I do it for the money | Hacker News Reader

I do it for the money

allowedtoapply.tumblr.com

15 pointspkeane14 comments

It's pretty obvious that in a scientific field, without passion, rigor won't find itself. This article reeks of immaturity. And I'd rather have only passionate people in our field. Most coders who only go through a CS degree as oppose to elementary-highschool-life and beyond coders, there's just a huge wall of difference in terms of understanding down from the cpu to tcp networking, across to asm, endianess, etc etc. New coders just never really get it. It's like trying to learn chess at an older age, 90% of grandmasters were grandmasters by the age of around 13.

I learned coding because I wanted to tear shit up as a somewhat dark child. And that's why I know pretty much everything from databases to reverse engineering to packet sniffing/editing to patching, injecting, loaders, class modification, obfuscation and deobfuscation, and XSRF, RCE, shellcode, buffer overflowing, the list goes on. Along with whatever it takes for an interesting programming job.

New coders just don't get it, they are too far outside the scope of (played around with it as a child, because it was interesting.) Money isn't a good enough motivator to teach grubbers the real internals of a machine.

  This article reeks of immaturity. And I'd rather 
  have only passionate people in our field.

There's passion and there's passion. When a job advert says "we want people who are passionate" sometimes they mean "there will be lots of unpaid overtime and we want people who won't complain about it".

I'm all for talented, experienced people in our field, but I think we also need a healthy work-life balance. If someone wants to work 60 hours a week then spend 20 hours a week on their open source side project because they're passionate about coding, that's their choice - but if someone else wants to work 40 hours a week then turn off the computer and spend time with their children, I don't see that as a problem or something they should be ashamed of.

And if my boss stopped paying me, you can bet I'd stop coming into work. If that means I'm in it for the money, then I'm in it for the money.

But you work in a field where there is a demand for those who do understand such things, no matter when they started their training. And you will be asked to work along side those who do not have passion for what they do, but are at least smart enough to learn when its necessary.

It may seem like these impostors are encroaching on your passion, but understand that they are doing a massively difficult task that you may not be able to: to become a master in a field in which they simply choose to be employed.

I haven't met many coders who haven't been coding since they saw a computer that I would like to work with long term. Like you say; they have a hard time talking at the same level of understanding and they always have big gaps in knowledge which I learned from years and years of playful tinkering with the internals (hardware and software) of computers. There is a large amount of catch-up for which life is generally too short. When you are young (I was 8 starting) you can explore 24/7; you don't really notice getting tired, going to bed etc; you are just 'doing things', you have to go to bed for some reason, you cannot wait till the morning and there you continue. When you get older, you don't really have time/money to do that; there is obligations, family, whatever. So most people never reach that kind of 'full control feeling' and that's rather annoying to work with I have found.

90% of grandmasters were grandmasters by the age of around 13.

At risk of hijacking this comment tree, I'd love to see some kind of citation is this is true. It'd be striking if it were.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_grandmasters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_grandmasters#L...

Not even close.

My statement was wrong. I believe the effect is still there, considering that in the lists you linked, the strongest grandmasters happen to _also_ be on the youngest grandmasters list. Clearly there is a 3rd factor that correlates these two, or the effect of young chess learning is profound. I'd think the latter.

Luckily passion and money in this industry aren't mutually exclusive, and I'm extremely grateful for that.

It's can also be difficult to work on Passion A knowing Passion B, 20% lesser, can pay 100%, or more, as much. Money can and do help overcome the relative lack of passion, especially on the margins, even if it may not replace it 100%.

With that said, I'd rather die than study women's studies for the rest of my life for ten times my salary[1].

[1] No free time allowed besides eating and sleeping and going to the bathroom.

I'm burying this as not intellectually interesting. If it developed the point in a thoughtful way, it might be ok, but it doesn't.

You might give some thought to how this relates to the lack of diversity (esp.) gender diversity in our field. It ought to be the starting point for a great discussion. Perhaps HN is not the ideal venue for such a discussion....

Given that working only for the paycheck is probably about 99% of the workforce I don't find this article particularly shocking.

Cool dude -- no worries; I'll just never hire you. Passion is really hard to fake and, frankly, I don't want to work with you if you don't have it.

Relevant: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6523/the_designers_not...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com