I love the idea of this but you read so many stories about the owners of open sourced projects not making a penny, whilst millions use their work and benefit financially.
It’s difficult to do this when there’s belly’s to fill.
I doubt any maintainer of a sufficiently popular open source project isn't making a lot of money in tech. Open source can open a lot of doors for employment opportunities and greatly increases your marketability to demand higher wages.
Of course, don't do open source if you don't enjoy it - because I doubt the time spent is optimal for getting the most money, but if you do enjoy it then it can very much help increase your income indirectly.
I don't really care. The stuff I write actually has a fairly significant impact on people's lives.
It is not hyperbole to say that some of the software I've written has saved many lives. Others tend to use a lot more hype to describe its impact than I would.
That’s great at your parents house but when you have kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, doing it for free is off the cards, no matter how much you love it.
I would never stop programming. It is a joy for me to do little utilities that makes my life easier. Even with billions of dollars in bank account I would still hack away at an ESP32 to stick it in a flying helicopter toy for example. And lucky for me this field is highly dynamic, I would never get bored learning new technologies. For me programming is like a kid with his shiny toys, every day another one. And I am pretty sure plenty of programmers feel the same way.
Makery stuff is still fun, but the work stuff used to be fun and now is not.
I did a lot of sysadmin so it was a lot of individual unix servers and different kinds of integration problem solving getting printers or networks to work or rigging up weird edi's over modems or ftp etc, getting some bespoke backend software to talk to some weird machine where nether the OS, nor app, nor apps language, nor wierd machine vendors provided that last bit of help needed to connect them together, mini-proto-HA by just making a better more redundant ordinary server,.. basically "IT rigging"
That was for me all just great fun. But now 99% of that is just cloud services and they are all soul sucking to me, probably more because of the corporate environment they get used within more than the tech itself, where you and everyone else are hardly treated any different than the machine. Everything is so managed that I don't feel like the modern tools are expressive and empowering like the old tools. Everything is services with predefined limits and potentials based middle of the bell curve assumptions about what people need vs languages and hardware where you rigged up your own interesting solutions to each new problem.
So I too now play with arduino/esp32 toys and open source projects for fun, and am pretty glad I already made enough money that it doesn't matter that no one would pay me for this.
I went freelancer. Out of aprox. 12 hours per day I do programming my clients get like maximum 3. Rest are for me personally. Learn new stuff, play with different tech, etc. Most of the time my playing time also translates into paying stuff from my clients later on the road, but not immediately.
And yes, some projects I get from clients are soul sucking, but I chose them fully aware of that, hence the balance heavily in my favor in terms of hours. I get back my soul after was sucked this way :).
Dominating the know how of some algorithm gives you a power that can be quite satisfying. Still, that is not career. The tasks at your work are things that happen at a given day of your career.
Career is a trajectory. A mission. Way way more than your current employment.
Why does making the world a better place make you think of Elon? I think of something much smaller scale. Helping my community, elders, people around me. Something at a much smaller scale where I get 1-1 human interaction out of it.
My passion is in fitness. I want to be active in my 60-80s (weight lifting / marathon running shape). I ultimately want to help others do the same and lead a better quality of life through their old age.
So what’s the point? You want to work forever? There’s no goal to retire early and just enjoy life or start your own company?
> I’m very far from making a lot of money
The software engineering career is a ridiculously “fast paced”. career. 5 years experience in programming is the equivalent to 20+ years in another industry. There’s very few industries where you can make a 200k+ salary in your 20s.
I'm facing this exact problem. The guy that works on the weekend, is unfortunately the most senior engineer on our team (it's quite sad really. He has nothing to prove, a wife and kid, yet he works weekends with no reward).
He's setting the benchmark higher and higher with everything he's doing. It adds zero value, yet he still does it. It leaves us other devs having to keep up for the sake of it.
I guess it's a really foolish way to think but whenever I think about those who suck up to their bosses and work weekends for no reward, I just think about the story of the CEO that pulls up in the expensive car. He tells his employee, "if you keep working hard, I'll be able to buy another one."
It’s difficult to do this when there’s belly’s to fill.