Changing Directions

Summary

Changing DirectionsI have two important announcements:I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”.As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of topics that interest me (projects around my hobby farm, wilderness trips, emergency medicine) – more writing for me, less writing for some imagined audience. (I’ll probably still end up writing about some of the same topics as I’ve been covering since 2020, just less often.)I’m writing this post mostly to give myself permission to make that change, and to give readers the opportunity to unsubscribe/unfollow if they’re not interested.If you’re interested in more details about why I’m leaving the industry and what’s next for me and this blog, read on.Leaving the tech industryI left what I hope will be my last tech job in October. In many ways it was the perfect job: work I enjoyed, great clients, co-workers I loved (and still miss), at a company whose mission and ethics I aligned with. And despite all that I found myself increasingly burnt out. I started telling people that “I love my job, but I hate my career.”I’ve been working in tech more or less non-stop for more than 25 years, and in that time my feeling about the industry has changed dramatically. When I began, I held straightforwardly techno-utopian ideas: I believed that technology was an unalloyed force for Good, that the computer revolution would bring about a more just and equitable society. I thought the industry was going to create a Star Trek-esque post-scarcity society.I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde, and I could go on but Christ I’m exhausted.I’ve been thinking about leaving the indus...