You spent all those years down in the trenches implementing bullshit designs an architect came up with, positive you could do better if you just got the chance. Then you go to graduate school to get the qualifications companies say you need to be an architect. You receive a masters degree. You’re your companies leading expert on software design. You get promoted to architect.

That’s when you find out the truth. All those previous architects left for the same reason you someday will. It wasn’t the previous architects making the terrible decisions that frustrated you. It was the marketing team and the CEO telling the CTO that the software product must have certain buzzwords present in the design. Those buzzwords offer no value to what your software product is meant to accomplish. But if you don’t put them in the designs, they’ll fire you and hire someone who will play their games.

Eventually, you can’t take it anymore. Having interfaced with the upper levels of your company, and having the understanding of systems engineering you do, you realize that every software firm will be this. There is nowhere you can go that will be better. You start saving.

Your goal is to save enough money to purchase a small plot of land and put an organic farm on it. Your convictions for this farm are simple: it must be able to feed your family. This may not be exclusively what you envision for it, and you may not even intend for it to be the only source of food for your family, but it will help you be less reliant on the kinds of corporation you’ve come to know and come to see as irrevocably evil.

And then sometimes, you get people like this in the post. Who find enough success farming to focus their energy on it exclusively.