Love coding, but won't take the industry dysfunction.

Working blue collar jobs has convinced me there is something rotten in the software industry. Outside tech, co-workers and supervisors alike care about my well-being; they know the work is hard, and appreciate my effort. Socially, there's an easygoing straightforwardness. Contrast to software, where companies demand ever-more output, yet rarely appreciate the effort it takes to do it well. They take all we can give and ignore exhaustion and pain, until eventually we break; meanwhile, coders tend to be high-strung and paranoid someone else will “break their code.” Tech offers money, but blue-collar work offers a different world with better treatment.

Driving school kids around may not be glorious, and seems like a waste of my degree and my ability, but it's not BS like adding yet another social media widget to some schlocky website, and my humanity is respected.