[lomendil]

I remember seeing a shift in CS student populations, say around 1999, from people who already had a self-developed interest in computing to people who wanted to learn programming as a trade to make money. The first group had probably taught themselves programming and had already been tinkering with system internals and hardware. They were programming because they were drawn to it for whatever reasons.

I think the author of this piece is from the latter group. To that group, software as craft just doesn't fit into their world. Whereas I think the first group has an understanding that beauty on the inside of a program shows on the outside too, especially over time.

[leoedin]

It's the same in a lot of technical fields. In my mechanical engineering courses there was a minority who truly loved everything to do with machines. The people who work on their car at weekends or build projects in their spare time. They were truly excited just to be able to do what they loved and get paid for it.

The majority though are people who have some affinity for maths and sciences and have made a career choice to study engineering. They put in the hours to do the coursework, but if it's not proscribed in the course they simply won't do it. They go home and don't think about engineering at all. Big companies are full of these people, chugging away at their job but not particularly interested in spending their spare time honing their skills or working on other stuff because it's actually pretty awesome.