How many of you are professional programmers? Still working as software developers for a regular income and doing trading only as a side project?
Or rather ... any of you still prostitute themselves?
God I hate programming (for a job).
Yeah for over ten years now.
I like the actual programming. The long hours, maintaining buggy code that's been in place for years, dismal architectures made by those who don't understand data structures, and general disrespect all irritate.
As it's friday permit me to be long winded and introspective.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a progammer (actually I wanted to be a systems analyst, which at the time was a rather grand job which basically involved telling programmers what to do. It seems to have morphed into business analyst, which is now a rather low ranked job where you get squeezed between the business and the developers and they all hate you. But I would have started as a programmer). From the age of 7 when I learned BASIC on a TRS 80 (that ages me!) I did loads of hobby programming.
I did a year of computer science at uni, then dropped it. I was like the kid who wants to be a professional footballer, who is then faced with the reality of getting up at 5am to clean the 1st team players boots before doing laps round the training ground. I enjoyed programming as a hobby, but not as an academic subject.
Over the next 20 years or so I did various jobs, obviously using computers to a degree but nothing more serious than an excel macro. In my final job (systematic hedge fund PM) I ended up doing quite a lot of coding. But it wasn't my job exactly; I was writing prototype and backtesting code but not production code. I had a team of professional developers who did that. I didn't have to write tests or deal with annoying disrespecting users and their pesky business requirements (I was the annoying user). I had to put up with other peoples buggy legacy code, but it was someone elses job to fix it.
I had the long hours and the annoying meetings, but that was just because I was working in a managerial position in the finance sector. And I was being paid properly for it.
In a funny sort of way I was still a hobby programmer, except hobby programming was part of my job.
So when I retired from finance, well naturally the first thing I did was write code. And I've probably spent more time writing code than doing anything else since then (more time than I've spent writing books, or doing the odd bit of consulting). I am not writing code for the sake of it or working on 'fun' projects, it's all about backtesitng and trading, but it's still writing code. And I enjoy it; clearly, as I don't have to do it but I still do a lot of it.
In a weird sort of way I've basically achieved my dream of being a hobby programmer without the distraction of a proper job to get in the way. And I know I'm extremely lucky, and I wouldn't want to be working in a job I hated. And though I could probably work as a journeyman developer I'm not sure I'd enjoy it all that much.
GAT
