Yeah... and here's a thing. I can write programs all day long at home. I could spend the rest of my life on personal projects if I so chose, and had the finan

Yeah... and here's a thing. I can write programs all day long at home. I could spend the rest of my life on personal projects if I so chose, and had the financial security to do so. If I somehow ran out of ideas, I could write software for friends and family. If I wanted to scale up from there, I could work on open source projects. Some types of projects would be closed to me (big research, projects requiring specialized hardware, etc), but there's a lot a person can do on their own as a hobby. Compare this to food. Beyond a very small scale (cooking for the immediate family, occasionally cooking for family events) there's a very fast, hard limit on what you can do as a hobbyist.