My programming brain has two modes. One is playful mode, and the other is drudge workaday mode. 9-to-5 Monday through Friday is workaday mode. Other times are playful mode. As it turns out, I am a far better programmer in one of those two modes. It won't be hard to guess which one. In drudge mode, I may spend three hours some afternoon trying to force my way through a problem. No turning back, the clock is ticking! In play mode if I spend three hours goofing around with the exact same problem and it's kinda not happening, well, screw it. That was sorta fun, but let's goof around with it some more and try something else. BANG! Sweet clean obvious beautiful solution straight from Erdos' BOOK. The powerful sense of joy in the latter mode sustains my love for programming, but I wish I could convince my lizard brain that it would be OK, indeed far better, to stay in play mode and not get sucked into the dark doldrums of drudge mode during "job" time.
I’m convinced that going for a walk, or staring out of a window, or browsing Reddit, or even taking a nap to let your brain work is an essential part of programming work and that should be understood by any employer. And employee.
May I ask approximately how old you are and what field you're working in? (Or, being passionate in?)
I feel like this is not a realistic view to sustain in most modern tech environments, unless you love inefficiently producing ineffective solutions that just so happens to be profitable, or you job hop every 1 - 2 years.
Interesting, thanks! I feel like that kind of confirms my position: you're not someone who has the same passion for coding, you have a stronger passion for building, leading and selling tech companies, which is why you've done that multiple times.
I've never been a founding engineer, but typically a direct report to founding engineers.
The people I worked with in your position were either like you (e.g. enjoyed programming but clearly got a big rush from the business and money side too) or they were genuinely just pure passionate programmers and miserable, as their role takes them away from that.
There's a whole categories of skills, abilities and problems that are never confronted if a person changes job every <2 years.
Hot take: what if the rise in enshittification and crap tech is because good tech can only be produced with the hindsight of a stable tech career from a stable tech employer?
That's a different topic though. This was about passion in coding for living.
I don't think it's the employee's responsibility to stay in one company if the stability and in-house career path options are questionable, as usually is the case.
If your job is your passion, and your downstream customers give you freedom to treat it as such, it can be fun.
The fun gets sucked right out of it when you have people breathing down your neck waiting for your output, are very particular about what they expect from it in a way that doesn't align with your creative values, etc.
Not all of us have a Lord Saatchi willing to bankroll whatever our brains fart out and call the result brilliant (likely to pump up its value to buyers). Matter of fact, that may just be what ZIRP-era VC can be conceptualized as: business model "Uber for Lord Saatchi-style patronage in tech".
