this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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This was a very great article to read whose title does not make justice to the content.
I think I kind of dislike the generalization on generation. To me recently there are simply a lot more people that see programming as a job and not as much as a passion.
I learnt programming as a scientific activity and not as a productive one. So this was driven by creativity. And many in my promotion shared these values. But even in my time, many were just interested in the job. And of course, these people were not as effective. They were mediocre in comparison to people programming in their free time.
And yes, there is probably a lot more people like this today, in particular in younger generation. But there are still a lot of people programming for fun in their free time in the latest generation. This is just, they are now hidden by the majority of more “normal” people. Because let’s face it. Attitude of people programming during the week-end for super long hours while still programming for work during the week is not sane and abnormal.
Edit: a big missing part is that passionate dev are not necessarily what company prefer. Because yes, they can do incredible work. But quite often I see company prefer to have few of them and a bunch of more mediocre but reliable developers.
There's a lot of pitfalls in that direction.. but there's also no denying that there's an entire generation of people who grew up equating using computers with programming computers.
Our Apple IIs and C64s booted into BASIC. That was the interface you learned. Just using the computer literally involved programming, even if it was tangential. My grade school "computer class" where we learned how to use a computer, was focused on programming the turtle to move around the screen with LOGO. I remember a time when "repeat" was the longest word I knew how to spell because of that class.
Basically, you have to go out of your way to learn how to program today, involving downloading specialized software etc. In the 80s, you were ankle deep in programming just by turning the computer on.
Fully agree with what you said. There are still just as many passionate people fascinated by computers in the youngest generation as there are in older generations. It's just that the sheer number of programmers has made them less visible in recent years.
Also, one thing the article misses is that programming 8 hours a day and then continuing to program in your spare time is not healthy for many people. People are different, and there are some who can do it without negative consequences, but for others it can lead to burnout, especially if they also have a family to take care of or other issues to deal with. I used to do a lot of programming in my spare time when I was in college. Now that I have a 40-hour-a-week job, I've learned that I need to be careful how much energy I spend, and I don't do as much open source work because I need a lot of my free time to rest and recharge.