complexes and see no bright future of the internet/tech in general, rather the opposite.
What's your age and what is you plan? I am actively looking for some kind of path at the moment for ex-tech people..
I'm 36, and I have less of a plan than a daydream of financial suicide at this point. I just want to finish fixing up my house, sell it, and live in a van or something with my dog, some bikes, and maybe some low power computing kit for rainy days (maybe build that desktop operating environment that doesn't suck that I've dreamed of building for years now).
I have no plan for making money, and I doubt I have enough stored wealth to last more than a decade. Health care in the US being what it is, probably not even that long. These are so far the only reasons I haven't already done it.
I've had one specific dream for 4 years and although I did nothing to get closer to it I've never forgotten it. I used to do some lazy things that fooled me into believing I have made progress. Instead I decided to just get the necessary skills now. I've spent 2 years "reading up" on electronics. I've learned more in the past two weeks than in those two years.
Of course just having the right skills isn't the same as achieving the dream. I still have to put in "the work" after I paid the entry fee.
Go into government and use your expertise to ensure vendors aren’t misleading the government about capabilities, that contracts have the right technical provisions to benefit the people, orgs aren’t employing nefarious technologies, ensuring they are using good methodology to track data, etc. IMO just being a person who can bring up the concerns makes a huge difference and eventually you’ll be able to move into a more policy focused realm.
I've worked in public sector, they don't care. The same people who make decisions based on golf-course handshakes and frat membership in private sector also do it in public sector, only there's extra political pressures to deal with too.
I don't know that they're doing this to create content - it seems more like they're creating content out of what they're doing in an effort to fund what they want to do anyway, and maybe get some social status as well, since they're draining their bank accounts anyway.
seriously though, i’m glad they were able to tie their profession in by sharing their story, i really enjoyed it. if i were to embark on this kind of thing i’d probably end up writing some software to help with the effort.
Seems so as well but I have to admit, it's an awful lot of effort just to gain a source of content. Realistically, it's more likely that these are just creative people who followed the trend (which they freely note in the piece) and decided to go off-grid in a way.
I've also noticed a lot more ads those types of programs. I'm wondering if the bad economy has made adds on youtube more affordable and get rich quick programs more attractive.
YouTube has upped its recommendations for this kind of stuff in the last few months. Everything is van life, off-grid, travel, tiny home building, etc. It's really curious and I'm not sure what to think about it. Everything is about being a creator and getting an audience for your YouTube, Substack, Patreon, etc. I'm pretty conflicted over this.