Comment by throwaway386q01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway386q01 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway386q01

> Joel implied that good programmers love programming so much they'd do it for no pay at all. I won't go quite that far, but I will note that the best programmers I've known have all had a lifelong passion for what they do. There's no way a minor economic blip would ever convince them they should do anything else. No way. No how.

This isn't just a minor economic blip, but I took a non-programming (but still technical) job out of college, because it was what I could get. I now have a few kids and pretty firm roots in a town without a lot of programming jobs. I make a six figure salary, I'm reasonably good at what I do and I like my coworkers, so I feel weird complaining about my job, as I'm better off than most people I know...

However, I really want to write software. I contribute to open source projects, and when there is something I can automate at work, I do it. I'm also somewhat concerned that if programming were to become my day job, I would lose interest in it. Has anyone else made the transition from hobbyist to professional, and have any advice to give?

I haven't made that transition, but I can say from experience that (for me, at least) hobbyist side projects are a lot different than working on software full-time. When you're coming up with your own side-projects or picking FOSS to contribute to you get a lot more freedom in what you're doing and how you do it than if it's handed down to you filtered through managers and other more senior engineers. Unless you're lucky, there's a good chance you'd end up working on something that doesn't really interest you or stimulate you in the way that solving your own problems can.

That being said, I work full time on software that doesn't always align 100% with my passions, but it hasn't dulled my interest or excitement in programming in general or my side projects at all.

Agreed though I find that as a professional I'm not as motivated to see side-projects through to completion because I'd rather spend my free time doing other things.

I studied computer science at university, but didn't take a programming job straight away - one of the reasons was that I feared being bored (slow death by cubicle). After dipping into grad school, dropping out, starting a company (where I wrote almost all the code for our product, but did a lot of other things too) and spending several years as a product manager, I switched back to software engineering as a career, and I've never been happier.

While I was working as a PM, I spent a lot of time as a hobbyist programmer, and a lot of time learning about how to engineer good software systems. After leaving that job I spent 6 months or so just building stuff. Games, android apps, whatever I felt like. It was awesome. I turned one of those projects into a consulting gig, then another, then got hired full-time from one of those gigs into a startup where I learned like crazy and sought out as much mentoring as I could get my hands on. I maybe could have done a similar side-step at my previous job, but having talked to some folks about what that would look like, I decided to just jump. It worked out. I hope it does for you too.

I'm also somewhat concerned that if programming were to become my day job, I would lose interest in it.

...Or, as it sometimes happens, you lose interest in writing software for other people.

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