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I have been at it for 20 years now and have started to feel my time is up as well

As a lot of comments here highlights, the issue is not so much the tech but the politics, constant perf reviews, re-orgs, nonsense BS that is pushed top-down. This industry is taking a toll on you.

My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot. When I started my career I thought I would love doing this forever. I would never imagine I would get burned out in the long run. I would never imagine I would think about retiring early because tech was so fun to me.

The reality is that money and savings give you optionality. It allows you to work without worrying day to day. You never know when the next wave of AI or BS is going to hit. That's when having that optionality is really important.

I have seen so many of my peers making very high tech income but also living the American opulent life, spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area to impress their friends. Today they have no choice than continue working for another 30 years. Today I can have a simple life and retire almost anywhere in the world.

Decide what is important to you. I guarante that buying the multi-million dollar home is not worth the extra 30 years of grinding.

I just retired after 40 years writing code.

The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted.

For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired.

I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.

Is that AI? Or is it me?

Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I don’t miss tech.

Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)

For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care?

He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it.

Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still make a huge impact. Either way I respect his decision and hope he finds peace offline. TBH I’m a little jealous.

Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years.

I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a year or two being frugal. After that it’s anyone’s guess, but I am beyond excited not having to program for a living any more, just on what feels meaningful, in complete autonomy.

Projects lined up: a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, a series of small games that I have been itching to work on, then, of course, the lifelong project of living in a rural house. Stretch goal if I win the lottery: build a solar farm.

Maybe I will be so lucky never to have had to use LLMs in my work. You guys have fun without me. :-P

Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!

Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.

I would (genuinely) be interested in a follow up on how that works out for them. I've "threatened" to do this many times, but my partner points out that if I thought tech management was full of BS, wait until I am getting ordered about by retail industry management while working the shop floor, dead on my feet, penalised for taking too long a toilet break. I think reality could come down hard here.

While I admire his commitment to his ideals, I find some of this veers into an uncomfortable fanaticism, especially the remarks praising the savage acts of violence committed by the Sentinelese (which I find particularly odd considering the author's professed religion). I doubt the Amish (who apply technology selectively and intelligently) would appreciate being compared to them either; the Sentinelese are not preserving a valuable way of life, they're primitive hunter-gathering barbarians, and anybody can "return" to that way of life any time they want by taking a one-way plane ticket and camping out somewhere where they cannot be found.

Additionally, the fact that this announcement is a scan of a typewritten letter, despite the fact that he has communicated in text-form on BlueSky since the letter's authoring, feels a tad performative to me.

This resonates with me as well. For more reasons than one: with the rise of AI (Mythos is but a pale forerunner) digital security — and by extension, digital privacy — has ceased to exist. The bomber will always win. The only way to win is not to play.

I overlapped a bit with Chad in 2015, as he was navigating a professional transition. I wasn't in an especially high role back then- just a guy in the back of the room.

In the times I saw him since, I consistently saw someone who thought hard every day about how to help others, and didn't lose sight of the human element. Sentry worked hard to create a viable business, without losing sight of open source goals. (you can see some of his efforts at https://blog.sentry.io/authors/chad-whitacre/ )

I tell my younger colleagues to do the best work they can sustainably do... but too often in this field, the big roles become too intense to be sustained forever. I hope his new role shows him the same warmth and support that he tried to put out there for others.

I have 3 weeks left, but outside of work I've already been divorced from anything technological invented this century. I've been living in a log cabin in the woods for over a quarter century. This essay does hit home.

21 days left. I don't plan to look back.

thank you for this. what a sacred journey you're embarking on. i hope to follow you - talking with a close friend now about becoming an elevator mechanic. my wife is pregnant so i have to find a profession that comes reasonably close to tech salaries. i've been writing poetry by hand. i think the world you envision is possible, and closer.

The ideal career path

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1jgcfx9/pe...

Chad is one of the kindest souls I've ever met. Good luck off the grid!

Also, how did he post this if he isn't using the Internet?

Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intuition led me down the right road at the right time. Always trust your gut.

I think we're going to see a ton of this in the coming years. A return to the 60s/70s when people were going off the grid, moving to a farm, or just disconnecting

Software dev is so much infested with mediocre people who follow any line dictated by management and politics and force others to do it.

If CEOs were smart, they'd use the AI craze to identify the AI boosters and then fire them all. This will increase productivity and save them way more money than a Clown Code subscription.

I'd retire yesterday if I could afford it. Maybe in 10-15 years. Have a once-a-day NNCP feed rather than total disconnection.

Fair play to the chap, it was refreshing to read a scan of a letter typed from a typewriter.

