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Who Wants To Be a Billionaire Coder?

Posted by timothy on from the will-settle-for-billionaire dept.

theodp writes "Computerworld reports that 60-year-old billionaire John Sall still enjoys cranking out code as the chief architect of JMP ('John's Macintosh Project'), the less-profitable-but-more-fun software from SAS that's used primarily by research scientists, engineers, and Six Sigma manufacturing types. 'It's always been my job to be a statistical software developer,' explains SAS co-founder Sall. So if you didn't have to work — and had more money than George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — would you be like Sall and continue to program? And if so, what type of projects would you work on?"

11 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Who needs to be a billionaire? by wrook · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I quit my 100 hour a week job and picked something a little bit less stressful. Now I'm only working 35 hours a week and don't program for a living. I live 5 minutes from work. I have plenty of time to do whatever I want including coding. I hate this attitude that you need to have more money that many small countries in order to do what you want. There are many routes to happiness. Programmers are supposed to be good problem solvers -- find a solution that works for you!

    1. Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? by Fourier404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Programming something I'm not particularly fond of is better than spending 35 hours/week I'm probably even less interested in. Obviously you have to put in those hours in order to make a living, and the point of this article is "if you didn't have to do it for a living (i.e. you already have more money than you need), what would you be programming?", not "what would you do with a tons of money?"

    2. Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I feel you are deliberately misinterpreting the question, and changing to subject to congratulate yourself on your life. The entire premise is set up to eliminate one common consideration in evaluating the many paths to happiness, and then asking if coding is in the remaining options.

      For me, a person who also lives close to work and does 35-40 hours a week in a job I'm happy with and well-paid for, the answer is...no. I would probably not code. I probably wouldn't go back to school for physics, either, but that's at least in the realm of possibility and would be above coding on the list of things to do, despite the difference in time commitments (I mean, I might put together a batch file or something for myself to make my life slightly easier, but no significant coding).

      The vision in my head is of an eternal weekend, and it is a glorious one. The only thing that could persuade me to code again would be the prospect of meeting people that I have something in common with. Like many slashdotters, I'm not naturally very social.

    3. Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? by nEoN+nOoDlE · · Score: 5, Insightful

      you don't need a billion dollars to be happy, but if he loses his job, he still could continue doing whatever he wants to do for the rest of his life, and his children (if he has any) don't have to work a single day of their lives. You might be happy, but you're happiness hangs on the state of the company you work for. If they start downsizing, or go completely bust, you could say goodbye to your 35 hour/week job that's 5 minutes away from home. I don't know about you, but my happiness being beholden to a third party I have no control over adds a certain level of stress which eats away at that happiness. A billion dollars to relieve that stress would be nice.

      --
      Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
    4. Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? by DoctorPepper · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I totally agree. I used to program for a living, now I'm a middle-ware systems engineer on Unix systems, for a large U.S. corporation. I get to work from home, play in Unix and Linux all day, make a pretty good living, and still code for myself.

      Am I a billionaire? hardly. Do I enjoy my life a bit more then I did? Most assuredly.

      --

      No matter where you go... there you are.
    5. Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Having a job isn't simply about money. It's also about the accomplishment, and feeling accomplished. Some people loathe their jobs. That's unfortunate. But for those who do something they like doing, that they feel is worthwhile doing, the money's just icing on the cake. Or it's really, an extra bonus for what they'd be doing for free anything.

      I doubt this. There's a reason it's called "work", and there's a reason that "work" and "fun" are not listed together in the thesaurus.

      Personally, I could definitely see myself coding if I was a billionaire, except I'd be working on some interesting open-source project. I would NOT be doing the type of work I do at work. It's not that I dislike coding (which is my primary job at work), it's that I dislike everything else: commuting to an inconveniently-located office every morning in traffic, having a shitty desk (not even a real cubicle) in an open work area where I can see all my cow-orkers and be subject to constant noise and commotion, having to work on something that's not exactly the most interesting project to me (unlike an OSS project of my choosing), dealing with deadlines and pressure from management, dealing with the crappy bug database we use, having to use Windows and Outlook which takes 30-60 seconds to read a single email, dealing with annoying cow-orkers, having to use bathrooms that smell like a sewer, etc. ad nauseum.

      Of course, I have some other hobbies I enjoy too when I have the time (not nearly enough), such as woodworking. If I was a billionaire, I'd simply spend all my time pursuing these hobbies, while I'm not traveling. And when I'm coding, I'd be doing it at home in an environment I like without noisy coworkers, working on projects I'm interested in which may have no monetary potential.

      So back to your original statement quoted above, really, how many people would get up every morning and go to an office and deal with coworkers and bosses if they weren't required to for a paycheck? I seriously doubt many would. They might go volunteer somewhere for a worthy cause or whatever, like many retired people do, but I'm pretty sure corporate office work would grind to a halt if everyone had all the money they wanted and didn't have to go work at some boring office for a living.

  2. Wow by ShooterNeo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The man's 60, and the clock is ticking. The number of good years he has left could be 10 or 20, or it could be 1. If you could do anything you wanted, but were sure to die in a decade or two, would you really spend time programming computers? Programming can be fun, but there's more interesting things to do in life.

    1. Re:Wow by Sylos · · Score: 5, Insightful

      To each their own. Yeah, if I had 60 billion dollars and 20 years to spend it on doing things I wanted..I'd travel the world, visit the people, etc. But at the end of the day? I'd log on to check my emails, read slashdot (:o), mod someone flamebait for GP, then wander off and program. Just because someone is wealthy as sin doesn't mean they have to stop enjoying certain things. Programming is fun. No need to stop programming. If anything, it removes the stress from deadlines or certain requirements and lets you program completely on your own terms. It would mean that all those things you ever wanted to do, you could do. You could wander off to 'theoryland' and think things through without someone breathing down your neck asking for "results" or a deadline that forces a hack job. It'd truly let someone do what they wanted.

      --
      'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
  3. Ask the retired by macemoneta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I retired eight years ago. I write code almost every day. Being ultimately lazy, I try to automate everything that I see. If it's a function that has to be performed more than once, and some aspect can be simplified with software, I write the code.

    Most everything is for my own use, and not generally applicable. A few things are more broadly useful, and those I've released under the GPL. Even those only get a few hundred interested people with the same niche interests.

    Some people are carpenters, and they work in their shops. Some people are artists, and they work with their medium. People that are really programmers must write code.

    --

    Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.

  4. Of course. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Money buys one the freedom to do what makes one happy.

  5. Doing what you love by Burning1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I had the opportunity to do something I would consider a 'dream job' for a couple of years. I was living at home, and accepted a job as a Martial Arts instructor, something I had been doing in my spare time for a while, anyway.

    What I learned in the process is that when you take on your hobby as a job, you find that you end up doing a lot of work you wouldn't have originally considered fun. Teaching was great, and I'm proud of it. It could also be tiring. But sales, and accounting? You don't think of that when you accept a job at a martial arts school.

    The same is true of open source projects. How many guys really want to run the entire project themselves -- writing documentation, offering customer support. Even when you're just a coder, you're eventually put in the position of taking on responsibilities that you might not want.

    Personally, I like to work on cars. There's no way in hell I'd do it professionally.

    Conversely... I'd like to be the billionaire, but I absolutely could not stand having an eternal weekend. I'd need pursuits. The money would free me to choose my own work, and hire people to do the stuff I wasn't particularly interested in.