Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people like us started doing it, there was zero economic incentive, at least for me. Folks have been making an upper-middle class living writing code since at least the late 70s (when my Mom started). There has always been an economic incentive. Now maybe no one was paying your sixteen year old self to write shitty JS code for that game idea you had, but if one had a BS in CS there were plenty of companies willi…
>your sixteen year old self to write shitty JS code Lol. JS didn't exist when I was 16, but way to miss the point! Ask your mom how many people knew anything about the computers in the 70s and 80s. It was a very small group of mainly ostracized kids. They certainly weren't doing it to get rich.
My dad-in-law has a CS degree that be got in like 1968, and there were a lot of folks in the field at that time according to him. He got started in FORTRAN and COBOL -- he was not a hipster nerd by any stretch of the imagination, just a regular nine-to-five dude. I get the impression from him that largely, in the pre-RMS era anyway, regular programmers were just like any other type of engineerish folk