[malthuswaswrong]

A penny saved is a penny earned. Many programmers are employed to automate tasks and reduce labor requirements. That adds value to the organization. You are splitting hairs by saying "the program" vs "the programming". You are a wizard that casts spells to make people's jobs easier. What exactly that means depends on the management. Once a job becomes easier they can either pay fewer employees to do the job or they can take more clients with the staff they have. That's not my decision. My job is to add value to the enterprise by reducing labor costs.

[karpierz]

The parent's point is that you don't make money by casting arbitrary spells, you make money by solving problems for people. You happen to solve them by casting spells, but they're not paying you for the spell, they're paying to make the problem go away.

[dusted]

Exactly, and the value gained by solving the problem is going to be larger than the value of the spells that did it. Nobody is going to pay more money for a program than they're going to make from having that program.

[cableshaft]

> Nobody is going to pay more money for a program than they're going to make from having that program.

Maybe not intentionally. Unintentionally, though, it happens all the time!

Like I've worked on several games for small companies that failed to find an audience and didn't sell well upon release, as well as large new initiatives for large corporations that either never fully materialized or were made to sell with a couple of clients in mind that never ended up signing the contract so those projects ended up getting discarded after the corporation had me put several months of work into them.

Thankfully I've also worked on programs that have had a lot of impact as well.

[dusted]

True, it was vaguely worded..

Nobody pays for software with the intention to pay more money for a program than they believe they will save or earn from the services of that program.

[malthuswaswrong]

There are exceptions. Mostly in the realm of regulations. Sometimes you pay for programming that you simply have to do by law, even if you don't actually want it.

[Retric]

Except division of labor means people are paying people for the actual casting vs any other task. Therefore if you can cast the spells of 4 people that adds actual value directly.

Plenty of other things add more value, but replacing 4 or more people at 200k a pop is already significant money.

[dusted]

You can cast all the spells you want, it's great knowing spells.. but they're ultimately only as valuable as the problems they solve. Any old wizard can cast spells..

But knowing what to cast the spells at.. finding the thing that NOBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD thought as a target for spellcasting, that's where the money's at, that person can then get "fu" rich by casting spells OR by just paying some run of the mill wizard to cast spells. The ideaman gets the money. Sure, you can be both a wizard and ideaman, and that increases your changes, I'm just saying the idea part is the tough part, not the spellcasting.

[qorrect]

Ideas are a dime a dozen - it's the execution, the idea, and luck that gets you rich.

[scsilver]

Yeah but most engineers shoot to short or take to long on automating that thing. Most useful automation takes large standards bodies and decades of coordination. When we are placed in profitable companies it's easier to produced more value than you consume, but I'm not sure making another pet project that I give up halfway through necessarily is. However, I am seeing some evidence if you do build out beginnings in certain fields the knowledge and understanding of that fog of war on the experimental mediums. Think vr programming, the tooling is not great, maybe just diving in there long enough to be brought into a vc back company building out that tooling.

OP, Have you tried getting to some conferences and talking to people, seeing if you can somehow further their goals. Sometimes passion is found in enabling and enriching others with more pointed goals.