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After 30k/40k/??? hours of programming, I wish I had spent a chunk of the time learning how to play the piano well or something.

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Ouch. Well, never too late to take up piano or woodworking or something. After 40k hours of programming, rock climbing might be out though... your poor hands!

Luckily I managed to pop out of the other end of the machine with my limbs intact.

There's not as much money in piano as in programming.

Looking back, that shouldn't have been so much of a driving force.

Now that I think of it, the right answer would have been several 10k hour professions. I can't say that the products I designed in 2020 were more complex or amazing than those in 1980. It would have been a chance to achieve high levels of proficiency in multiple fields.

The "10k hours rule" is of course just a rule of thumb, with a lot of exceptions depending on the skillset. I believe the number of hours required for mastering the violin was 25k.

I think the programming field is large enough to learn and improve your whole life. You probably have to change domains, programming languages, frameworks, architectures, companies, and switch from web to mobile, from frontend to backend, from serverless to embedded -- but there are always new ways of experiencing the beginner's mind.

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