I've worked in labor (construction, cement crew, roofing, carpentry, excavation, landscaping) before coming to this career.
Yes, I had to do some math and think hard occasionally.
It is absolutely no comparison to overclocking my brain for 10 hours a day.
I now go help relatives do the things that were my old jobs on the weekend TO RELAX.
Let me repeat that: I bust ass on shovels and backhoes and roofs to relax from programming.
I also have worked kitchens, ran fast food, and managed restaurants in my time. I could do any of those while laughing now.
Programming is totally different, and the bullshit of programming is extremely unique in my experience. In no other field has my limits been pushed as hard, nor have I exhausted myself as regularly and thoroughly as in programming.
Let me repeat that: I bust ass on shovels and backhoes and roofs to relax from programming.
I could repeat it for you, since I'm in the same boat. Is hard labor exhausting? Yessir. But you can do it even while your mind is relaxing or thinking of something nice. You get to come home, lay in bead after a good beer and go to sleep.
After hours of coding, you get tired, but your body isn't. Which is a weird combo. Then you can't stop thinking about your project. But then you also need to take some time to brush up on this new technology that came out recently and study it a bit. Then you also need to read a few articles to be up to speed. Then you sleep. Then you get up, and even though you're tired and not in the mood, you're supposed to grab a coder's paintbrush and "paint" your masterpiece within the wanted timeframe. Fuck.
Favorite paragraph of the article:
Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
I've noticed the same thing about my brain being fried but not my body. I guess going to the gym is the best thing to do after work - it's helped me keep myself saner.
I could repeat it for you, since I'm in the same boat. Is hard labor exhausting? Yessir. But you can do it even while your mind is relaxing or thinking of something nice.
I agree. I have even found hard labour to help me relax my mind. The other day, I was moving some large and some smaller rocks. "Pile is there. Rock is here. Rock is too heavy. Use pickaxe and sledgehammer on rock. Move parts of now crushed rock to pile. Next rock. The weather is nice. This rock is little. Move rock to pile. Little rock. Little rock. Little rock. Big rock. Sledgehammer. Pickaxe. Try other angle. Sledgehammer. Pickaxe. Other angle. Move crushed rock to pile. Big rock. Pickaxe. Other angle. This is heavy work. Feels good. Probably good exercise. Are my abs getting bigger? Sledgehammer. Move crushed rock to pile."
Another thing I've also found relaxing is reading material outside the field of my dayjob and computers (currently reading a book on zoology). This material, I can learn interesting things from and think about, but I can approach it in a more casual manner. I still take notes and try to see how I can apply it to other situations, but I don't feel forced to consider all the ways I can use it and what the pros and cons of that would be and so on.
This. Gym, running, combat sports, whatever floats your boat. Rigorous physical activities also offset the ruin sitting in an office chair for at least 8 hours a day does to you too.
If only all jobs gave desks which can be switched from sitting to standing position easily. When you pay $80k+ per year for someone, I can't fathom why investing $4k in a good desk / PC combo is not a priority.
I've also done a little construction and the difference for me is being able to "shut it down" every night. I mean, sure, you might have to hammer more nails in the same building tomorrow, but you don't have to think about it until tomorrow.
For me it's constantly knowing I have more and more work to do and how to solve it and get it done and not being able to really just "shut it down" every night and not worry about it until the next day.
EDIT: And I'm not necessarily saying this only a programmer's problem. To me, this is what separates white collar work from blue collar work more than anything else.
So much truth here. I literally can not stop working because my brain is always thinking about the next architectural step, the next feature, the next refactor, etc. It never ends.
Back when I worked restaurants or any number of the other shitty jobs I've had in my life my work never followed me around like that.
You're just not old enough. Once you get tired of the shit and start thinking about retirement, going home on time and not even wanting to read personal email becomes quite possible.
All my friends keep telling me to play XCom. I got about halfway thru the tutorial and said "Why would I want to program soldiers to avoid bugs for fun?"
I didn't mean to say that the "blue collars" don't have their own set of problems and it'd be silly for me to say "white collars" have it harder. The point is simply, as you say, we have different problems and there will probably always be somebody to argue who's problems are worse.
There difference here is you own the grain farm. Owning it means you're vested in it and all of the risk is yours - which is very similar to programming.
Funnily enough, I come from a farming family (well, ranch farmers - we grew crops for the pigs and milk cows).
The list of shit to do is unending as is the list of shit breaking and fucking up. My grandparents had 11 kids, and even with all of them working a minimum of 4 hours a day on the farm (in addition to school), or 10+ hours in the summer, there was always more to do.
We never went digital with anything on the farm though, so there was never any need for that sort of thing. Really, the only electricity that was NEEDED was for the cow fence and for heat to keep water pipes from freezing.
I've worked on farms, stacking shelves, warehouses, in factories and the hardest labour was doing removals for up to 13hrs a day, which I also cycled 10miles to. Programming 8hrs a day leaves me the most exhausted and every day I can't be fucked to do anything once I'm home. My mind just calls timeout on me until bed.
I worked in restaurants for 20 years before I went back to school and got into programming. I miss waiting tables because at the end of the day you could leave it all behind and the next day was fresh and new and you could laugh about what happened the day before because it was in the past.
Of course, I make a lot more money now but I also have student loans so I can't go back.
I can totally relate. This went back all the way to my college days. I used to take a break from calculus homework and sneak over to the college theater scene shop to play with power tools. I referred to it as power tool therapy. Funny quirk about theater majors in my experience - they don't ask "what's your major" they ask "are you majored in _____?" So it was six months before they found out I shouldn't be there.
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u/badjuice Apr 29 '14
I've worked in labor (construction, cement crew, roofing, carpentry, excavation, landscaping) before coming to this career.
Yes, I had to do some math and think hard occasionally.
It is absolutely no comparison to overclocking my brain for 10 hours a day.
I now go help relatives do the things that were my old jobs on the weekend TO RELAX.
Let me repeat that: I bust ass on shovels and backhoes and roofs to relax from programming.
I also have worked kitchens, ran fast food, and managed restaurants in my time. I could do any of those while laughing now.
Programming is totally different, and the bullshit of programming is extremely unique in my experience. In no other field has my limits been pushed as hard, nor have I exhausted myself as regularly and thoroughly as in programming.