And a small observation: if you require money to do something, you usually have no chance of being as good as the folks that do it for the pleasure.
There is a common distinction between professional and amateur with the former getting paid for their work. In general there is an understanding that someone getting paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better than someone who does it as a hobby.
Perhaps coding is an unusual space where the best coders are often misfits who have a hard time holding down a job.
For something like flying airplanes, I think this is obviously true: nobody can afford to spend the required hours doing it unless somebody else is paying for the airplane, and the only way that happens is if that person is your employer. A lot of things are like that.
But programming is very different, it requires almost no resources to practice except your time. You can sit at home in your pajamas with $1K worth of hardware and keep yourself busy for a lifetime through open source. Of course, you can also spend a lifetime building useless sandcastles while telling yourself you're a genius: you have to find ways to hold yourself accountable to grow.
I've been fortunate to get paid to work on some interesting things... but the work I do for fun is, on average, ~100x more challenging and interesting than the work I'm paid to do. I would be a much much less capable programmer if I'd only done work I was paid to do for the past decade.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "amateurs are better than professionals", but I think the skill level of the two groups is much more blurred in programming than in most other things.
This argument seems absurd to me.
I get that in software quite often time is wasted by poor management that otherwise would not be wasted if working unpaid. Well managed research orgs can work at elite levels but they are few and far between.
Airline pilots rack up a lot of hours but get very little "stick time", and what they do get is extremely sedate flying to not scare the passengers / spill their drinks. Their primary skills are pushing buttons on the autopilot and talking in the radio and transcribing clearances.
A military pilot gets more effective stick time. But aerobatic pilots, ag pilots (but I repeat myself), and glider pilots gain a LOT more experience and skill per hour flown than an airline pilot.
I mean, just look at this glider flying lesson:
Military pilots are also professionals, and of the glider pilots how many of the best are trainers. Ag pilots are professionals, as are helicopter mustering pilots who are incredibly skilled. The majority of acrobatic pilots are also professional pilots. I’m not suggesting that great amateurs don’t exist just that a great amateur who has gone pro can often beat one that hasn’t.
I understand the sentiment, on one hand if I was rich I would be able to devote my time into constant improvement, but then maybe I wouldn’t have the same drive to succeed as having my livelihood dependent on the outcome. There is institutional knowledge gained by working in a research org that would be hard to replicate as an independent scientist.
Somebody wealthy enough can afford to just pay to fly that much, I guess, but that's so few people it's not even worth mentioning as a possibility.
[0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...
> if you require money to do something, you usually have no chance of being as good as the folks that do it for the pleasure
Not only do I think professional have a chance to be as good as amateurs, but the elite professionals are on average better than the elite amateurs.
I do think that we would be better off if more elite amateurs became elite professionals.
Usually complex things are there, where they money is - semiconductor industry, big corpos (chromium, linux, llvm, etc), AI, etc.
......... o.O i guess the professional football leagues all have players who are worse than the rec leaguers? hners are delusional...