Taking a contrarian point here, I went into software to make money doing a craft I can enjoy. I love software because its *useful*. Useful enough I can finance a lifestyle I enjoy for myself and my family, while still feeling moments of creativity and autonomy.

I think there needs to be a distinction between artist and artisan. Art exists for its own sake, code exists because its useful. I don't want code that reads like poetry, I want code that works so I read actual poetry later.

> Have a project in mind that you’ve always wanted to tackle but it never made sense to you to do it because it would never be used by anyone else or it would never make you any money?

I appreciate the tinker's and hobbyists, software is endlessly interesting as a career, and I'm thankful to be here. But I only want to build code that is useful.

That may be so, but the thing you are paid for depends on a colossal mountain of unpaid labor by tinkerers. There’s no job for you if people with real curiosity weren’t interested in installation and packaging, fixing bugs, Rust, CSS expressiveness, authorization expressiveness, virtual machines, standard library algorithms, etc. Something tells me the $250/mo you might spend on some GitHub sponsorships and Patreons - if even that - is not paying for anyone’s kids’ private schools.

And anyway, how useful is your code, really? I will not generalize or make assumptions, but you’re also not going to tell me what it is, right? So scrutiny for thee, but not for me?

And if it’s like, “I make Dagger wrapped implementations 17 layers deep in a Google product you’ve heard of”: by now you should know that the thing sincere people say about insincere people, “We watch what Hollywood says is good,” applies to shit that Google, Apple, Amazon and all these super high paying job companies do too. If you are conflating many users with useful, that’s the problem. Facebook, TikTok and Instagram could vanish tomorrow, and literally nothing meaningful would be lost.

Is “useful” to you, “everything that I do is useful, and everything I don’t do, maybe”? You don’t get to decide if your POVs are reductive. They just are.

I appreciate exposing yourself for a contrarian point of view, noble if fatally flawed.