Most hackers worth a shit know the answer to the question without even any context.
It's like a lust to solve a problem. Idk maybe it IS add, I'm there too, but sometimes there are software problems that just completely captivate me in a way that nothing else does.
Time melts away, and I'm just typing.
Y'all know that feeling, that 6am,"oh shit I work in three hours but I was hacking on this project all night and it almost works if I could just get this thing over here to- Oh, work, real world.... Right."
That mental mode of concentration is elusive and indeed a bit habit forming. There are moments where I'll be washing my car or cleaning the house and I have that "I should be in vim right now" thought and the world just seems grayer and dumber until I survive past it and sit back at my keyboard again.
Said like that, that is weirdly analogous to when I used to drink.
Is programming a drug? Are some addictions healthy?
It's funny how incredibly highly the money and success narrative is emphasized in the news, and the drug-like high aspect of the work is rarely mentioned. The truth is that a lot of us would do it (and do do it) for free, and the high demand aspect of it is to a large extent just a blessing on the side.
I started for the glory. Refurbishing keygens and writing ddos perl scripts for irssi.
But the more I learned, the bigger the problems I want to solve, (and create, in some cases) and that drove me to become more dedicated to the discipline of it all.
I'm blessed to have the opportunity to do contracts or work a 9-5 with my skillset, and I can basically live whatever lifestyle I can afford that way.
But yeah, even if I was getting paid 1/5 of what I have now, as long as I can spend my days browsing through disassembly, outsmarting someone, I'd still show up.
I don't think this is specific to programming, but generalizes to any kind of problem solving (as you write in your second sentence).
I was once taking a shower when I cried out in joy as I had just figured out how to shave off an extra fraction of a micron from the side of a large state machine (we had a last minute change order and it hogged a bunch of area on the chip). I grabbed some clothes and jumped into my car (didn't think to rinse the shampoo out of my hair) and floored it down the freeway to the office (VPN? hah!)
It's like a lust to solve a problem. Idk maybe it IS add, I'm there too, but sometimes there are software problems that just completely captivate me in a way that nothing else does.
Time melts away, and I'm just typing.
Y'all know that feeling, that 6am,"oh shit I work in three hours but I was hacking on this project all night and it almost works if I could just get this thing over here to- Oh, work, real world.... Right."
That mental mode of concentration is elusive and indeed a bit habit forming. There are moments where I'll be washing my car or cleaning the house and I have that "I should be in vim right now" thought and the world just seems grayer and dumber until I survive past it and sit back at my keyboard again.
Said like that, that is weirdly analogous to when I used to drink.
Is programming a drug? Are some addictions healthy?