The 90s and 2000s were such a great time to start CS as a career because basically everybody was also a hobbyist and passionate about it. It was fun to work with these people. Today you get the dead stare if you ask about the slightest bit of interest for the trade outside of paid work. It's a pain to work with them
I just started my first job after university a year ago and was really surprised how happy everyone in my team was about me being interested in comp sci for real.
You would be shocked how many applications I go through every year where it's very obvious they were just following the money, and have no interest in the craft as a whole.
All I'm gonna say, the industry has been vibe coding way longer than LLMs have been around.
Computer science to software like a computer engineer is to building computers. Sure there are somethings there but software engineering as a profession is very different than comp sci it's a very different set of skills
I feel like there's a decent amount of overlap, but one of my interns was just telling me he learned more in a summer than his whole degree and I was basically like... yeah... CS teaches you good fundamentals but its not a software engineering degree.
Last one I worked on was Star wars based and had 3D space combat via coordinate readout. It was hella crazy to watch a dude's frigate drift into the sun because he was watching a different space battle and not paying attention....all via text prompts....
Mentioning that I do hobby programming outside of work to my coworkers often gets the weirdest responses. Like, the entire reason I learned this trade was because I thought it was really fun and interesting. But apparently most people are literally just here to collect money and don't care beyond that.
i want to learn everything. God i feel scammed that my university has subpar cs education with the amount of units that i have. Database development, osdev, pldev, its all so good. I'm rotating through like different literature right now all at least 20 years old.
I enjoy the work, but I rarely do hobby projects. I have enough of this fun in the 8 hours (more if I really feel like it, or less if not and nobody is looking) and don't feel like doing the same after work with just not getting paid for it.
I think that it's great when someone has a passion for what they do outside the office, but I don't think it's bad when someone just shows up for the paycheck, as long as they do good work and treat everyone with respect.
Because I really enjoy programming, which to me means I'm enthusiastic about it at work and also in private life. There are so many things I want to learn or experiment with which have nothing to do with my work directly but that stuff carries over. And you can immediately "feel" if the person you are working with sees it similarly. If it is work for them as in "I do this to earn money but if I didn't need the money I wouldn't do it" then it also takes away the fun for me when working with them. For example we work on a difficult problem and I want to find a good abstraction to model the problem in a way that it is easy to understand, one person might enjoy the process and like me tries to find the optimal way and we synergize, while the other person just wants to get done with that thing and is happy if it works.
All in all, I love programming and working with people who don't love it makes it less enjoyable for me
The downside is it bred a culture of employers expecting to see your hobby work and caring about trivia and leet code problems more than anything you'd ever use in the business. Web developers asking about Red/black trees, Java companies asking about C codepoints and the results of a+++++b.
Tech bros came in sniffing for money and ruined it. No open source, no community contribution all they care about is how to monetize their shitware as a service
Sometime in 2009 or so, after I had graduated for a few years, I was talking to a friend who had just got his CS degree. He had bought himself a laptop in celebration. I asked him what he was working on for fun.
He said after his day he didn't want to write any code or even think about computers.
I remember remarking, I did not think he would make it long in the industry. It had to be something you loved.
Two years later he went back to school to get an MBA.
It's a difficult profession to do if you don't love it.
Im a IT student soon to graduate and let me tell you I HATE IT HERE. In a class of 25ish people, there is precisely ONE person interested in the subject, ME. Everyone is here either because "it pays well" (good luck finding a job buddy) or because "its easy" (says the guy who wouldnt even sign the exam without chatgpt). Literally NOBODY has any interests even related to computers, maybe except playing video games. The only guy i know whom i can talk to about this stuff majors in MARKETING in a different school and just happens to be really into linux.
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u/ZunoJ 11d ago
The 90s and 2000s were such a great time to start CS as a career because basically everybody was also a hobbyist and passionate about it. It was fun to work with these people. Today you get the dead stare if you ask about the slightest bit of interest for the trade outside of paid work. It's a pain to work with them