The AI-related bullshit definitely sucks the fun out of programming, but carpenters still have to deal with customers…
Programmers still have customers - you just work for the same company as they do most of the time ;-;
Exactly, becoming a carpenter still retains one major issue with the programming profession. Several programmers I know even have to deal directly with the company’s customers (though they tend to complain more about their own management).
I’m going into plumbing. I’m done with this shit.
Shit is my shit now, and it’s much nicer.
I know I specifically asked for a chair, and the chair you made is a very good chair, but my use case is actually reaching things in high places and this just doesn’t get to the top shelves so you’re gonna need to make the legs longer, I think.
Tree trimming, welding, and camper van conversions for me, when it becomes necessary
My senior always jokes about opening a food truck. One day they’re gonna push us hard enough that we’ll do it, too.
The difference between IT and important jobs, is that I get to drink on the clock in IT. In fact it’s mandated.
At my old job, the IT department had a kombucha tap right at the end of their counter. I always wondered if they considered swapping the kombucha keg out for something stronger.
My first tech job had a beer fridge and a guy who filled it that we all called the Beer Captain.
I swear I must be the only sucker that hasn’t encountered one of these freely drinking tech companies.
It’s not just tech companies lol. It’s funny, the place we would have meetings–when it was a lot of people–was 50% off for the company. It was a nice cantina. Let’s just say my beer mug was a jug and I didn’t have to pay for it lol. >_> one time I was the designated driver sigh. Good thing it was a minute drive and then we would all drink more at the bosses house. Even when I worked in education, no one gave me shit coming in smelling of booze; one day I had to call off after reading my students file. No one blamed me for getting shitfaced after reading that.
You’re not the only one, I’ve been with quite a few startups and before that I worked with VC’s to help get new portfolio companies rolling with IT. Never have a seen it, I’ve only heard of it.
It’s probably for the best, I predict I’d either drink too much or complain that they only buy crappy beer :)
Did you ever try it? Or is kombutcha just what they wrote on the label?
I did try it. If it was beer, it was the weakest, fruitiest beer I’ve ever tried.
Was that some sort of kombucha-flavoured soft drink? Actual kombucha drink tastes only like vinegar. (I drank it for maybe a year in a health-crazed period ~20 years ago xD)
There’s some kombucha that tastes quite fruity and sweet. Actually in that city there was a kombucha company that made a really delicious grape kombucha.
thanks, TIL :)
I’m in biotech and my wife and I keep talking about quitting our jobs and opening a meadery.
Intriguing!
Probably more as a small scale personal project than a business venture (the bureaucracy around food-production would kill me) for me though.
Do you make it already on your free time? Can it be made without honey?
Wouldn’t be mead without honey.
Mead-ish? Meadly?
Ha! Only 2 questions in and you are already in “you won’t believe it is butter” territory.
Haha unfortunately it comes with the territory when refusing animal products but still wanting to eat similar to everyone else - I CAN have my cake and eat it too, kinda (with soy cream).
I’ll slogan my homebrewed syrup-beer: “you won’t believe it’s mead! (it’s not)”.
Honestly, while I love eating butter, I’d rather not look for similar looking replacements.
I can very well go with peanut/coconut oil (for cooking) and blended peanut for spreading, instead of using randomly processed industrial idk-what-oil based stuff that was originally developed with the intent to reduce costs to companies and then half-heartedly attempted to cater to those who care about nutrition, with a whole fake health campaign to make it work.Forget that, I’d rather just eat it with water.
There are plenty of good substitution products available nowadays - even found one not-butter tasty enough to make my whole family switch to it, until it went out of production… probably as well for our arteries. But I’ve yet to find a good replacement cheese though, so I’d rather go without.
Our area is filled with local breweries, so I think a meadery as a local business would work.
We do! We’ve been doing ~1 gallon batches which gives us 5 or 6 bottles of finished product. We’ve been buying honey from the big box grocers but I want to switch to buying from a local beekeeper.
I’ve never tried using not honey, do you mean like Agave nectar or similar?
If you make alcohol out of agave, you’re just making tequila at that point
Youd still have to distill it to get tequila. I am kinda interested in trying a fermented agave batch now.
True! I’m sure there’s a word for agave “beer.” (or would it be a wine?)
If any of the small time beekeepers I’ve met are anything to go by, they’ll be happy to make a deal where you take some of their honey to make mead with, a portion of which they’d sell.
Maybe even a beekeeper who also could retail your mead, if they already have store space and customers and an assortment of honey-related products…!
Yeah, I don’t eat honey so haven’t even thought about mead in a decade, but the one time I had it, it was delicious! I suppose the market of buyers with allergies or dietary restrictions against honey is too small, but I wonder if it could be possible for home use (where no one cares that it’s not “real mead”).
Depending on where you are, selling booze is a massive financial undertaking. In the US, you better have 6 figures hanging around to blow. And years to wait.
Where I live you can sell like small batches of self-produced stuff (like a bottle or two after a tour or tasting), so it’s not very expensive to get such a permit, but too much paper work for my taste.
The little bit of looking into it that we’ve done, we know anything sold must be produced in a commercial kitchen, and that would be a big expense because real estate around here is ridiculous. It’s really a pipe dream at this point but gives some hope to hang onto that there is something else out there for us.
Fun mead fact: The word “mead” descends from the Proto-Indo-European word for honey.
I’d have to call it Sirop (sugared drink) or something… Maybe “sugar meadley” or “agave meadley”!
Agave makes the basis for tequila, before distillation.
But if it’s just sugar water and yeast, it will be a bit gross.
In my foggy memory, mead tasted like very sweet beer, so I assumed some grain would be involved, but perhaps not.
