I recently left my 25 year software career to attend violin making school. I am literally having the best time of my life (I was also extremely fortunate to have lived relatively cheaply the past 25 years so it's not hard for me to downshift my expenses).
I think the biggest thing I love about violin making is respect for expertise. Violin making is not a whole lot changed in the past 300 years, though we do use a lot more modern tools for evaluating acoustics and wood properties. In tech, things change so quickly that expertise is made obsolete very fast, and people are generally cast aside. I've heard a lot over my career that "any good software engineer can learn a new language in a week", and while that's partially true, real depth of expertise in any framework took much longer. All that depth of expertise has become incredibly devalued. And I've also heard a lot about how senior engineers are now more valuable with AI, as they are better able to orchestrate agents and detect hallucinations. That may be true, but I feel like the nature of the job has changed so drastically that it's just not something I would enjoy doing day to day.
I also think the thing that is fundamentally different about this paradigm shift is that it is younger people who are (unsurprisingly) most against it. E.g. when I started my career, web apps were just taking off, and a lot of older engineers at the time found the shift from native apps to be relatively daunting. While that may also be the case with AI, it's a lot of younger folks who are most against it, and that wasn't the case when the Internet really exploded in the late 90s.
I think the biggest thing I love about violin making is respect for expertise. Violin making is not a whole lot changed in the past 300 years, though we do use a lot more modern tools for evaluating acoustics and wood properties. In tech, things change so quickly that expertise is made obsolete very fast, and people are generally cast aside. I've heard a lot over my career that "any good software engineer can learn a new language in a week", and while that's partially true, real depth of expertise in any framework took much longer. All that depth of expertise has become incredibly devalued. And I've also heard a lot about how senior engineers are now more valuable with AI, as they are better able to orchestrate agents and detect hallucinations. That may be true, but I feel like the nature of the job has changed so drastically that it's just not something I would enjoy doing day to day.
I also think the thing that is fundamentally different about this paradigm shift is that it is younger people who are (unsurprisingly) most against it. E.g. when I started my career, web apps were just taking off, and a lot of older engineers at the time found the shift from native apps to be relatively daunting. While that may also be the case with AI, it's a lot of younger folks who are most against it, and that wasn't the case when the Internet really exploded in the late 90s.