One thing that I would like to point out is, being financially successful and extremely competent programmer are two different things. An example Zed Shaw is an extremely good programmer, but if you read his legendary rant "rails is ghetto" you come to know besides being an extremely great programmer he had to struggle financially.
So being a good programmer is not synonymous to having your bank accounts with decent zeroes following some non zero number.
Incidentally, yesterday I was talking to a programmer who had been coding for 17 years, he codes bots for games in C++ when not coding other stuff. He did not take his degree seriously, and today is looking for an MNC to hire him, so that he gets married, for the chic wants a secure life.
What did the good programmers do differently? Its a difficult question to answer. Having said that, couple of things are:
1. starting early
2. getting lucky
3. focus and hardwork
4. marketed themselves properly
5. surrounded themselves with better programmers, to get better at it.
6. capitalized on the opportunity of solving a tough and challenging problem.
ending on a pragmatic quote: passion burns out, what sustains is greed. (taken from "Do you want to be doing this at 50")
Great post. I think there's a huge selection bias when someone drops the kind of names the OA did. All those guys had hugely visible successes, but it's hard to know how replicable any of that is. Given equal skill to Carmack or Hickey, I don't see a brilliant guy having a reasonable chance at writing the next Quake or Clojure. Those successes are black swans.
There are a lot of guys making $250k or more working on some obscure B2B product or enterprise team somewhere. Just because we don't hear about them doesn't mean they aren't just as happy or find as much meaning in their work, and it's certainly a lot easier to optimize for if that's what you want.
That said, I think programming is a bit like a professional athlete in that you can't have a great lifelong career by sticking purely to the technical aspects. You need to be learning how your skills apply to real businesses and building your network. Fortunately I think these things happen naturally to some extent, but it can't hurt to think about them.
"Starting early", super important!
"Getting lucky", yes - both in time and in income - striking gold is not much worth if you can not step up on the possibility - and sadly, for many, having kids or a ill parent, or loosing a steady income is to big a obstacle to tacle... Meaning, you might not have that many a year to live that, wild, frivolous, entreprenourish life...
> being financially successful and extremely competent programmer are two different things
I'm going far than this and say are two OPPOSITE things. Being good a 1 thing is hard. Good at 2 things? 3 things? Rare. That is way is easy to have Teslas, but not Bells...
I know a lot of developers in the latin america community, and mi city (www.clubdelphi.com). Here, is VERY rare to find the super-rich, mega-startup anomaly (yes, it is). We can do the hard work, have competent skills and still survive. I don't see highly tech people being good at the art of make money (the lack of social skills hurt a lot!), and the time necessary to code + doing business is a big drag.
I have a partner that help in the sales side. Without him, I can't see how I can code and get client in a steady way (the economic realities here are differente to USA: Have FACE TO FACE is DAMM IMPORTANT!, internet-only business? close to impossible), and I'm lucky for that. A lot of my peers are code monkeys, even the good ones...
So being a good programmer is not synonymous to having your bank accounts with decent zeroes following some non zero number.
Incidentally, yesterday I was talking to a programmer who had been coding for 17 years, he codes bots for games in C++ when not coding other stuff. He did not take his degree seriously, and today is looking for an MNC to hire him, so that he gets married, for the chic wants a secure life.
What did the good programmers do differently? Its a difficult question to answer. Having said that, couple of things are:
1. starting early
2. getting lucky
3. focus and hardwork
4. marketed themselves properly
5. surrounded themselves with better programmers, to get better at it.
6. capitalized on the opportunity of solving a tough and challenging problem.
ending on a pragmatic quote: passion burns out, what sustains is greed. (taken from "Do you want to be doing this at 50")