On Oct 21, 7:51 am, Kevin Wright <[email protected]> wrote: > Which comes very close to asserting that Apple only wants jerks to develop > on their platform. > > I dearly wish I could see a kinder interpretation of the facts, but it > currently evades me...
[OK, I know I said I was going to stop, but this really bugged me.] Caring about money doesn't make you a jerk. Tim O'Reilly has a nice defense of it in his "Rules of Thumb" for O'Reilly employees ( http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/thumb_pref.html?page=2 ): -- quote -- If I were to boil my company vision down to one sentence, it would be this: "To make money doing interesting and worthwhile things." Why "to make money"? Well, money is the fuel for the whole system. It makes the rest possible. What's more, there is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics. When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it cleans out an awful lot of wooly thinking. I think often of Alexander Pope's comment about writing poetry in rhymed couplets. He said that funnelling his creativity through such a narrow aperture made it shoot out like water from a fountain. Why "interesting and worthwhile"? Oddly enough, while dull people find very little to be of interest, intelligent people find almost anything interesting. (Curiosity is the wellspring of intelligence.) And so there are many things that can be interesting that do not add a great deal of value to the world. Adding the proviso that what we do be worthwhile in some larger sense limits our selections a bit, but like the need to make money, actually improves the chances of happiness at what we do. -- quote -- For my own part, let me add this: I have a mortgage to pay, and a special-needs child who I support through private health insurance (since I am self-employed). I cannot pay these bills as a Swing developer. I can pay them as an iOS developer. Furthermore, I no longer find Swing "interesting and worthwhile"… being abandoned for a decade will do that to a technology. iOS is interesting and worthwhile to me as a developer, and I'm particularly inspired by its media technologies, which are years ahead of everybody else. --Chris > On 21 October 2010 12:42, Carl Jokl <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > I think development is a balancing act. > > > I personally can get attached to pet projects and care more about them > > being successful than making lots of money. If it was all about money > > then why would I work on things out of hours when I am not getting > > paid for them. I know I am not the only programmer who has been told > > 'no' by a company and consequently worked on something in my own time > > to prove it would work when there is no money involved. > > > The other side is the reality that I have to pay the rent somehow and > > need to make a living to survive and so have to compromise. > > > I am sure there are developers for whom everything is just money money > > money....but I think they are probably jerks. > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > "The Java Posse" group. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected]<javaposse%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups > > .com> > > . > > For more options, visit this group at > >http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > > -- > Kevin Wright > > mail / gtalk / msn : [email protected] > pulse / skype: kev.lee.wright > twitter: @thecoda -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
