But he's not arguing that at all! If you've read the entirety of the essay, he's saying that there has to be a balance between the needs of a job and the compul

But he's not arguing that at all! If you've read the entirety of the essay, he's saying that there has to be a balance between the needs of a job and the compulsion to have fun/showoff/be a hacker. (And he says it in one of the most reasonable ways possible.) I think there's real value in this. After all, there's a real motivation to want to write amazing stuff to show off to your friends (e.g make them say "WTF how did you do that?"), as well as play with new technologies; and as an engineer you have to worry about a different set of important issues (e.g. is the project on time?/ what needs to be refactored?/what to bring up in the next team meeting?). He's arguing for a way to reconcile the two while at work, beyond just programming on personal projects on nights and weekends^[1] ^[1] And that's leaving out the section at the end where he argues about sticking to a set of engineering best practices, and not trusting yourself to be good enough to know when to break them. PS: Also, see georgemcbay's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310114 on how the author knows what he's talking about.