On Saturday, March 23, 2002, at 05:01 PM, Adam Back wrote: > Tim writes: >> There are other examples of "one man projects with limited >> expectations of financial gain," whether anonymity was an issue or >> not. Stallman comes to mind. Ditto for a lot of the early Unix >> tools, even entire languages. > > Not coincidentally there is a file called MOTIVATION included with the > emacs package (try "locate MOTIVATION" or your unix system) which > talks about these issues. It rang quite true for me. I've found > programmer performance is strongly related to interest -- I figure a > strongly motivated programmer can produce times over more creative > work and can deliver more quickly than someone slogging through > intrinsically boring trudge work; financial incentives don't make > something interesting in itself. The attention span, motivation depth > and concentration level of a disinterested person is I suspect still > typically lower than an interested person even given relatively > significant purely financial rewards.
And though the phrase sounds hackneyed, and is a book is title thusly, this is a true statement: "Do what you love and the money will follow." Or, more precisely, "And if the money doesn't follow, at least you did what you wanted to...and a lot of people who chased the money doing something they hated ended up with squat." When I was in my physics phase, my father used to bug me about how physics was not where money was to be made...and in the early 70s he sometimes cited the hoary reports of "physicists driving taxi cabs." But I wanted to do physics, so I did. I compromised a bit on not going into relativistic astrophysics, and did some catch-up work in solid state, landing me a job at Intel. A lot of fun, and a lot of money, though I didn't think about the money until many years later. Lessons for self-starters are obvious. Who knows what the hot field of 20 years from now will be? (Actually, I have some fairly clear ideas.) Sadly, I think a boatload of people who went into "security" because it was rated "Cool" by places like "Wired" are now finding it's not so cool after all. There are a lot of exciting aspects of it, but they sure as hell don' t involve working down in the bowels of some large corporation doing maintenance, which is what most "security professionals" end up doing. The exciting stuff is right here, or in academic branches of crypto. Whether it ever leads to money depends on a lot of exogenous variables. Do what you love, first. It may be the only chance you'll ever have. --Tim May
