[sokoloff]

If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is, bar none. You'd be a fool to turn away from it for a lifetime grind with epsilon better prospects.

I'd do my job for half what I get paid; I just don't have to.

As for nearing the peak of your ability (assuming typical undergraduate age and experience): BWAHAHAHA! You'll be even better than you are now in 5 years, and again 5 years after that. Only then might you consider that you're near the asymptote. These will be "not small" qualitative differences, in my prediction. Come back and read this 5 and 10 years from, please. :)

(context: MIT '93; I just started my 45th orbit of our star.)

[grmarcil]

Wanted to put in a word of support for this point about looking back in 5 years. I nearing my fifth year out of college and the difference between now and then is huge.

It doesn't always feel that way because we often are comparing ourselves to last week or the guy at the next desk, but just in terms of expanded toolkit and knowing how to work within a big project and a big team, the difference is enormous. Lots of skills, both technical and "soft", that you don't even realize you don't have yet.

I think also, in college, you tend to think of your abilities in terms of A) how clever you are and B) how fast you can learn something new. Once you're working, your abilities are really judged more like A) how effective you are and B) how much you already know. Learning quickly is great, but having already accumulated knowledge and digested it for several years is even better. I could see myself feeling like I'm near the asymptote in 5 more years, but I could also see this going on for another 10 or 15 years. There is a lot to learn.

[sanoli]

> If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is.

I read this and thought, he's right. Then I thought, this is actually true of pretty much any activity. Hadn't thought of it this way.

[Chinjut]

Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation. Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one thing truly worth doing.

[gohrt]

I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a minor league team and I program to pay the bills.

[sanoli]

Sports is different, in that the number of positions available that are good enough financially are very, very few. So for sports, you're just not good enough. As an analogy, if you were a doctor in a smaller town, in a tiny hospital, and you loved it and were good, you'd be fine.

[enraged_camel]

That's probably because sports can't really be considered vocations except by those who play them professionally. Minor leagues aren't really professional level.