The Wrong Profession.
August 27, 2003, 10:08 amI really related to Don Box's post on kids going into IT:
I would be very hesitant to encourage anyone to pursue this career path. Like writing a book, the only people who should do it are those who can't not do it.
I think that I read some Rainer Maria letters once where he was advising some writer that if he couldn't not write, that's when he'd know he was a poet. I think it's the same way with computer professionals.
I remember being really surprised when I started my CS degree at UK: there were lots of kids there that had never programmed before. On my first day of CS 115, I had already programmed in Basic (both Microsoft QBasic and the Basic-like language on my TI 85 calculator), Pascal, C, and DOS batch files.
I remember seeing kids there that I knew from high school that didn't even like computers. When I asked them why they'd chosen to major in CS, they said that they heard you could make a lot of money in it. Of course, they dropped out before the end of the first semester.
I'm not a programmer because I expect to make a lot of money. I'm a programmer because it's so fun and interesting.