<joke> I just hope he doesn't start mailing packages to people in the tech industry in the next few years.</joke>

I got into teaching several years ago, leaving industry behind. It's great! I had gotten a little bit tired of programming other people's stuff. It wasn't the programming itself that was dull, but I found most products that people wanted were actually kind of boring and formulaic. And none of them really worked for the betterment of humanity.

Teaching is a massive challenge. The stuff that I teach in computer science I find to be relatively easy after 20 years in industry, but figuring out how to teach it effectively? That's really, really difficult. Such a great challenge to be able to sink my teeth into—so rewarding. And it's for a good cause.

I'm not opposed to going back to industry work. I'd probably use genAI to get a bunch to get stuff done, too, even though I don't use it for my personal projects. But it would have to be some work that I believed in, that was doing some good in the world. I can imagine working for the county, say, or for a non-profit.

I love my current job, but also part of me thinks a Garbage Man would provide a cool experience. (I'm ok with the stinkiness). I just think about careening through the city at the crack of dawn, exploring every nook of my city. That or group fitness instructor.

This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him.

Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside because he doesn't have a robot bodyguard. His UBI would have paid him to stay inside and stare at the wall, but he won't sign up for that cause it requires a smartphone and an identity implant. Probably wind up homeless with a handwritten sign, "Destroy All Clankers! Anything (without an embedded microchip) helps."

I'll never give up tech. It's a passion I've had since childhood, and a large part of what keeps me going in society is seeing the lights of the eyes brighten when someone discovers something new with technology that genuinely makes their life that much better than it was a moment ago. Not merely the flame of some dopamine hit of something shiny, but that genuine, "Thank you for helping me save an hour of my time/cross this chore off my list forever/give me back time, to live my life" sense.

The fact so many of us are burning out so hard, so fast, so thoroughly despite tech being a passion genuinely worries me. These are otherwise brilliant people, well-read, modest intellectuals that are just sick of this anti-human society we've built, with the constant braying by Capitalist and Industrialist leaders that this thing is necessary or you will be left behind, in lieu of natural discovery and adoption and integration into our lives. We bought into it initially and for so long, even as time after time after time it proved to be empty, or shallow, or vapid, or hollow. Never life-changing, never society-changing, always enriching those with far too much by taking from those with far too little.

I wish the OP well. I think we all need more offline time, if just to remind ourselves what the role of technology was always meant to be within it.

I retired to the country, where any friends are 50 miles away, and most don't even reply to emails and messages.

I still want to utilize some free wikis and such to help share ideas.

There are simple things that can improve life for people, especially seniors, that are very low tech, and that's the rub.

Low tech things mean taking action, getting away from the screen, where SO WE THINK, magic happens when we create some new fantabulous code gizmo.

Maybe just bringing a pizza to someone, inventing some gadget to read invisible labels and expiry dates on food, or making an exoskeleton for someone with back pain will do more good than some AI that writes exciting posts on social media, or better, counters some other AI that is coming for your money and creative mind.

We are all overthinking everything, when simple, human problems are neglected in some race to an unknown "endpoint" that is illusory and ever-moving.

It is amusing and depressing to see so many people exit tech. I remember this happened in similar “vibes/strides around 08 and then for Covid, which ironically doubled down on remote work. And now for AI.

It really paints a projection on how much time we all really have in this world and this segment of work.

At best I wonder, do “I” have another 10 - 15 years left in tech?

Do you?

Agreed with the other comments on financial freedom. It does feel that tech is one of the last bastions remaining where you can really solidify being an autodidact to have an exit of your choosing.

Damn, I am a beginner in my coding journey, and even I fell the fatigue - the fear that no matter what I do , it can be easily replicated with AI, I now have to think extra hard to make sure that a new project I am embarking on cannot be easily vibe coded in a weekend, it exhausting - I feel the spirit of coding, building together is dying as everyone wants to monetize and sell to PE firms, everyone wants a million or billion $ valuation, is open source and community dead ?

I dream of being the Zamboni driver for my town's arena. I have a plan I'm successfully executing to get to be that before I'm 50.

The hardest part will be beating all the competition for the job.

I would go offline but never retire from tech, I would miss music terribly. I would also move all my ebooks over to an e-reader and that's it. If I can live somewhere offline with my music player and e-reader that's fine.

Chad has been one of the strongest voices in the open source community for the past few years. When we were building tools for OSS developers we valued his opinion highly.

This is the final nail for me, that something is rotten in the state of open source.

There's the "old guard" of open source, who seem to spend most of their time arguing about semantics, governance, and the nth kubernetes telemetry solution.

