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> A third career option would have been cooking. I almost went into this, it seemed pretty easy to make millions of dollars on. I consulted restauranteurs who w

> A third career option would have been cooking. I almost went into this, it seemed pretty easy to make millions of dollars on. I consulted restauranteurs who were making millions of dollars in revenue a year. They basically told me I'm an idiot -- running a business was a prison, like having kids. They'd pick up tech jobs if they could. They were right, restaurants are the biggest money pits and be sure to thank them on Xmas with a card for allowing you to focus on other aims as so many were destroyed during COVID. As for cooking... no one makes millions from cooking, ever. You have to become a celebrity chef and stop cooking and become a one man Media and PR team and sale books or do tours/TV which is the furthest thing you'd want if you actually enjoy working line (being part masochist I actually did). I enjoy writing scripts/pilots/short stories, and have experience coding but it's not something I enjoy or like: I find it a reductionist and often tedious task I was forced to learn to code because I couldn't convince anyone to build me what I needed when I launched my fintech startup. How did you overcome this, coding doesn't seem creative at all by comparison. I'm only coming back to coding after a ~4.5 year hiatus and study CS (AI/ML) but the truth is I'm struggling to find the motivation and I think I'll probably end up in product management more than being a developer and consultant: I'm just glad I chose python back then since all of the AI and ML stuff is using it.

muzani 4y ago
> How did you overcome this, coding doesn't seem creative at all by comparison. There's patterns in writing, just like music and code. Creativity comes with playing within the restrictions. That's literally how poetry works; you're limiting words into some artificial form. I love mobile development because it has some fairly extreme restrictions -- everything from screen size to operating system restrictions. These days you're also dealing with feature flagging plus dropped connections, with longer app review periods. Plus tons more restrictions like tests, low end devices, lifecycle, and Google/Apple being schizophrenic. I think the real hit to creativity is not the work itself, but the process. Our team doesn't have project managers or scrum masters. Product tells us what users want, we tell them the cost. My team goes even more extreme - no style documents, no naming convention, and architecture is just a shared document that everyone edits. It's like a band. Someone plays a rhythm or riff and the others play around it. Git blame shows that some of our classes have been edited by 4 different people. Each module appears to have a unique, inconsistent style, but it becomes like the varied songs of an album.

muzani 4y ago

> How did you overcome this, coding doesn't seem creative at all by comparison. There's patterns in writing, just like music and code. Creativity comes with playing within the restrictions. That's literally how poetry works; you're limiting words into some artificial form. I love mobile development because it has some fairly extreme restrictions -- everything from screen size to operating system restrictions. These days you're also dealing with feature flagging plus dropped connections, with longer app review periods. Plus tons more restrictions like tests, low end devices, lifecycle, and Google/Apple being schizophrenic. I think the real hit to creativity is not the work itself, but the process. Our team doesn't have project managers or scrum masters. Product tells us what users want, we tell them the cost. My team goes even more extreme - no style documents, no naming convention, and architecture is just a shared document that everyone edits. It's like a band. Someone plays a rhythm or riff and the others play around it. Git blame shows that some of our classes have been edited by 4 different people. Each module appears to have a unique, inconsistent style, but it becomes like the varied songs of an album.