91–100 of 120 posts
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Not everyone who programs loves programming, but everyone needs to make a living. You are lucky that what you love also makes money.
Make a living doing something you love. If you don't love programming then do something else.
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Do you take drugs to prevent sleep? Because sleep is stealing a huge amount of your life too.
It's fair to say that I love sleep :) Indeed, very few people in our industry don't appreciate a daily hit (or two) of caffeine.
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Do something you love is referring to creative passions. Find something creative you love to do and make it your profession. Think of the people making the games you enjoy and how many of them must enjoy what they do because of the obvious quality in the product they are producing. Try to find that for yourself. If you only love consumption habits, try taking up new hobbies. There must be something that you will enjo…
Think of the people making the games you enjoy and how many of them must enjoy what they do because of the obvious quality in the product they are producing. Try to find that for yourself. This sounds very naive. I've gone for beer with various people in the gaming industry. From ubisoft QA team leader to indie game programmer to Blizzard Project Manager. All of them were tired of their jobs. For all of them it was "…
I am interested in the indie game programmers being unhappy. That seems almost paradoxical, unless they were just unsuccessful. I cannot imagine Notch having a stronger passion that making video games.
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You would get payed if you stayed longer? Here (Portugal) it's common practice for every kind of dev to work overtime with no extra pay, it's seen as a trait of the job and it's not just when there's a huge deadline, because there always is.
Same in the US. I have never heard of software developers (who work as full-time employees) earning overtime pay. I'm not sure if contractors who bill hours are eligible for overtime pay.
Look, the people you are "pitying" are the people you depend on: we make your operating systems, your languages, your frameworks, your tools; we invent the things you use; we create your social networks; we abstract away the things you find too hard; we built the very internet you're using to mock us. Do not fuck with us, for without us, you would be a clerk in a dusty room writing out invoices with a pen.
Why are you assuming "501 developers" don't do any of the things you list? I think the point is that you can have balance in your life and be a good & passionate coder.
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I think this is the nearest real-life equivalent to "let them eat cake" I have ever seen. Are you going to pay me to play Xbox with my brother or go out to dinner with my wife and talk about interesting books we've read? Neither is anybody else. For most people, the set of "things I love" and "things people will pay me to do" intersect very little if at all. (I don't actually have this conundrum. There are a few thin…
Do something you love is referring to creative passions. Find something creative you love to do and make it your profession. Think of the people making the games you enjoy and how many of them must enjoy what they do because of the obvious quality in the product they are producing. Try to find that for yourself. If you only love consumption habits, try taking up new hobbies. There must be something that you will enjo…
1) The product has to be valuable enough to a reasonably large number of people
2) You have to be reasonably good at what you do (this isn't a given at all)
3) Very likely, you have to be reasonably good at marketing (and, if we're really serious about the "doing what you love" thing, love marketing)
Even if you really love doing something creative, without the above, you better love it more than eating if you're going to try doing it for a living.
“It’s just a job.” It's just 8 hours a day. 5 days a week. Roughly 25% of your life. Another 33.3% is spent asleep. Maybe you commute to work; maybe that takes you 45 minutes each way. That's 4.4% of your life spent driving, walking, on trains or buses to get to your job. You're going to spend a small percentage of your life on the toilet; another small percentage in supermarkets buying food, in a kitchen preparing i…
That's only if you're lucky. At least in America, 10 or more hours a day is quite common. In the tech field, some weekend work is also not unheard of. In some companies and industries (like game development, startups, finance, not to mention insane shifts that nurses and doctors are forced to work), death marches and sweatshops where you work 14 to 16 hour days for months on end is the (pathological) norm.
The above doesn't even count the times where you bring the work home with you, nor how the crap you have to deal with at work affects the rest of your life emotionally and the (usually detrimental) effect it has on your health.
You do get compensated somewhat financially for this. But how much is your health and emotional well-being really worth?
Consider this next time some company sends out a pitch for a ninja or rockstar that loves to work in an "exciting", "fast-paced" environment.
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I think this is the nearest real-life equivalent to "let them eat cake" I have ever seen. Are you going to pay me to play Xbox with my brother or go out to dinner with my wife and talk about interesting books we've read? Neither is anybody else. For most people, the set of "things I love" and "things people will pay me to do" intersect very little if at all. (I don't actually have this conundrum. There are a few thin…
Do something you love is referring to creative passions. Find something creative you love to do and make it your profession. Think of the people making the games you enjoy and how many of them must enjoy what they do because of the obvious quality in the product they are producing. Try to find that for yourself. If you only love consumption habits, try taking up new hobbies. There must be something that you will enjo…
There's nothing like being forced to do something for a living to turn what you love in to a chore.
I used to love programming. Then I did it professionally, day in and day out, for years on end. It didn't take very long to make it a boring chore that I felt I was forced to do.
Then I switched to system administration. At first it was fun and interesting, but as my learning plateaued it became boring as well (not to mention very stressful).
Then it was on to something else. Rinse and repeat..
There are consequences to this sort of career-switching (not to mention to the burnout involved). Usually, it's the specialists with a simple, linear career path that get rewarded. Generalists and jacks-of-all-trades do not typically get much in the way of compensation or respect. Companies will look askance at your switching jobs (not to mention careers) so often, and you will find it difficult to compete with someone who's been doing just that one thing his whole career.
But the problem for people like me is mainly the tendency of getting bored too quickly. We pick up hobbies and interests for a while, but then they bore us -- even if we are not forced to do them for a living (though the rate at which they bore us tend to increase the more we are forced to do them day in and day out).
So what's the solution? There doesn't seem to be one. We just have to suck it up and work at a job that we'll inevitably get bored of and hate.. unless someone wants to pay us to play and to pursue whatever interest strikes our fancy at the moment. And, at least for me, that's probably not happening in this lifetime.