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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

When I started in computing in the 80s a lot of people did programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun. People did things like easter eggs and other stupid stuff. Now it's just a career and everything is about money, money and more money. I guess that's a natural progression once something goes mainstream.

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From my POV (maybe I'm just looking in a different direction?) I see way more people programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun than ever before. As just one example the 2018 Global Game Jam had 8,608 game created in a weekend. The Unity community is HUGE. The Processing community, the Open Frameworks community, the Three.js community. Not seeing a lack of people doing programming for curiosity and fun.

There are more people programming for intellectual reasons now than ever before in absolute numbers.

However, that larger absolute number is a much smaller proportion of the total number of programmers than it was in the past.

I think it's also safe to say that the mainstream of programming has moved more towards monetary motivation and away from intellectual curiosity.

And look at the quality:quantity ratio...

I was more talking about the workplace. Now we have a lot of "professionalism" and "management" with a lot of restrictions. Back then you didn't have that in a lot of companies. As a dev in a company you had much more freedom. I can understand the need for professionalism but it definitely takes the fun and adventure out of things.

When something is valuable economically, this shift seems inevitable... the same happened to electronics, electricity (telegrams etc), steam etc. (Probably, it was different before the industrial revolution and modern corporations.)

The actionable question is: what's next? What promising technical field is not yet economically valuable?

People can't afford to have hobbies like they used to.

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