[IvanK_net]

I have no idea why they mention coding. It is the same in any kind of job. You can bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos ...

At a certain stage, you realize that in order to be able to do only that job, you must make someone pay you for it. You must do it in a way (or in a volume) which makes others happy. The fact that it makes you happy is not enough anymore.

I don't think there is an angel and a devil. It is still the same thing. If you like the result of your work, there is a high chance that others will like it. You don't need to change what you do by a 100%. Changing it by 5% - 10% is often enough.

[blahgeek]

I think it's more common because one doing only coding can get paid reasonably. On the contrary, few people who "bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos" can get paid enough for a living, so that's usually not an option to consider. (Which is the reason that I find us coding people very lucky.)

[Juliate]

> only coding can get paid reasonably

If you happen to work for a company that's big enough to pay reasonably. And even that is still a very temporary accident of times.

There was a time with plenty (comparatively to today) of tailors, living very reasonably, because there was a demand, and the means.

Today, you're lucky if you manage to find one that's in your city, and even more if he/she's not too expensive (that is, compared to ready-made stuff).

[rikroots]

I code at work so they can give me money so I can buy the stuff I need to carry on living. I have very generous employers who pay me a lot more money than I need to live on. The code I write at work is not very creative code - I contribute bugfixes and incremental improvements; I advocate for better accessibility of our products; I spend time code reviewing for colleagues. Standard work.

When the working day ends I switch from my work laptop to my personal laptop and start doing fun stuff: creative coding; curious-itch-scratch coding; etc. I'll also spend time doing the other fun stuff like writing poems, inventing languages, drawing maps, watching reaction videos - there's all that family and friend stuff too which can (often) be fun.

It's a choice: "live-to-work", or "work-to-live". I choose living. Recently my employers had a promotion round (the first in a few years) and I told my manager not to put my name forward for consideration. I'm comfortable at my current level and don't need the worries and stresses that come with increased work responsibilities - that would just get in the way of the fun stuff!

[goodpoint]

so you are saying work is meant to be miserable and coding is the exception. Is that a life worth living?

[gwd]

> I have no idea why they mention coding. It is the same in any kind of job. You can bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos ...

One reason is that coding is so much more scalable than all of those. There are loads of stories of people who made some small thing that was useful, and were able to make a tidy profit on it (or sometimes a fairly large one).

I enjoy making homemade wines. Occasionally someone will try something I've made and ask if I'm thinking about selling it professionally. No way -- it's a fun hobby, but definitely not something I want to do in enough scale to be self-supporting.

I also enjoy languages, and developed an algorithm for helping me find material to read that's at the right level -- only a handful of words that I don't know. It's been incredibly helpful for me, and I'm sure it could be incredibly helpful to millions of people out there as well; so I quit my job and am trying to figure out how to make that happen:

https://www.laleolanguage.com

[brulard]

I disagree that coding for fun and making it a product is 5-10% difference. I would say it's closer to 500-1000%. I coded a lot of tools for myself, for productivity or for fun. Currently I'm very quick in doing that thanks to LLMs, it's definitely not vibe coding, althoug there is a lot of code generated. As these tools serve only me, I may not care about code quality, about bugs, about someone elses data loss, about security, GDPR, different devices, mobiles, screen sizes, platforms, etc. I don't have to support "users" as an entity at all in my apps, it can be all hidden behind VPN, so i don't need auth. I have so many little issues in my apps so I know I can not for example click this and that in rapid succession, or drag this thing out of this container etc. It's 100% fine for me, it would absolutely needed to be fixed for other users. I would need something like a user manual, marketing page, payment processing? I don't get any support e-mails and angry users. There are many compromises that I can make with little value loss if I code just for me as compared to trying to offer a service for people and ask for money.

[swoorup]

One can combat it by just choosing discipline, grit, perseverance and stop boxing themselves into angel vs devil kind of thinking. You are either working for self or working for someone else.

Life is rather what you make of it than the society perception of it.