If the flavour comes only from honey (and the process), it’ll probably be a lot harder to imitate.
Raw honey has a lot of flavor. And beer has barley and hops for flavor.
Also the yeast contributes a lot. There are so many varieties of yeast.
But the problem with pure sugar is that it’s one dimensional. The yeast go into overdrive and starts spitting out off flavors.
pure sugar is that it’s one dimensional
are we talking like, the white granulated shit? because we gave processed sugarcane and sugar beets to the cows as treats. also stole a little for ourselves (it still had plenty of sugar in the cane and beet after they’d extracted the sugar juice somehow. i don’t know how you juice a cane. then they sold it to us. don’t ask me how it works, i was a kid and this is what i was told) and they tasted great. i think it’s that we had the plant the sugar came from rather than just the sugar. the plant gave the sugar flavor depth. think how brown sugar (sugar without the molasses extracted) has a different flavor than white sugar.
i’d still call the cane or the beet “pure sugar”, since that’s what they made the white granulated shit out of. that’s me tho, and the contexts i’d be using it in pure would mean more natural/unmodified/untainted than homogenous.
I spent a few years bouncing between the ideas of opening a coffee shop, and ice cream shop, or a fruit stand.
the most important bit is we have a small stage for live music and open mic nights.
and of course i ended up making custom musical instruments for a living instead of any of that.
Oh cool, it sounds like you were able to boil it down to what you really wanted to do.
drive my wife batty? yeah
My dad went from db management to running a grocery store.
My one friend is now becoming an HVAC technician
From database management to people management!
We’re getting more analog every day
I did this, except I actually have better pay and benefits than I did working in tech (I was a low paid web developer, now I am a highly paid finish carpenter). I was just warning my coworkers today to get ready for the wave of ex-programmers hitting the trades.
raises hand
Construction is nice. We mostly demolish things. It’s good exercise, fun, and keeps the demons at bay.
You were really getting shafted as a web developer and likely could’ve made a lot more… But on the other hand I’m glad you found something you like more. I still prefer programming, with or without AI assistance, to just about any other work I could do. I have a gig where I generally get to solve slightly different problems every day (very wide domain) and I have no idea what other job could provide this without being in danger from LLMs.
I know a few carpenters of the self-employed variety and I gather it can be a very rewarding job if you’re into it. I could never, I need more stimulation for my ADHD, I need to be able to do a week worth of work in 2 hours when things are overdue, it doesn’t really work in carpentry lol
You were really getting shafted as a web developer and likely could’ve made a lot more
I don’t think you know how much experienced finish carpenters get paid.
I’ve always done both - software for a living, woodworking for fun and improving my family’s life. For me both are great creative outlets.
i once took over a consultancy gig at a high-tech optical lab. when me and the guy i was replacing were leaving on the last day of the handover i asked just conversationally where he was going next, and he told me he was going back to school to be a painter. guy was in his mid-50s.
Like fine art or like, tradecraft painter? Haha
i think the former but the latter would probably make more sense.
I’m currently going down the software engineer to woodworker pipeline…
I can count the number of people I know who have done that on two hands… Three people.
Me too! I wonder how common it actually is?
There is just something so very satisfying about making something you can physically touch and hold after spending a lot of time …not… doing that
Same here, went into finish carpentry, and timber framing. I may return one day to code if the opportunity allows, but this isn’t too bad actually.
Not me, I’d totally suck at it. I am leaning towards becoming a gardener specializing in super hot peppers.
My DBA friend builds a lot of sets for school productions and community theatre. It’s only a matter of time…
I was a programmer for 25-some years but I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I now get my engineering jollies from the used school bus I converted to a motorhome and from the house I bought three years ago and am finishing up renovating. For money I drive a school bus, which pays about 1/6 of what I used to make but is infinitely more satisfying. As far as retirement goes, I’m hoping to die a painless death before AI replaces all the CDL jobs in the country. I think AI will work fine for school buses, mainly because kids are easier to replace the younger they are.
Ok, I had to reply because this runs parallel to my own retirement plans. What’s the easiest path to a CDL? What’s the cost and length of time instruction to actual licensure? Any caveats or roadblocks (pun not intended, but I’m not editing it out).
I know I can look this up on different school websites, but I wanted to get a first hand accounting of the process. My currently ill-defined goal is to be a bus driver for the local transit company (rural). Some F550 with a bus body, and some actual buses.
Do you have a Class B or C? Passenger endorsement, I’m guessing, too. Would it be wise to get a class B just in case I needed to pivot to driving something else, like a commercial dump truck for construction?
Sorry, lots of questions, I know.
Some school districts will train you for the CDL, and some even pay you while you’re training (mine didn’t at the time). My training didn’t take very long because I already owned a used school bus and knew how to drive it, at least. You have to take four standardized tests (general CDL, airbrakes, passenger endorsement and school bus endorsement), have a driving exam, and take a 14-hour special school bus class (this is all in PA, at least). The standardized tests aren’t super-difficult, but you do have to actually know the shit, you can’t guess your way through it and hope to get a passing grade. I just crammed the free online tests over and over until I was getting 100% on them. I think it was maybe a month and a half between when I started my training and my first day on the job, but that was with not doing a whole lot each day. My district was (and still is) a weird combination of desperate need for drivers with a frustratingly slow pace of actually training people.
I have a class C. I wouldn’t bother with a class B unless I actually needed it.
Literally me soon because of AI
Same with the neofetch dev, saw all this AI crap coming and just jumped into farming
I read “DBMS” as “DSBM” at first.
I need to get out more.
I read it as BDSM… Not sure what I should do…
Get in more
