How many tech to permaculture people are here?

Hi All,
Question:
How many other people are in some sort of tech job or used to be in tech? And what got you started in this space?

Details
I'm an IT guy. A jack of all trades and master of none. I found myself drawn to growing food sustainably, which led me to permaculture. I know Paul used to be in tech and got into growing things and permaculture. I have noticed a great number of youtubers who used to be in tech and either left or are running homesteads on the side. I see both users and staff here on Permies often mention being in tech. So many people in the homesteading and permaculture movements seem to be coming out of tech.

I started growing things for health, and kept going because it was awesome fun. What about you?

I worked help desk as an undergraduate student. My first year of grad-school, I was a "research assistant" but really, I designed and delivered computing-related courses (I mostly taught (very early -- it was 1995) HTML and Photoshop). Then I was hired into the management team of that same helpdesk that I came up in. In the summer of 1999, we moved away and I got a job in a Fortune 100 Network Operations Center, doing systems analysis and datacenter cabling. There, I started dabbling in software just to build tools to help the organization -- a shift turnover log, a PTO calendar, web slideshow about the datacenter, etc. Since then, I've been a coder, doing mostly VB.NET and SQL (various flavors, but now it's mostly been TSQL) for like 22 years. Two years ago, part of the company I worked for was sold to another company and we operate as an independent company, so IT was radically downsized and I've been picking up a lot of sysadmin duties. (I took five programming courses as electives in college, but I wasn't ever a CS student and my degrees are in technology education.)

I work 100% remote, as does my wife (technical writing, project management, but also IT), so we figured we could move to the country -- which we've always wanted to do. Since our youngest was nearing the end of high school, we waited for that, and then jumped. But I had bought the main Mollison book when I first heard about it, back when it was fresh, though I still haven't read all of it. But as a result, "permaculture" has been on my mind for a long time. I was a hobby-scale grower of chiles when we lived in town, and had had small gardens at previous houses. So I was hovering adjacent to this way of life for a long time. Witnessing the destruction of physical environment and ideals, that I hold dear, it feels like I *have to* find another way to get by with a lighter touch on the land. Permaculture is the best mental framework for that as far as I know.

It doesn't feel like there's a connection between these two aspects of my life, but maybe I'm just not seeing it. And in some ways, my tech life holds me back from really diving into my stewardship of the land because I can't figure out any land-based way to generate income that would come *anywhere near* what I bring down as salary. (#goldenHandcuffs #firstWorldProblems)

*raises hand*

I was an IT lady just prior to running to the woods.

I knew I was going to be leaving my previous non-tech field well in advance, so I looked to my new field (data analysis) well in advance because I knew it was something I could enjoy, could earn a reasonable living at, and could work remotely. The job I have ended up in is more of a general analyst role, but it still meets those criteria nonetheless. I don't live for my job, but I do acknowledge that right now I need an income, so I made sure I could find something I could at least tolerate.

Another reason I chose this specific field was because it was broad enough that I could get a job that I find at least somewhat ethical. My previous work definitely didn't benefit the earth or society... I won't pretend that my new job is doing wonders for the world, but I can at least sleep at night knowing it is net positive. We aren't clear cutting the rainforest or just trying to sell more widgets at the expense of indigenous peoples...

Permaculture drew me in for similar reasons. I want to make the world better overall.

I was a software engineer for several years. On the surface people into tech and permaculture might seem wildly different, but there's some strong similarities in how they approach the world.

They tend to think in systems. They adjust systems to better meet goals, tweak them to prevent problems, and sometimes build entirely new ones to meet needs inside an existing environment full of other systems.

They learn to look past the initial expressed "want" to understand the reality of what's really going on. They're good at learning new skills and picking up knowledge. They build and alter tools to meet their needs.

Yep, remote-work aerospace startup guy here. I chuckle to myself about the vast dissimilarity between my workday world and the farm world a few steps from my desk. "How I got this way" would be a longer tale, but incrementally, lots of good books, in tandem with my wife (who is definitely more food-health-conscious than me, her reasons go more that path, mine more the liking building stuff path), and wanting my kids to be able to enjoy both the open spaces out of town and to enjoy the work of a mini-farm. So far it's working!

I will note that I am NOT an IT or super-coding guy. Maybe the best single term would be "systems engineer" (and I wince as I write that), but I do have a build bench/mini-lab, and might be the only solar-powered off-grid aerospace research conex... but I might be flattering myself, probably there are lots of people as weird as I am, right?  ...right?...

Keep these stories coming, these are interesting. They don't have to be long. My theory is that tech people make up a large percentage of the people getting into permaculture and homesteading these days, so I'm testing my theory here :)

You do realize that permaculture is nothing more than...

Six sigma for food...   ;-)      

Thus IT people know the drill....


