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How to stay sane
Dec. 16th, 2004 11:16 pmI have determined how to stay sane as a programmer.
Or maybe I've determined why the same people who will work for $8 an hour in a university are worth $50k in business, I'm not sure which.
It's easy. See, you have to get paid or you starve, right? In a larger sense, you have to get paid a lot or you can't buy computers and then you're bored, which is bad. But, at the same time, you couldn't care less whether your company makes a profit selling word processors. In fact, you couldn't care less whether your word processors even work, because word processing is boring. You want to work on interesting projects.
If you try to sell your interesting project, then one of two things happens: either you spend the lion's share of your time doing things that are not coding, which is boring, or you screw up somewhere, nobody buys your project and you starve again. Option 1 is bad for everyone except people who don't want to be hackers, option 2 is bad for everyone except people who think Ramen is nutritous.
So. You can't work for a company because it's boring, and you can't work for yourself because it's either boring or suicidal. What's left? Universities and the government. Work for a university doing something boring for almost free, and you'll have both the money and the free time to work on the interesting projects you want. You can then give away the interesting projects, thus avoiding any necessity to spend time deciding how much it should cost or other boring, non-code-related tasks.
You could also find a company that sells cool projects, but those generally want someone smarter than you.
Or maybe I've determined why the same people who will work for $8 an hour in a university are worth $50k in business, I'm not sure which.
It's easy. See, you have to get paid or you starve, right? In a larger sense, you have to get paid a lot or you can't buy computers and then you're bored, which is bad. But, at the same time, you couldn't care less whether your company makes a profit selling word processors. In fact, you couldn't care less whether your word processors even work, because word processing is boring. You want to work on interesting projects.
If you try to sell your interesting project, then one of two things happens: either you spend the lion's share of your time doing things that are not coding, which is boring, or you screw up somewhere, nobody buys your project and you starve again. Option 1 is bad for everyone except people who don't want to be hackers, option 2 is bad for everyone except people who think Ramen is nutritous.
So. You can't work for a company because it's boring, and you can't work for yourself because it's either boring or suicidal. What's left? Universities and the government. Work for a university doing something boring for almost free, and you'll have both the money and the free time to work on the interesting projects you want. You can then give away the interesting projects, thus avoiding any necessity to spend time deciding how much it should cost or other boring, non-code-related tasks.
You could also find a company that sells cool projects, but those generally want someone smarter than you.
