[saulpw]

> What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

The days of patronage are basically over; no one pays you real money to explore anymore. Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain towards some goal. There may be an exploration phase but well over half the work will be the grind of bugfixing and maintenance (or equivalent in other fields) that is the actual reason for your employment.

[ChuckMcM]

Could you say more about that? I don't think of it as patronage and I agree with this statement: "Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain towards some goal." but in my experience you can go to a corporation and say "I'm really interested in working on <this thing>, are you interested in that sort of stuff?" And if they are they'll start paying you money to explore that thing with them. I did exactly this the first time I "retired", I'm really fascinated by software defined radio and I was exploring how it works and what one could do with it and a friend said, "I'm working at a company that needs help understanding how to do repeatable software and they are doing a lot of SDR work." Which led to a conversation with the CEO that led to a job offer where I helped their software teams get better and I got to use the multi-million dollar RF lab to continue my explorations. Granted my role was "technical leader" and not "programmer" but how I spent my time was a joint agreement between the company leadership and my interests. I wouldn't expect a company doing accounting software to pay me to design SDRs of course.

And if you passion is something completely different then that can be the case too. A executive I met at IBM retired and has gone head first into their actual passion which is art history. They didn't major in it at school or try to get a job in it because those jobs didn't pay them what they wanted but now that they are retired they are spending their time in libraries and museums all over the place digging into the nuances of various bits of art. Are they "working"? Yes in the sense that they are doing the same thing they would have done if someone had hired an art history major apparently :-).

[keiferski]

Getting paid to work on your hobby only works if your hobby is somehow tangential to industry. For technical people, this isn’t really a big issue, because we live in a society that puts technical achievements (which result in profits) above pretty much everything else.

But for non-technical people, getting paid by a corporation to work on your hobby is mostly impossible, no matter how important the problem is. No company is going to fund things which are deemed important yet don’t make anyone money directly.

[DrillShopper]

"Hey, HP? I'm really interested in working on a new way to tie flies for fly fishing, are you interested in that sort of stuff?"

I wonder why I haven't heard back....

[smokel]

There are still people with too much money who want to do good. In the art world, for example, it is pretty common to sponsor promising artists in one way or the other.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the problem of picking the right person to donate to is a very hard one.

And the amounts of money involved might be on the low end of your expectations.