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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't work in tech? by piva00 on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:15PM (#46356112)
I was about to answer the same, I'd go to carpentry. I love being in the workshop, I love the pieces I made, I wish I had more time to properly finish some of them with all the details I had envisioned.

I've considered it a lot when I went through a big burnout, perhaps I should've just thrown away the 20+ years of career in tech at that moment to start as a journeyman since now it just became much harder to let go off the comforts this career brings me...

Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't work in tech? by freedomben on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:24PM (#46356247)
Oh man, we've got a lot of similarity there! I even took 2 weeks of PTO at one point when I was feeling massive burnout and spend that time in the shop building a table, chairs, benches, and a couple of attempts at mantles. Chairs were a lot harder than I initially thought (mostly making them comfortable to sit in), but the table and benches were easy enough I could crank out a table in a day and two or three benches the next day.

After that two weeks I even did some market research to see if there was any way to make a remotely comparable living off of it (unfortunately there wasn't, at least until the kids are out of the house and expenses go way down). I also realized that my style was not well aligned with popular styles at the time (this was 2019), and that shipping costs basically meant I could only sell to local area (and even then delivery cost/time would require adding too much margin).

Someday hopefully life will be more compatible with our dream :-)