So where is the "new guard"? There's been a lot of interesting work in open source AI, but it seems to me like a championed effort cannot exist without a new paradigm around collaboration and monetization. More and more, we see the new guard question or outright deny new contributors due to AI slop PRs and issues continue to pile up.

There desperately needs to be a sexy revitalization of open source, starting with young developers. I thought it would be from the YC-esque startups of the world, who use open source as a way to garner legitimacy, good will, and a top-of-funnel upselling motion.

"Trad" open source is greying - and the new wave is more of a ripple. It has no shared identity, and no champion.

I would follow him if I could. Most of my colleagues as well.

I was about to comment something like "happy for OP, he's very fortunate to have enough to be able to simply retire" when I read the bit about Home Depot.

Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.

Indian Philosophy gives a beautiful framework to structure your Life w.r.t. three axes;

1) The Goals of Life aka Purusartha - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puru%E1%B9%A3%C4%81rtha They are;

    - Artha: All sorts of wealth including material and non-material like friends, health etc. Needed for a good life.
    - Dharma: Rules/Regulations/Laws/Ethics/Morals which make coexistence in a society possible.
    - Kama: All sorts of pleasure that one seeks for enjoyment. Many equate only this to a goal of life.
    - Moksa (optional): Cultivating a mindset which supersedes and transcends the above three thus "freeing oneself" from the unending "wheel of life".

    - Brahmacharya: From Childhood to Adulthood (before puberty) which is the Student stage. During this stage you focus on studying and learning various subjects/arts. Since both mind and body are still developing, self-control and discipline w.r.t. various harmful external influences are emphasized. The goal is the development of a healthy mind and body.
    - Grihastha: The married Householder stage with Wife and Children. The Grihastha is considered the central pillar of society since everything else depends on him. He generates wealth, enjoys all sorts of pleasures and lives within a social law framework for peaceful coexistence. 
    - Vanaprastha: The retired householder stage who has successfully raised his children i.e. put them through brahmarcharya and into grihastha stage. He now removes himself from much active duty in society thus making room for the next generation to step-in and develop. He curbs his desires/wants (since both body and mind are ageing) and acts mostly as an adviser to the next generation.
    - Sannyasa (optional): This is a completely different stage/way of life whose only goal is Moksa. A person can move to this stage from any of the above stages. None of any ordinary rules/laws/practices of society are applicable here.

Understand your current stage in life, Manage/Control your goals w.r.t. that stage and Adjust your duty accordingly for a Happy and Full Life.

If this is viral marketing for a typewriter company, it's genius.

I love learning about computers, programming, and math so much. I actually got into tech as a career pretty late. For many years I worked as a art fabricator/carpenter in the art world.

I only got good enough at programming to get a job in tech because I became obsessed with the Curry-Howard Correspondence as a backdoor into learning math.

I've always had a wide array of interests. I live on a half acre property with a giant garden and a shop that is bigger then my actual house. I've always split my free time between exploring and learning about computers, gardening, radios, and carpentry, fixing old machines, etc.

The shift in my lived work experience with AI has substantially demotivated me from programming and computers in my free time. A million times over I would rather pull weeds or clean my Bridgeport mill.

I've always wished I could go back to a 1990s experience where the computer lived in the den, the internet was only somewhat monetized, the future was utopian.

OP's plan to fallback to 1980s era technology is appealing but also somewhat depressing. Not only do I really like and enjoy learning about computers, but also making this kind of individualistic decision doesn't really get us to a better place as a society.

I wish we had heeded the warnings of researchers like Sherry Turkle who identified the impacts of technology on the individual as far back as the 1980s.

Been thinking the same lately…

"maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat." XD

While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.

Echoes of _The Soul of a New Machine_

>I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

If memory serves, the note left by a burnt-out engineer on their workstation when they left abruptly.

> 1980. Neo-Amish.

I've not a new 'retirement' plan to voluntarily be stuck in the '80s.

i got 9.5 years. 9.5 years and then I'm finally climbing off the stage, picking up my tips, and my dancing days are over. i'm counting it down.

Lol, had to tell the internet on his way out huh. He'll be back of course as he clearly values the internet and makes it part of his ego.

I think about this a lot but I also kind of feel like I'll never truly be able to retire in a way that matters.

Then they came for the programmers but there were no one to come for because they all have taken up farming.

Am I the only person in this thread who thought this might be a joke? The job at Home Depot in particular, and this bit:

> I haven't used a phone or the Internet in my personal life since February 6. To communicate, I use the USPS, or maneuver my body into close proximity and vibrate air with my throat. I love it. I want to be part of a society of people likewise inclined.

