Comment by assword
2 days ago
I love(d) programming when I was a hobbyist and still get the itch to hack around with stuff now and then.
But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.
But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.
> I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.
I'm a masochist, I like the challenges and pain I have to deal with everyday for a product I don't care about.
Same, same. It was my main hobby since I discovered a little terminal in my dad's 80s videogame that could run BASIC, used my rudimentary 9 years old reading skills to look hard enough to the manual and figure out something about that puzzling black screen.
Discovered I could make it do stuff.
I could make stuff, just by typing some white characters in the black screen.
Fell in love, was my main indoors hobby, bought books, learned enough C/C++ to try to mod games before I was 14.
The web started to be a thing. I asked for HTML books for Christmas. Then learnt about ASP, it had something to do with Visual BASIC, I knew BASIC.
Learnt the web, got a job, worked my ass off. 12 hours day and loving it, I was 18, and lucky. My hobby was my job.
20+ years later, it's a job, programming is a skill I have and I'm extremely grateful for being so lucky that it also made me a career, allowed me to live in other countries, and ultimately settle down in a very different place than what used to be my home.
But still, it's a job now, not my hobby. After working in many different places, seeing the transformation of this industry, me getting older, it's just all a bit jading, I don't aspire to do this for more than a job these days, the only figment left of the old hobby is the odd electronics project for artists.
I have other hobbies that fulfill me in a very different way, I think it's just life :)