[__s]

This might surprise you, but some us enjoy programming

I was programming for free for years. Then I was programming for practically minimum wage for a few years. Now I'm programming for a nice salary. I get paid to wake up & do what I want

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I program for free, nowadays. I made enough, as a manager (which I hated), to be able to retire early, at a fairly humble level (which was a good thing, because no one wants to hire "olds"), and I do work on nonprofit stuff.

The project I'm working on now, would make a lot of Fortune 100 companies green with envy, and I'm doing it for free.

[spacemanmatt]

My career seems to be doing better because I'm crowding 50. I was expecting worse.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I suspect the biggest blocker for me, was that I was a manager.

[DanUKs]

That’s great at your parents house but when you have kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, doing it for free is off the cards, no matter how much you love it.

[unnouinceput]

I would never stop programming. It is a joy for me to do little utilities that makes my life easier. Even with billions of dollars in bank account I would still hack away at an ESP32 to stick it in a flying helicopter toy for example. And lucky for me this field is highly dynamic, I would never get bored learning new technologies. For me programming is like a kid with his shiny toys, every day another one. And I am pretty sure plenty of programmers feel the same way.

[Brian_K_White]

Makery stuff is still fun, but the work stuff used to be fun and now is not.

I did a lot of sysadmin so it was a lot of individual unix servers and different kinds of integration problem solving getting printers or networks to work or rigging up weird edi's over modems or ftp etc, getting some bespoke backend software to talk to some weird machine where nether the OS, nor app, nor apps language, nor wierd machine vendors provided that last bit of help needed to connect them together, mini-proto-HA by just making a better more redundant ordinary server,.. basically "IT rigging"

That was for me all just great fun. But now 99% of that is just cloud services and they are all soul sucking to me, probably more because of the corporate environment they get used within more than the tech itself, where you and everyone else are hardly treated any different than the machine. Everything is so managed that I don't feel like the modern tools are expressive and empowering like the old tools. Everything is services with predefined limits and potentials based middle of the bell curve assumptions about what people need vs languages and hardware where you rigged up your own interesting solutions to each new problem.

So I too now play with arduino/esp32 toys and open source projects for fun, and am pretty glad I already made enough money that it doesn't matter that no one would pay me for this.

[unnouinceput]

I went freelancer. Out of aprox. 12 hours per day I do programming my clients get like maximum 3. Rest are for me personally. Learn new stuff, play with different tech, etc. Most of the time my playing time also translates into paying stuff from my clients later on the road, but not immediately.

And yes, some projects I get from clients are soul sucking, but I chose them fully aware of that, hence the balance heavily in my favor in terms of hours. I get back my soul after was sucked this way :).

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I can relate.