I'm not at all certain though. Chad posted it on LinkedIn and Bluesky, so if it is a joke he's definitely committing to the bit.

Here's Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, the person Chad names as taking over the Open Source Pledge, posting about it - https://bsky.app/profile/vlad.website/post/3mmw3jigagk2q - which makes it seem more real.

Update: more evidence in-favor of "not a joke" is this 19th Feb 2026 video from Chad's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc - at 16:22

> I don't not want to be someone who helps lay the groundwork for the remnant. I'm going to call it the remnant, a remnant of humanity that doesn't take the bargain. I have no idea what's next. Alright, we're starting Gift magazine. Whoa. I went to Penguin Bookstore. I got an address book, and I got a ridiculous planner. And we got our P.O. Box. Box 200. Oh, and I also switched to paper billing. Paper bank statements at Dollar Bank. Puzzle gaming. Figuring out the offline.

Update 2: here's a blog entry from 19th Feb that accompanied that video: https://openpath.quest/2026/spitting-out-the-agentic-kool-ai...

> Long story short, I’ve decided to dial back my engagement with mainstream technology, and to launch a print magazine called Gift to network with like-minded individuals.

So I'm sold, there's humor in the presentation, but it's a real decision.

Very nice performative piece.

The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it.

AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.

I wish I could do the same.

I wish I could retire...

While I share the sentiment, this feels like an extreme, nuclear reaction which might be irreversible. I understand the fatigue, and resentment, but if you are about to be a family, you are going to find that typewriters aren't the acceptable mode of communication nowadays, and that you need some money to raise children.

Even if you are already wealthy and don't actually need to work anymore, going off the grid completely is still the wrong move. There's a lot of ways to spend less time online, improve your privacy and reduce tracking.

This is a great choice

I've been smartphone free for over 5 years now. It's been liberating, but its just not enough. I still use my computer to doomscroll for an hour or 2 a day. It takes me hours of hiking alone in the woods afterwards too unwind all the stress and distraction that comes with being connected.

Ironically right around February I started to have similar thoughts as Chad, that perhaps I should become Neo Amish as he calls it. Like Chad, I like disconnected, non-AI technology just fine. But anything that spies on me or tries to modify my behavior needs to go.

Maybe I'll mail Chad a letter and see if he wants to be my penpal.

I am very fatigued by tech and AI too.

I do find occasional pleasure in personal projects, creating exotic programming languages that are not text-based, compilers and stuff like that, but otherwise coding work makes me wanna puke.

This isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure.

wait home depot is hiring??

Even good ideas can be ridiculous if you take it 100% radically literal.

Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.

Legend

Must be nice.

Good luck with what you're doing. It feels like everyone's shipping more but thinking less and with open source you really feel it with the PRs and issues. All the best!

Godspeed.

I'm curious about one thing thouhg:

Or profession is very young and what annoys me the most: i can do my job only on a computer and i'm very good in knowing how to use it and i also use it for everything.

Privat and work has merged into being in front of a screen.

The joke of starting a bakery or doing other manual labor jobs is quite common.

It might just be time for this to transform.

I would retire yesterday if i could afford it though.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315784

Text inside images is not a11y. That's a paddlin'.

I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.

I plan to do the same eventually. I want to buy a shop and become a mechanic, primarily flipping cars, and doing actual repairs for a fair price. I need to get to the point where the business venture only needs to do a bit better than break even, and I'll quit this industry. After more than 20 years in tech, I've done a lot of cool things with smart people, but almost none of what I built still exists (every tech stack is a Ship of Theseus) and AI is just making working in corporate miserable.

I personally like using AI tools and experimenting with local models, but I hate being subjected to the output of AI from other people. There's such a large competency gap that exists in the human operators, and AI does not ameliorate it, it makes it worse, but so many have drank the koolaid that it solves everything and eliminates that gap. I won't become a luddite, I will still build technical things at home, but I miss being able to see the tangible fruits of my labor and getting an honest thank you from another human being I've helped out through my work. I miss the permanence of physical things. I'm also tired of arguing with people who think their incompetence + AI outranks my competence and expertise.

I am clearly in the minority in these parts.

I find it intellectually alarming (but not surprising) that someone would say something like "[the north sentinelese tribe] are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday".

"way of life" is doing a lot of obscuring here.

It took centuries of hard work to leave that behind.

did Chad, or whoever posted this for him, post this as a jpg with no alt text? wow, thought Chad was a bit better than that (I can't even read this thing easily and im not considered to be visually impaired)

"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"

yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.

what's the point in posting scan (?) of paper online instead of just publishing it normal way, so people can adjust font and actually read it? especially since you are anyway at computer and posting it on website and bsky