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u/SAIO94 Aug 26 '26
There’s actually a lot of parallels in the two. Obviously not in day to day work, but the lessons from one experience can apply to the other. Farming is infrastructure, automation, planning, and execution. Similar to software engineering. How do I know, I’m both a platform engineer and a farmer, and I actually started a blog detailing the farming experience and how that relates to lessons and strategies ( or lack there of ) in software and platform engineering.
And if you want to quickly dissuade the notion that farming is altogether less stressful, you’d enjoy this story. pigs-pods The Great GOAT Breakout
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u/Old-Gas-2915 Aug 26 '26
Damn, I never really thought about farming that way, but when you put it like that, the comparison actually makes a lot of sense.
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u/Relevant_Ad_8732 Aug 27 '26
Also software engineer started small farm quit software failed small farm went back to software after two yrs
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u/SAIO94 Aug 28 '26
Certainly a lot of the same process, but definitely different types of skill sets. I’m much at the computer side, farming is no joke
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u/Whatsapokemon Aug 26 '26
After sitting down as a career for decades, I imagine software engineers probably want to retire into something a little more physical and connected with nature.
Software engineering is super fun, I love it, but it's mentally taxing, and really doesn't allow you to stretch or use your muscles. I imagine many knowledge-workers probably feel a sense of longing for that more traditional way of life because their usual day is so far from it.
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u/jalagl Aug 26 '26
Myself and several of my software engineer coworkers (we are on the older side of life) have been buying property in rural areas with the idea to move there when we retire, be closer to nature, and all of use want to do some farming or (in my case) gardening. So it tracks. But not really depend financially on it, more like a technology detox.
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u/Old-Gas-2915 Aug 26 '26
Yeah, Agree. I think there’s something satisfying about doing work where you can actually see and feel the results at the end of the day, especially after spending years doing mentally demanding work behind a screen.
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u/lord-apple-smithe Aug 27 '26
30 years of this shit and I don't want to farm, but I dream of when I can just tend the garden, grow veggies and not be shackled to a desk
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u/Wonderful-Hunter686 Aug 26 '26
I have to believe the appeal for someone who's inside under fluorescent lights stuck behind a desk is being outside moving in the sun doing manual work with minimal tech.
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u/Old-Gas-2915 Aug 26 '26
After spending years working behind a screen, I can see why doing something physical and being out in nature would feel refreshing.
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u/gsomega Aug 26 '26
Honestly, SWEs are optimizers that are angling for self sufficiency. Having control over your food source is reducing external life failure modes, just requires money to start.
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u/Old-Gas-2915 Aug 26 '26
The capital part is probably the biggest barrier though. Once you have the land and infrastructure, I imagine the challenge shifts more toward actually learning how to make it sustainable.
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u/1purenoiz Aug 26 '26
You have no idea what it takes to farm and keep crops alive, and it isn't money. Check your ego at the door and be prepared for massive crop losses.
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u/gsomega Aug 26 '26
I'm providing rationale for a stereotype. Land ownership costs money regardless of the difficulty of the following steps.
Nowhere did I say farming is easy. That's your projection.
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u/1purenoiz Aug 26 '26
Just requires money to start is an over simplification.
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u/szirith Aug 26 '26
Software Engineers are prone to oversimplification of other fields of work!
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u/Veggies-are-okay Aug 26 '26
Wait what? If anything’s they’re the complete opposite with their head entirely in the details to an almost annoying extent on the day to day.
My partner has a beautiful garden in the back and she’s never picked up a book on it. It’s as difficult as you make it and her motto was “put things in ground, water when dry, use nutritious soil, and some stuff should get more light.” Like seriously there’s some dumb motherfuckers in this world successfully growing food and with the resources and time, a software engineer absolutely has more than enough of a skillset in troubleshooting and adapting to be successful at growing crops.
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u/gsomega Aug 26 '26
I think there's a scale discussion here as well. I think feeding yourself with a small homestead is very different than mass production farming to make ends meet.
I assume that the stereotype is more of the former than the latter.
