I just want to code (2023)

I have no idea why they mention coding. It is the same in any kind of job. You can bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos ...

At a certain stage, you realize that in order to be able to do only that job, you must make someone pay you for it. You must do it in a way (or in a volume) which makes others happy. The fact that it makes you happy is not enough anymore.

I don't think there is an angel and a devil. It is still the same thing. If you like the result of your work, there is a high chance that others will like it. You don't need to change what you do by a 100%. Changing it by 5% - 10% is often enough.

I think it's more common because one doing only coding can get paid reasonably. On the contrary, few people who "bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos" can get paid enough for a living, so that's usually not an option to consider. (Which is the reason that I find us coding people very lucky.)

> only coding can get paid reasonably

If you happen to work for a company that's big enough to pay reasonably. And even that is still a very temporary accident of times.

There was a time with plenty (comparatively to today) of tailors, living very reasonably, because there was a demand, and the means.

Today, you're lucky if you manage to find one that's in your city, and even more if he/she's not too expensive (that is, compared to ready-made stuff).

Come on, coding is universally at a premium compared to other trades. Naturally you wouldn't have a FAANG salary at an outsourcing farm overseas but it'll certainly provide you with comfortable living by local standards.

Like you almost spelled out, tailors were never competing with ready-made. Clothing used to be expensive, until people (sometimes children) working for pennies were able to send to you across long distances something good enough to wear.

I'm not sure that is actually true about tailors. My understanding is that most clothing was homemade. I assume people didnt generally make their own shoes but they made their own textiles and basic garments and most people didnt have many garments.

Maybe there is a specific time period you are referring to where this was common but as I understand it, pre-industrially there were very few artisans selling products for money. Clothes were made largely by women and girls for their families.

One can combat it by just choosing discipline, grit, perseverance and stop boxing themselves into angel vs devil kind of thinking. You are either working for self or working for someone else.

Life is rather what you make of it than the society perception of it.

> coding is universally at a premium compared to other trades

It has been and it still is at this time. Just saying that it won't last.

The existential threat, and perpetual adaptation to technology musicians (classical as well as contemporary) have met since the invention of sound recording and its developments, is coming for software developers too.

> perpetual adaptation to technology musicians have met

Didn't it also went with an important reduction in the number of people who could make a living out of that?

> I have no idea why they mention coding. It is the same in any kind of job. You can bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos ...

One reason is that coding is so much more scalable than all of those. There are loads of stories of people who made some small thing that was useful, and were able to make a tidy profit on it (or sometimes a fairly large one).

I enjoy making homemade wines. Occasionally someone will try something I've made and ask if I'm thinking about selling it professionally. No way -- it's a fun hobby, but definitely not something I want to do in enough scale to be self-supporting.

I also enjoy languages, and developed an algorithm for helping me find material to read that's at the right level -- only a handful of words that I don't know. It's been incredibly helpful for me, and I'm sure it could be incredibly helpful to millions of people out there as well; so I quit my job and am trying to figure out how to make that happen:

https://www.laleolanguage.com

I disagree that coding for fun and making it a product is 5-10% difference. I would say it's closer to 500-1000%. I coded a lot of tools for myself, for productivity or for fun. Currently I'm very quick in doing that thanks to LLMs, it's definitely not vibe coding, althoug there is a lot of code generated. As these tools serve only me, I may not care about code quality, about bugs, about someone elses data loss, about security, GDPR, different devices, mobiles, screen sizes, platforms, etc. I don't have to support "users" as an entity at all in my apps, it can be all hidden behind VPN, so i don't need auth. I have so many little issues in my apps so I know I can not for example click this and that in rapid succession, or drag this thing out of this container etc. It's 100% fine for me, it would absolutely needed to be fixed for other users. I would need something like a user manual, marketing page, payment processing? I don't get any support e-mails and angry users. There are many compromises that I can make with little value loss if I code just for me as compared to trying to offer a service for people and ask for money.

Be that as it may, there definitely used to be more tailors.

Presumably he is referring to the industrialization period when suits were the everyday fashion. Once we moved on to baggy jeans and sweatpants, where the fit doesn't matter much, then the tailor was no longer relevant.

so you are saying work is meant to be miserable and coding is the exception. Is that a life worth living?

Precisely.

Yes, I'm referring to what we could call the golden age of tailoring, around 1800-1970.

You could say it was brief, relative to humanity history, indeed, as a transition period between cottage/home textile manufacturing as well as sewing, and high (and accelerating) automation managed by fewer people and lots of low-paid workers (as it is today).

And such is the trajectory for software development, a brief golden age, between the moment where computers barely existed, and the moment where automation/acceleration takes over.

It won't eliminate software development, but it won't require as many people as it does today. Some "local" artisan shops, highly skilled, and more expensive, may still exist.

But the capital currently feeling high tech salaries will inevitably seek new/other growth opportunities, as it has always done with other growth drivers.

It's not that work is meant to be miserable, it's that if work wasn't in some ways miserable/frustrating/unrewarding/etc, more people would be doing it for free.

Or rather, you wouldn't need to pay people to do things they already enjoy doing. So, the things you need to pay people to do must contain some things that people don't want to do for free.

I code at work so they can give me money so I can buy the stuff I need to carry on living. I have very generous employers who pay me a lot more money than I need to live on. The code I write at work is not very creative code - I contribute bugfixes and incremental improvements; I advocate for better accessibility of our products; I spend time code reviewing for colleagues. Standard work.

When the working day ends I switch from my work laptop to my personal laptop and start doing fun stuff: creative coding; curious-itch-scratch coding; etc. I'll also spend time doing the other fun stuff like writing poems, inventing languages, drawing maps, watching reaction videos - there's all that family and friend stuff too which can (often) be fun.

It's a choice: "live-to-work", or "work-to-live". I choose living. Recently my employers had a promotion round (the first in a few years) and I told my manager not to put my name forward for consideration. I'm comfortable at my current level and don't need the worries and stresses that come with increased work responsibilities - that would just get in the way of the fun stuff!