Thanks for sharing! We're blessed that such a hobby is lucrative enough to pay our bills. Not many hobbies are, and usually this leads to wage suppression as th

Thanks for sharing! We're blessed that such a hobby is lucrative enough to pay our bills. Not many hobbies are, and usually this leads to wage suppression as there's too much supply. My pet anecdata is how a violinist playing for the BBC Symphony Orchestra would earn roughly 30k despite being a top tier orchestral violinist. Programmers are comparatively blessed that a relatively arcane and niche craft ended up creating trillions in value and the growth in demand for the skillset outpaced supply of the skillset. As such, it was possible to have your cake and eat it. But this was the exception not the rule. Tech has been glamorous for over a decade now: you have people from other industries moving over at all levels and armies of MBAs keen to rentseek internally and externally, and a fat pyramid of aspirational career coders coming up as graduates. And thus we see craft in software fading out. You could argue that the same wage suppression does somewhat play out insofar as open source software is capable of producing far far more value than paid maintainers earn.