I thought about this, but then thought why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work only to be making no money and have a wave of whinging users furious I didn’t fix their pet bug. When I could instead spend that time sitting on a beach sipping martini’s.
I think it’s about makers gonna make mindset. If you like building things you spent all time building things. Sipping martini’s may be fun for the first week.
That's fine in a truly affluent laissez-faire society that we've enjoyed
through the 80s and 90s and some of this century.
But here's what might happen when the good will and good faith of free
labour that supports the machine is pushed too far. A little fictional
retelling of "The Golden Goose" for our time [1]
The makers who are going to make are making now, not making money at Facebook so they can later make. I have no idea if I'm going to die tomorrow and I'm not going to do so as a Facebook employee dreaming of the day I'm not.
Getting paid a lot to sit behind a big desk on week days and occasionally write C++ in order to support my own venture eventually became untenable. I couldn’t bring myself to take the day job seriously: it’s useless corporate shit that does nothing but make the world a worse place, and it took time and attention away from making my own customers happy.
Edit: the worst of it was that because I stopped caring about office politics, I ruthlessly called out process problems, and accumulated ridiculous amounts of responsibility far beyond my job description. I hope everything went OK after I stopped showing up.
Exactly. Given unlimited budget of both time and money, how would I amuse myself with it?
Buy a big house. Ok then what? Sit on my couch in my big house? What about the 2nd hour?
Sure I'd travel and consume amusements like ziplining in the jungle or something and seeing plays and concerts.
Ok but then what?
What I would do is buy a big workshop and fill it with all kinds of tools in all kinds of different disciplines, from woodworking to 3d printing to welding to machining to chemistry to glassworking to software to electronics... (ok I lack imagination because in fact my garage, basement, guest room, and a rented 10x20 self storage unit are already stuffed to the gills with those exact things, plus guitars and aquarium stuff and cycling stuf...) and not just to look at them but to play with them.
That IS my maitai on the beach.
The beach is very enjoyable, and I do enjoy it, but it is not interesting.
The users who get my stuff for free don't matter at all. I owe them nothing. If I care about a project or a project's reception or usefulness or quality, then I care about it. The users don't extract unwilling care out of me, I have to already care on my own, which means adressing bugs or features is just more of the same work I WANTED to do just like the developing in the first place.
It's totally backwards to think of the users as some kind of burden you hate.
I mean, let's say you do hate that burden: ok then just don't release any of the stuff you built. But then what was the point in that? Yes you can't help building stuff and it was engaging and interesting to build, and you chose to do it when you had the choice to do anything you wanted... but still, part of what makes something worth doing is that it's at least theoretically not totally pointless. Even if in reality your github gains no real audience, it's good enough that it's at least published and out there and could possibly be found interesting or useful by someone else sometime. The mere possibility is enough. But to me unreleased code is a dead end. It's maybe good for exercise but what good is the exercise if not to eventually use the strength for something somewhere that is something other than exercise?
So you build and publish and so what if some users whinge?
but it's not about making cool new things that everybody is interested on
by this point the issue is maintaining boring old stuff everybody depends on
maybe that's what happens to most (google for example), from being a cool new research program in search and document analysis to just another company trying to make money to keep up
I have played around with elementary OS for a bit, and even though it was "coding like at work", it was really refreshing to see how much elementary's tiny team has already achieved. At the MegaCorp day job, every new button requires a meeting marathon only to fail in unforeseen ways.
Martinis on a beach and hobby coding are also compatible.
In my experience it’s definitely about company size / stakeholder count rather than user base. You don’t need a bunch of people to sign off if there aren’t a bunch of people.
It's entirely about company size and profit. Small companies can't afford to have their limited staff wasting time on bullshit. Big companies tolerate or even encourage it, for various reasons.
> why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work
If you are spending your time at work exactly the same way you would spend your freetime then yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
Many of the jobs that pay well don't make you do things that are fun though, but more things the business needs in order to make more profit. Since it is like that for most software developers, I think that's the perspective that
akvadrako has as well.
With that perspective, then it makes sense to work (on unfun work) for X amount of years in order to afford spending Y amount of years on actually fun work.
History shows that programmers tend to build more useful and groundbreaking work when there is no deadlines and it's for their own fun as well.
