There isnt anything stopping you from asking questions like why is something done this way. You might see it as slave labour, but if you laid bricks for example

There isnt anything stopping you from asking questions like why is something done this way. You might see it as slave labour, but if you laid bricks for example, you cant lay bricks in temperatures below 3 or 4 degrees C, and you can only lay so many rows of bricks high as the mortar has to set. Where most people are failed by those around them, like parents and school's is pointing out when you leave education, you wont stop learning, and its always good to ask questions and plan ahead what you want to do with your life. Arguably have a bucket list which will change as you age in order to have something to aim for, and dont get caught in the trap of settling for second best or end up being used by people who think might be your friends but only knew you because of what you could do for them on the cheap. Now you might have called your summer job slave labour, I look at it as being paid to exercise as well as learning new skills and make new contacts. On the subject of aimless excited programmers, there's lots of ways to look at programming before learning a language. If one wants to earn a lot of money, then consider database related programming, everything is data, even spreadsheets can be considered flat files of sorts. And whilst you probably wouldnt use javascript to write a database app in, even though you could stuff data into a cookie and run it client side, there are better general purpose languages suited to database work, besides the obvious sql languages. If chasing the money, consider looking at what's involved in high frequency trading where you'll be writing your own OS to maintain the super high speeds required for algorithmic trading. Co-locating data centres as close as possible to trading exchanges is just one part of the problem. [1] IF you want to do apps for smart phones, again look at the languages that deliver the most for you, but also consider whether you should go with a popular language like dotnet or java thats portable across platforms, or whether you want to go with a niche language that might become less popular over time especially when considering there are thousands of languages that exist, with many having fallen by the wayside. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_...