I have worked in IT for Ge motors, then GE Coporate for some years, also worked  in corporate world for some time,  Sweet Water sound with high end audio equipment.        

Now I just like to play with home automation..        Automatic is one of my favorite words.

I'm one of those people who won't buy a car that can drive itself.

No wireless tire pressure monitoring systems that can be hacked. No On Star. Nothing computerized controlling the steering or brakes.

I also once had a recruiter try to woo me into a job mentioning self-driving cars, and I was interested. It turned out, it was a startup from people working on self-driving cars, who pivoted to AI for security cameras. Very lame!

I like knowing how things work and researching incessantly. As such, my tech work generally shifts to be more and more self-hosted, with less and less faith in "cloud" technologies, despite working with them professionally for some time.

There was a point where I was booting/installing systems through iPXE. Everything would be completely up-to-date. Very simple on my end.

Then I realized that without holding my own data, if I was offline I had nothing. A laptop, iPXE booted, can't even be used as a calculator if there's no harddrive or equivalent. So I try to archive what I can and try to be as technologically independent as I can from the "grid" of the Internet.

All while wondering if I'm better off with an axe in the woods. No phone, laptop, etc.

But it would nice to be able to pass along a lot of knowledge, and learn a lot of knowledge. Even copying this information by hand would be a feat. Perhaps in the ashes of the future, we will pass on solar powered desktops reading data from 200 year old Bluray discs, long after flash memory would have faded. But probably, other things would fail by then, and eventually it would be lost for good. Our Library of Alexandria only survives in printed format at that point, until it's burned down again.

Oh well. Problems for the next generations!

I kinda specialise in AV, generalise in IT and electronics and am happy building most things.

I remember searching for how to do stuff and there were actual answers by people who do stuff on permies. This was compared to all the content farms bunging up the internet and now it’s even worse with all the LLM ai junk out there.

My permie progress has been incredibly slow but the knowledge here is invaluable.

Mart Hale wrote:You do realize that permaculture is nothing more than...

Six sigma for food...   ;-)      

I think I understand, but translation please for those who aren't the "it" boys/girls/rainbows.

I was in IT for a long time.  Introduced to permaculture by Jack Spirko and the Survival Podcast.  
Initially started with raised bed gardening, followed by perennial food production, herbalism and chickens.

I've been a human factors/UX researcher for over a decade; that's my "day job" (when I'm not laid off, like I have been since last year...if any of you currently-employed tech people have leads on UX job openings please PM me!)

I agree with the "think in systems" comment. Also there's something about wanting to understand (more) how things work, and how to fix things when they break. Paying attention to the needs and paint points of the "user" and turning that into design improvements. Form follows function, and function is a result of process and iteration--stuff I see all over historic farms and backyard gardens and DIY woodworking sheds.

EDIT: Actually for me the biggest thing might be the adjusting of systems and objects around oneself in a way that promotes flow states and peace of mind.

Six sigma for food...

Six sigma was/is a process for improving processes that was very popular in the 90s at large companies. Originally intended for manufacturing processes, it was later applied to all sorts of things, and so became the butt of many jokes.

Slightly more detail: six sigma refers to a statistical process control toolkit (ie, get six standard deviations out from the mean of a bell curve, that very small number is sort of a target failure rate, 3.4 out of a million). It legitimately applies to a high-volume product (you need a lot of samples for 6sigma to be an integer number), and the process must furnish enough data to permit statistical analysis. This all began with Guinness brewing, believe it or not, which employed the first known professiinal statistician, "Student" of "Student's T-test". And yeah, way overhyped for applications where it made no sense, and a lot of consultants made money and a lot of engineers made jokes.

I would actually go to Lean as a better parallel to Permaculture. Yes, it is afflicted by many of the same overprescription/fat-consultant issues (like fake permaculture?) and has foreign jargon and acronyms (kanban, POLCA, kaizen, hugel, WOFATI...wait...) but at its root it is a philosophy of trying to make what you want more efficiently with less waste. Similarly, it arose because smart people tried hard to do things better (Toyota Production System...Sepp Holzer?) and the jargon was laid on afterwards when people wanted to both spread it and also capitalize on it.

Yep. Tech people in permaculutre are still tech people.

Matt McSpadden wrote: So many people in the homesteading and permaculture movements seem to be coming out of tech.

I've never been much into computers (at least not since the Commodore 64), but as long as you mean 'tech' in a science and tech sort of way, then I came into permaculture via technology. Doing a science degree, because I found science involved far fewer essays than humanities, I used to subscribe to the New Scientist magazine even after starting my job in automotive engineering **. One of the leaflets enclosed one week was for the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), now rather more mainstream technology these days, but CAT introduced me to permaculture in the 1990s and the rest is history.... I now run a shop as a workee job that (just about) pays the bills but gives me a better work-life balance, and a great office window view!



** funnily enough becoming a "6 sigma blackbelt"