

I do it for the money - pkeane
http://allowedtoapply.tumblr.com/post/80985672742/i-do-it-for-the-money

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goldenkey
It's pretty obvious that in a scientific field, without passion, rigor won't
find itself. This article reeks of immaturity. And I'd rather have only
passionate people in our field. Most coders who only go through a CS degree as
oppose to elementary-highschool-life and beyond coders, there's just a huge
wall of difference in terms of understanding down from the cpu to tcp
networking, across to asm, endianess, etc etc. New coders just never really
get it. It's like trying to learn chess at an older age, 90% of grandmasters
were grandmasters by the age of around 13.

I learned coding because I wanted to tear shit up as a somewhat dark child.
And that's why I know pretty much everything from databases to reverse
engineering to packet sniffing/editing to patching, injecting, loaders, class
modification, obfuscation and deobfuscation, and XSRF, RCE, shellcode, buffer
overflowing, the list goes on. Along with whatever it takes for an interesting
programming job.

New coders just don't get it, they are too far outside the scope of (played
around with it as a child, because it was interesting.) Money isn't a good
enough motivator to teach grubbers the real internals of a machine.

~~~
brandonhsiao
_90% of grandmasters were grandmasters by the age of around 13._

At risk of hijacking this comment tree, I'd love to see some kind of citation
is this is true. It'd be striking if it were.

~~~
192837465
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_grandmasters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_grandmasters)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_grandmasters#L...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_grandmasters#List_of_youngest_grandmasters)

Not even close.

~~~
goldenkey
My statement was wrong. I believe the effect is still there, considering that
in the lists you linked, the strongest grandmasters happen to _also_ be on the
youngest grandmasters list. Clearly there is a 3rd factor that correlates
these two, or the effect of young chess learning is profound. I'd think the
latter.

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seivan
Relevant:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6523/the_designers_not...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6523/the_designers_notebook_passion_.php?print=1)

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mikkelewis
Luckily passion and money in this industry aren't mutually exclusive, and I'm
extremely grateful for that.

~~~
meric
It's can also be difficult to work on Passion A knowing Passion B, 20% lesser,
can pay 100%, or more, as much. Money can and do help overcome the relative
lack of passion, especially on the margins, even if it may not replace it
100%.

With that said, I'd rather die than study women's studies for the rest of my
life for ten times my salary[1].

[1] No free time allowed besides eating and sleeping and going to the
bathroom.

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dang
I'm burying this as not intellectually interesting. If it developed the point
in a thoughtful way, it might be ok, but it doesn't.

~~~
pkeane
You might give some thought to how this relates to the lack of diversity
(esp.) gender diversity in our field. It ought to be the starting point for a
great discussion. Perhaps HN is not the ideal venue for such a discussion....

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jmnicolas
Given that working only for the paycheck is probably about 99% of the
workforce I don't find this article particularly shocking.

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gooddelta
Cool dude -- no worries; I'll just never hire you. Passion is really hard to
fake and, frankly, I don't want to work with you if you don't have it.

