The Underscore Archives

2008/7/2 Tom Gidden <tom at gidden.net>:
>>> Happens a lot, though... "what shall we do next, taking into account
>>> what we know?", rather than "what shall we do next, so we can learn
>>> new stuff, widen our abilities, and open up new opportunities?"
>>
>> ITYM rather than "what do our customers need from us that they would
>> pay a nice premium on, for the minimal effort"
>
> Not at all.  I don't personally subscribe to that mentality.  Fine if
> some people do, but if everyone thought like that, there'd never be
> any innovation.

Necessity is the mother of invention, in a rational market (yes, I
know they're as purely theortical as String Theory) customers pay a
premium for stuff that they need :)

>  From the sound of things, money does seem to be an overriding factor
> on your choice of projects and your career path.  Not necessarily a
> bad thing, but it's not the case for me: satisfaction and interest in
> the project are much more important to me.  Whenever I've had a high-
> paying job, I've usually been miserable. Not sure why.

No - merely seperating business case for platform, etc from hackerly interest.

If I was money driven I wouldn't be hacking Perl from home, and open
source projects in my "spare" time, I'd  be raking it in with
enterprisey-buzzword systems in Java for EDS or one of the other the
pigopolist government
services companies.

I just happen to have found a niche that on the whole pays pretty well
and allows me to work from home, using a tool set I've grown rather
good with and a little fond of, but that's the means to an end...

..which is working 2 days a week on interesting projects on my laptop
sitting in my sailing boat cum office floating in a nice cove of a
greek island.

A.

-- 
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