| I have an in-law who is the goofy, super lazy kid. Can’t be bothered to do anything. We sent him to school for like 1 semester and he didn’t go to class and just screwed around. His SAT scores off the charts. He just sort of codes and is a genius and doesn’t give a crap or have super crazy aspirations or ambitions. It drove me insane. Zomg your wasted potential! Honestly coding really sucks. Like I don’t know why anyone celebrates it. You barely get to do it in big companies, where you are sort of stitching a bunch of crap together. On the flip side, the engineers I know who became super prolific were all ultra creative. Many have multiple creative hobbies while also being top open source contributors. The most prolific open source developers I know have tons of random interests. The weirder ones, who like doing things like curing weird meat in their fridge and brewing weird alcohol drinks in their bath tubs turned out to be the best. So I don’t know. It’s actually the case where if you told me he sort of does code and has extremely exotic and strange hobbies, then you might have a super star. Programming to me didn’t make sense until I was immersed in a context where it was useful. I didn’t feel the urge to program until I was working on things where protramming helped me go faster. No amount of yelling would have made me into coding in college because there was no use for it. If he goes to work and encounters situations where code helps him go faster he may get into it. In college - coding just often may not make sense or feel a relevant tool. So idk. If he is getting broad exposure to a lot of technology then that is great. Couldn’t tell you. |
I have a million things I want to do and programming can help me do them faster or better. Or it can help me explore different aspects of ideas in novel ways. I can generate art, automate a hydroponic garden, point my telescope at planets and stars automatically, program a fermenting chamber, make games, visualize data in interesting ways, and generally enrich my life.
The fact that I can do it well professionally is mostly a byproduct of using it to explore my hobbies and interests. The worst thing that can happen to me is work which doesn’t further personal interests in some way or another. Fortunately I can be creative about finding ways in which solving arbitrary problems can be interesting in other contexts where I might want to apply what I learn some day, and I can stave off potential burn out here and there.
But yes, I do a lot of stuff. Too many projects at any given time. The fact that I can program is an afterthought, and although I like it, it’s a means to an end and not the other way around.