[eternityforest]

I think he should find an existing FOSS project to get involved with, which has a similar style to a typical IRL project, to see if he likes it.

I'm not a parent or an expert on life, but I sure do see a lot of programmers who love tinkering, but hate their job, hate tech in general, and spew nonsense micro services, constant rewrite, and reinvent js framework wheels endlessly, trying their best to treat work like a throwaway weekend project, as if playing with ideas mattered more to them than being a part of a quality product.

If I had to guess, just based on my increasingly biased view of the tech scene at the moment, he'll either hate programming and get bored, or be exactly the kind of dev I'd absolutely love to work with.