I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious.

What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

As a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.

> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

Hang out in a bar with 32 year old farmers or roughnecks as a teenager and you'll hear lots of similar shallow anodyne life wisdom.

> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage?

Some of my friends tried going down the influencer path. Some on LinkedIn, one as an Substacker, others on Instagram.

Seeing their influencer content in contrast to their personal lives made it abundantly clear that they were using their influencer side as an outlet for their thoughts. As ideas or epiphanies came to them, they would jump to their influencer accounts and preach their realizations as if it was knowledge they had held for decades.

The optimistic angle is that they were using the outlet as a place for sharpening their thoughts. Thinking in public and putting your thoughts into words forces you to sharpen your ideas and make them more coherent.

The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out.

The content can be helpful for others to sharpen their own thoughts or catch up on basic realizations about life, but for others it feels weird to see so much fanfare around basic social and workplace understandings.

My experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.

Maybe the old farmers and rednecks don't have blogs which you can read online. They might well tell their friends and family!

Being very online, probably.

Also, it’s writing code for a social product.

Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.

Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? I didn't get into tech until I was 40 but I definitely was going through some of the same personal growth as the writer when I was about 30 and if I had a blog I probably would have written about it.

They may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.

I'm decently older than this and I'm all for it.

Age is just one modest, fallible signal for wisdom, to say nothing of occupation. Farmers and roughnecks definitely spout plenty of "life lessons".

An unkind answer is these are the sort of navel-gazing observations had by most teenagers, and people in tech are just late bloomers.

But an even less kind answer would be that self-help is big business, and to run the scam you have to build an audience.

Tech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.

True. But it's the same trend in every other field: new born babies lecture soon to die people about life.

Example of such lessons: recently, a well known dating coach who gives lessons that costs around 8000 euros per hour about how a man can become a high value man and attract high value women, called Sadia Khan, proved she is in the position to give lessons about how a woman can be of high value: private calls of her were released recently and it is shown she is a side chick of a married man.

I was listening to a book-review podcast that was talking about one of Ernest Cline's books. They were on a section where the 17-year-old protagonist is remarking on how his personality probably reflects his dad's interest in something or other, and one of the hosts laughed and said no 17-year-old does that kind of self-analysis. I immediately said, "Au contraire, maybe you didn't, but plenty of them do." I certainly did.

There may be something about the kind of mind that's drawn to tech that correlates with navel-gazing. We like to know how things work, and that doesn't necessarily only apply to computers and gadgets.

Of course, that only explains why we think about it; not why so many of us write about it like we think other people need to hear it. That probably comes down to being smarter than average and thinking you've got everything figured out by the age of 15, also a common trait of tech people. Fortunately some of us manage to outgrow it and be embarrassed by what know-it-alls we were.

> farmers or roughnecks doing this

Oh, they do it. They just do it in their preferred medium, which is usually in person on the job, not the internet.

Software people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source.

That’s the charitable read anyway.

There was an article or comment a couple of years back discussing how people are now writing grandiose blog posts like they are describing how and why they broke up Pink Floyd. I wish I could find the original source because I still think about it.

> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

They have blogs and the means to distribute the links to their blogs via sites like this.

Spend some time at your local pub and you'll hear people of all backgrounds over you their sagacity.

Netscape was only released 30 years ago.

Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.

The quintessential American author Oprah Winfrey didn't write her first book untill she was 42.

I can't help but think of Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

Looking at wikipedia, he started it in 1962 (at age 24), and it is still incomplete in 2025 (he is 87)

By the time you're old, it might be too late to start your "wise" framework.

The tools have a short lifecycle. So if you've used the tool for a week, that's equivalent relevant lifecycle experience to a farmer using a tractor for 50 years.

/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes

I attempted to write a life’s lessons kind of book when I was 17. It took 26 years to finish it. Turns out, it takes a long time to test ideas. I kept asking myself “but how do I know this works.”

I suppose it’s true. You don’t notice them doing it. The problem here is that you’ve concluded that the detection instrument functions. That’s bad engineering. Check your equipment.

>I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

Not for nothing, but you might if you spent time on the FarmersAndRoughnecksNews forum instead of here

I think it has to with the audience, or a platform. A young farmer would probably pretend to know a lot and even talk to impress if you put an audience in front of them.

I think it's a social media thing that's not limited to tech. There are tons of tiktok videos where some 18 year old explains the world with passion.

Sharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.

> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

Do you read the blogs of 32 year old farmers or roughnecks?

In tech there's more to be gained building a personal brand online than in petroleum

They feel the need to prove themselves to others. Not a jab or anything, it is normal.

Maybe you’re just exposed to tech blogs and not the farmer/roughneck equivalent?

> write about life lessons like an old sage

Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.

exactly. there's just an attitude of hubris in a lot of tech nerds that remains unmoved even when they've "swapped out a whole new operating system" for themselves

old farmers do the same, they just don't blog

Arrogance.

Blog posts are branding. A version of them is self help style but there's all kinds. It just sells well.

I draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing.

...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.

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