Yesterday's post was closer to the actuality of a programmer than this one. To reiterate what I said yesterday, when you are coding professionally, you don't choose what technologies to use, you don't pick projects that itch your creative side. You're just part of a production steam roll. Passion is irrelevant in this discussion. What matters is how fast you can deliver and whether you are more billable than the next guy.
The other parameter in this equation is Money. I am sure I can find a low stress dev job working on a project that I am actually interested in but at age 50 i don't want to be living on medium wage making ends meet. I'd rather work on a high stress job, while I am young, with a decent salary, giving it all I have and by 40 I'd have secured my future enough that I can do something else ... my two cents
>you don't pick projects that itch your creative side
Right I'm doing contract work, so actually I do tend to pick the interesting projects. Before that I had a job where I specified the technology that I was using -- and that everyone else had to use. Before that I picked a job that used technology I wanted to be using. And so on...I haven't been "forced" to use a technology that I didn't think appropriate for a long time (unless you count the idiot decisions by Google and Apple to use Java and Objective C, respectively, but I've been minimizing my contamination by both).
And it was exactly passion and an urge to learn, just as the guy described in the article, that enabled me to be in this position. My contract work pays up to $125/hour, and I'm rapidly approaching age 50, so what were you saying about "medium wage"? Or do you work for Wall Street and make twice that now?
Or maybe you've got the wrong job? Or you don't have a passion for programming? As he said, if you don't have it, you'll burn yourself out and go elsewhere.
A contract worker with a luxury of selecting which client's projects to work on and get paid $125/hour. You realize your are the 1%. The 99% have more constraints and hardships.
I am "the 1%"? Not nearly, if you mean "THE 1%," which starts at around $350k per year.
If you just mean the top 1% of developers? Well, maybe I AM in the top 1% of developers, though I don't know how anyone could measure that. But the point is I got here through passion. And the point of my reply is that passion IS relevant to this discussion.
And that it's only not relevant to people who don't experience it with regard to programming. Honestly, I don't know if someone who doesn't experience passion can CHANGE that; you're passionate about what you're passionate about, and telling yourself to obsess about something seems like it just wouldn't work.
So don't take this as any kind of criticism; I'm not saying you're Doing It Wrong. Just that passion DOES make a difference; when you have it, you have no reason to listen to people who tell you that you'll be irrelevant and no one will hire you when you're 45, because you'll be keeping yourself relevant out of habit. Just don't claim that it's not relevant in general, because it is. Climbing to the top of ANY profession or other endeavor really requires it; the most obvious example being Olympic athletes, who typically don't start out at the top of their sport, but achieve the top by being more passionate (and therefore obsessive) about practicing.
It makes me want more terms for "programmer" or "developer" (and not including "rock star", which has connotations that annoy people). There's such a range of skill encompassed by those terms that they're practically useless, and they spawn debates like the above where people have 15 different ideas what a "programmer" is (in yours, I'm in the top 1%, and in mine, I hang out with "typical" developers, and yet a lot of people I know work on interesting projects with an option to contract). Heck, pretty much everyone at Google is in a similar situation, in that they can (typically) switch projects easily if they get bored. And there are far too many developers at Google for all of them to be in the top 1%, I think.
I understand where you're coming from. PASSION (with capital letters) is important. PASSION for programming is what got me to get a BA and MA in computer science. It's what makes me sit in front of my computer working on side projects whenever I have a chance to. However, the point of this article and the original one is not that. These articles speak of the day to day stress loaded routine job of a regular* developer. And this is where passion (with lower case letters) is not important. My point about the 1% vs the 99% is that not everyone works for Google, Facebook ... In fact, all the contract workers I know struggle a great deal to make ends meet. We need to broaden our analysis to the sate of programming in the whole world. I am not talking about silicon valley or the bay area, which I consider to be the 1%. I had the chance of working in mid-west USA and in a foreign country and I have friends working in other countries. All I can say is that the majority of them don't want to be programming when they are 50.
Programing is power. Why do big tech companies pay $250k for basically a risk-free position to a good programmer? The key is knowing how to apply that power to making money.
When you are young you put in the hours to learn the craft. It's like any craft really, you need to put in a lot of time and effort to get good at it. At the same time you should be learning something about the world and how programming can solve problems in it. Maybe in business or something else. But at any rate, by the time you're 40 you should know how to make programming work for you. You definitely don't want to isolate yourself in a world of code without understanding how it succeeds or fails to provide ROI, otherwise you'll hit 40 and still stuck on the hamster wheel (or at best with a temporary nest egg).