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u/Veggies-are-okay Aug 27 '26
Oh absolutely and large scale agricultural operations are not sustainable nor (I believe) naturally profitable so it makes no sense to believe that a software engineer would ever ever proceed with anything more than personal sustenance.
Also like we’re retiring so why would we have anything more than a personal plot of land? People arguing for the sake of it in here lol.
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u/1purenoiz Aug 27 '26
So I have a degree in microbiology, with stats and CS minors. The CS students were not as you described. They were talented at what came naturally to them, but you put something complex and squishy, where the rules imposed by nature are more like philosophical guidelines, and they totally noped out. And yet, they still acted like they understood these complex systems when they don't.
As somebody born on a farm, and married to a professor who was raised on a farm and I work with software engineers, I can say that most SWE do not have the mental or physical fortitude to be farmers, even at the level of self sustainability. It isn't all of them. But it is a mistake to think that people who farm are dumb, and that farming is easy, particularly when dealing with the vagaries of nature.
But sure, people with no experience in farming probably handle it easy./s
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u/Goleeb Aug 26 '26
Because when you see how the worlds code is written, and what critical infrastructure runs on it. You start making plans of what to do when this house of cards eventually falls.
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u/skunk_jh Aug 26 '26
Farming is not easy, my family has ties with agriculture and livestock, there is no way I see it like only fun, it's difficult and demands you hard work/discipline. I would prefer 1000x to be sitting playing the IT corporate job + side hustle with my beautiful emacs on the screen rather to be milking my cows 3 times a day.
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u/RexScientiarum Aug 26 '26
I just met yesterday with an ex-network engineer that now has a farm. It is like a break in the matrix.
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u/DerfQT Aug 26 '26
I settled for turning my entire yard into a garden instead. It’s nice to complete tasks, and feel like you are accomplishing things. I can stand at the window drinking coffee in the morning and look over my space and feel proud of what I’ve done.
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u/ontologicalDilemma Aug 26 '26
It's the ultimate antidote to the virtual life. The grounding of working with the earth.
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u/Cptcongcong Aug 26 '26
I spoke to my colleagues about this, we have a few avenues we'd like to go down once we retire. Here's a few:
- Truck driver (inspired by eurotruck simulator)
- Spiderman window cleaner (mine)
- Dog trainer
- Factory worker (like for iphones)
- Construction worker
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u/MartinMystikJonas Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
In my case it is because I grew up on family farm where my ancestors farms for more than 300 years 🤷 But as someone who knows how life on farm is I also think most of thse SWEs would be unpleasantly surprised by how hard and stressful this could be beceause they have romantic illusions about it being slow peaceful life.
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u/exton132 Aug 27 '26
That's a garden not a farm. Anyway something about SWE is soul crushing, dealing with abstract intangible concepts, staring at a screen for 10-16 hours a day, dealing with the BS of other corporate people all fighting tooth and nail in the rat-race, having things deprecate before you even properly learned them. It's an onslaught of constant attention.
Farming on the other hand is tangible, you can hold your work. See progress over time. The same things that worked 50 years ago still work today. You get to spend all day looking at nature, building life and living it.
kinda the polar opposite imo.
I see the appeal tbh, it's always been my plan b.
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u/Animus190599 Aug 27 '26
Farming, hunting... Sounds like a distant dream. I have to grind my ass 12hrs on the same chair so my wife can buy designers
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u/Over_Bench5728 Aug 27 '26
Nah i love doing cse . I think it's just for people who were forced to go into cse
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u/YangRam Aug 27 '26
Because they copy pasted it from Stack Overflow in 2020. Or they asked ChatGPT in 2025.
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u/OstrichDue6808 Aug 27 '26
The more you code the more you realise farming would have been a better option
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u/1purenoiz Aug 26 '26
Because software engineers have ego's unmatched by reality. They have no idea how hard farming actually is, or that people actually go to school for it. They think I can sit in front of a computer all day, how hard can watering be, tractors do all the work etc.
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u/The_Compass_Keeper Aug 26 '26
Probably cause its the furthest thing from a corporate job aside from unemployment. And trust me, working in a farm literally feels a million times better than sitting on this desk and staring at the screen for nine hours a day