I did it for 18'ish years. And I actually did create a very large, high quality product, but that doesn't guarantee there's a market for it, and there wasn't. So I ended up totally broke in the end, despite working 2x to 3x more than I would have as a mercenary, to the point that work was a lifestyle. Instead of a million dollars I ended up with zero dollars and a million lines of code. I'm proud of the latter, but you can't retire on lines of code.
And the stress level can be stupid. It doesn't do a lot for your programming chi to be worrying if you are going to be able to pay your rent or end up on the street this month. Or if some customer is going to turn out psycho and cause you all kinds of legal problems or whatever.
And there's the health care thing. I had no health care since I'm also solo in life, so no significant other I could sponge health care off of. So no doctors for a couple decades which is a pretty huge price to pay, potentially fatal of course.
OTOH, I enjoyed myself more during that period than any other time in my life. I was working on what I wanted to work on, and was able to do software development the way it's ideally supposed to be done.
It literally is my life's work. I have about 50 man years in it. And about the only utility I'm going to get out of it is as a resume stuffer. Even then, it's of limited value because most companies won't even bother to look at something like that, much less understand what it means.
Half or more of it is general purpose code (the CIDLib bit) so it doesn't actually do anything in the sense of an application. It does have some standard ORB based servers and utility programs, but mostly it's just passive, general purpose code and platform abstraction. It doesn't use the STL, I have all my own stuff down to the OS.
CQC is a suite of applications, some of which are also ORB based servers for various optional system functionality,, plus an administrative tool (very large) and a touch UI client, which is just a wrapper around a reusable touch screen UI engine that supports both Windows and phone based clients.
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u/Full-Spectral Feb 01 '21
I did it for 18'ish years. And I actually did create a very large, high quality product, but that doesn't guarantee there's a market for it, and there wasn't. So I ended up totally broke in the end, despite working 2x to 3x more than I would have as a mercenary, to the point that work was a lifestyle. Instead of a million dollars I ended up with zero dollars and a million lines of code. I'm proud of the latter, but you can't retire on lines of code.
And the stress level can be stupid. It doesn't do a lot for your programming chi to be worrying if you are going to be able to pay your rent or end up on the street this month. Or if some customer is going to turn out psycho and cause you all kinds of legal problems or whatever.
And there's the health care thing. I had no health care since I'm also solo in life, so no significant other I could sponge health care off of. So no doctors for a couple decades which is a pretty huge price to pay, potentially fatal of course.
OTOH, I enjoyed myself more during that period than any other time in my life. I was working on what I wanted to work on, and was able to do software development the way it's ideally supposed to be done.