I know we tend to talk a lot about passion, but I find that more often than not “passion” means being willing to work anyway between five to forty hours of unpaid overtime.
@AstonJ asked in another thread about what sort of interests people in our trade have outside of work.
I’m going to ask what seems to me the logical converse of their question: If you’re only in tech for the money, what would you rather be doing?
Are you happy with your life? Are you content with your working conditions? Do you approve of the uses to which your work is put?
Or are you just pretending to be in order to remain employable because we don’t look out for each other and force management, founders, and venture capitalists to bargain with us as equals?
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I love what I do… I just wish I was smarter and better at it 
I especially don’t mind when the language I’m working with feels natural, intuitive and relatively simple. For me, being able to code is a key - to unlocking almost anything. You can do it to make money… or to change the world. It’s the latter that drives me, but I totally understand why people would want to do it as a job in order to pursue other things they love.
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My problem is that I see this as OR and not XOR. I’m making money and changing the world, and I sometimes wonder if I’m helping change the world for the worse.
This is why I started getting involved with the new Gemini Protocol and started providing hosting at gemini://tanelorn.city. I wanted to do something unambiguously good with my skills.
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Very true 
I hope not Matthew! 
Nice, Gemini looks interesting 
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I hope not Matthew!
So do I, but I think that’s the problem inherent in our work. The tech industry arose out of the military-industrial complex and never really broke free. I’m just glad I don’t work for a FAANG corp or Palantir.
Otherwise, it might be time to start asking, “What would Cecil Harvey do?”
Nice, Gemini looks interesting
Thanks. It wasn’t my idea, but I’d love to see it take flight. It seems obvious that the World Wide Web is leaving its human-centric and document-centric roots behind, and if ordinary people are to continue to have platforms and voices of their own that aren’t owned and controlled by corporate interests, they’ll need a platform that isn’t the web.
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Very good, realistic question.
Nowadays I am not in programming work only for the money. But I am in it mostly for the money.
There are interesting and curious problems to work on out there but I’d wager 95% of all companies with an IT / development department just want to move some data from sources A, B and C, massage them a bit, put them in a database, and have an app that can show the data conveniently and then be able to export the data to systems D and E and/or make a few reports for the financial department. That’s the reality for most programmers out there and it’s no wonder that many lose enthusiasm and desire to work in some short 5 or so years in the profession. And by year 10 many are leaving and are looking for other venues (that’s quite challenging to do; the high programming salaries are very hard to let go of).
The real trouble for more mature programmers who have been around is to find those small percentage of companies working on really interesting problems. And if you want to work on something that’s not necessarily commercial, good luck! Charities and non-profits can be really hostile workplaces due to constant lack of job security.
I like the addendum / post-script of one programming book about Python (sadly forgot which one it was). The author basically said (I am very sure the quote is grossly imprecise but I am also rephrasing my impressions from his short essay there): “At one point you should stop working in the programming area. You will get no respect and your time will be micromanaged. Better off to start a business where you use programming as a secret weapon.”
This is what I am looking to do for myself long-term. Obviously any company I work for in the meantime will have my attention and will receive value from my skills – I am not planning on skimping on productivity just because I’ve realised I should have started a business 10 years ago.
But it gets harder with time. I am 40 now and even if I am the most curious about learning compared to any other age before I now get days where I have exactly zero desire to do anything but read books and stare at the clouds. It’s so extremely powerful that I absolutely can’t do anything about it anymore. When it happens, I am helpless. The day will be unproductive (in the work/capitalistic meanings of the word).
So IMO, people should often re-evaluate what are they spending their time on and do course corrections early without letting your fear of the unknown get the better of you. Else you find yourself with a family you love, doing a work you might hate, so you can have those precious few hours with those people without fearing if you will have a roof over your head and food in the fridge.
It shouldn’t be like that. We can all do so much better.
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I’m in it for the knowledge and making things for people. To be honest adding money in to it has a tendency to turn me off from the areas, not coding specifically, but just because I see how money corrupts it. My current job, programming at a college, mixes my interests very well so the money hasn’t affected my views of it, I’m still super productive even years later. ^.^
I could make soooo much more money doing other work, and I might someday, but it would be the interesting work that brings me in to it, not the money.
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I’m not in it for the money at all. Before becoming a web developer, I was a successful geotechnical engineer. In fact, I could earn twice or maybe thrice as much as I earn as a web developer. I left geotechnical engineering partly because I didn’t like it as much as I enjoy programming/coding, and partly because it wasn’t something I could do from home (I’m kind of lazy person).
And as @AstonJ said,
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