From Software to Soup: On Trading Coding for Crepes

Legal Serf writes "Having lived through the best of eTimes and the worst (hopefully) of times, I bet everyone (still employed) has had daydreams of chucking it all and escaping the present malaise permeating most tech companies. The NY Times ('open' but not 'free' registration) has a piece about ex-dotcomers who've traded visions of iBuzzwords for soup, crepes and hotdogs. What?s most interesting is that everyone interviewed pretty much said the same thing: It's nice to provide something of real value to customers who are actually happy to trade money for goods, even if it's just dessert. Anyone out there feeling the same? (About the value of tech or the temptations of other trades?) (I keep thinking about these tech friends I have that fantasize about opening a hip babershop...)"

Comments

Re:Grass is always greener....

[Theaetetus]

Absolutely... NPR just did a story about how of a list of professions, the lowest stress one is "musical instrument repairguy".
I certainly agree with that. I'm in audio engineering, specifically electronic/RF repair. It's problem-solving creative stuff, and at the end of the day, I can honestly say "this came to me broken, and it's leaving me fixed." I have almost no stress in my job.

OTOH, my roommate, a refugee from the tech sector, has been unemployed for a year now. He did some sort of nebulous 'network engineering' thing, and was let go because he really couldn't point to anything and say "I did that". There were constant projects getting cancelled and basic account maintenance things that never impress the boobs up in HR who don't know what you do. All they see is that their computer boots up with "Windows 98" and it's the year 2002, and why are they four years behind?
I admire people who have such a love of cooking that they can make gourmet food. There's a lot more to it than just flipping burgers, and they _always_ make people happy. Can you say the same for your job? -T

Re:I'd like to see stories about...

[Arandir]

The why is easy. People were buying stock prices. It's sounds stupid, but that's what they did. There was a Red Tag sale as Sears and millions of people bought Red Tags.

When you buy a stock, you are actually buying a piece of a company. The price of the stock is irrelevant. The value of the company is what matters. That stock will gain you nothing in the long run unless the company produces something of value to non-stockholders. But people didn't care about the companies, they cared about buying up these worthless pieces of paper.