Who Wants To Be a Billionaire Coder? 318
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?"
Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
I would work on open source alternatives to software which currently only has good commercial options. Anything which I didn't have the knowledge to work on myself (artwork, interface design, low level algorithms, security...), I would hire experts to work on.
YES! (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know about what project I'd do, but yeah. I'd keep working for sure. Yes, sometimes it's a big pain, but ultimately there's just so much of not doing anything valuable that one can take. It's why a job where you go in and browse the internet for 8 hours totally suck. You need to do something. Might as well do something you know or you like.
Though, it would be nice just to take any job offered and not have to worry about how much it makes. Likewise, doing some community projects would be equally rewarding.
the patient tasks (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been programming for, like, uh.... about 27 or 28 years. Arguably longer if you wanna go back to really little kid stuff.
If I had that much money - was basically (if I wanted to be) in the leisure class - what I would like to believe about myself is that I would try to secure my family's material conditions really well, try to make as efficient as possible my wealth management program, and, as to hacking.....
There are *so many* really great and valuable potential projects that (a) nobody is investing in; (b) have an investment horizon that is tough because these are projects that will take a good 5 years, let's say, to get to where seeing a return is on the table. A good 10 years before you start to see the possibility of "done".
I would start an R&D lab but a very small one - perhaps 10 people - and while we'd try to have some positive income spin-offs each year from 0 onward, the goal would be to create the kind of environment where we can take off some of the bigger, long-neglected problems.
You kids these days don't know what's possible in a GUI framework. You don't know how to do language design, systems software generally, databases, file systems, or a whole lot of other basics. You've inherited really mediocre crap and you take for granted that that's where things are at. And the industry has ceased production of grey-beards. (Also: get off my lawn!)
"like tears in the rain", -t
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Work on! (Score:4, Interesting)
I am jobless at the moment, and the most difficult thing about that is keeping yourself busy. In today's crisis, job-searching isn't a full-time occupation, so there is plenty of time to do other things. The problem is: most of these things can be done tomorrow. So I really have to force myself to do them today. When you work, most of the time someone is waiting for the results of your labour, which is very motivating. So I'd rather work on than 'enjoy' my pension when I'm 65 and still healthy enough to work.
Of Freakin' Course! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course I'd program if I didn't have to work for a living. I mean, I didn't get into this business because I thought it would be profitable. I got into it because it's want I enjoy doing. The fact that I happen to get paid fairly well for it is just bloody awesome, but if it wasn't profitable, I'd have some crappy day job I hate and would code in my spare time. Likewise, if I simply didn't need the money, then I wouldn't need the crappy day job, but I'd still code in my (much more significant) spare time — in addition to all the other things that I enjoy doing.
The tougher question is what projects I'd work on. I suppose I could do anything I want, so I'd probably do less useful coding. I'd build things that have already been built just because I want to see how I would do it. I'd build things that are silly just because the idea popped into my head. I'd probably start tons of projects that I'd never get around to finishing.
Re:the patient tasks (Score:2, Interesting)
Your first paragraph is preposterous. Even as little as 1 billion dollars doesn't particularly need to be managed to secure a nice future for dozens of people (let's say you put it in bonds earning 1% (which would be hilariously bad), that's 10 million a year, it takes an utter jackass to successfully squander that much money (you could send 10 people to Harvard, buy a nice house and a Ferrari, and still have to decide to do with the other 7 million), never mind that you could, in an emergency, touch (probably a lot more than) 50 million of the principal without really causing a problem).
Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? (Score:3, Interesting)
Same kind of deal here as well. I left my old stressful job and went with one that has me working the standard forty hour work week.
Friends ask why I would continue to code outside of work, since that is all I do all week, especially with the minimal budget I live on.(I could quit and live for a few years before I ran out of savings.) They think I should relax and enjoy myself.
Why? I come up with ideas I wish to try out and that is how I enjoy myself. Most end up in a folder of projects that may never get used again. In some cases a friend comes to me and we start working on a project together. This has led to successes such as a web site that received around one million hits within the first month.
Re:the patient tasks (Score:3, Interesting)
You misunderstand. By "managing wealth" I very much include not leaving *too* much of a legacy for kids, making sure as little as possible goes towards evil, and getting as much of the surplus doing good works. Buffet is schematically the right idea here, even if I don't agree with all of his particular decisions. My selfish thing is that I wouldn't want to spend 60 hours / week managing various investments. Nor would I want to just hand most of it over to the Gates foundation. $1B today, if you can make a lot of it liquid quickly, is -- I agree -- more than is reasonably needed. It's just a big responsibility and my selfish take is that I'd make a priority of reducing the amount of time I had to personally spend managing that responsibility. There are some causes I'd want a hands-on role in because I think I have intellectual contributions to make but there's a lot of grunt work in responsibly handling that large an amount of money/nominal wealth that I would want to delegate in order to concentrate on what I'm good at.
-t
Commercial art vs. art that feeds your soul (Score:5, Interesting)
At my day job in the software industry, I often feel like a musician who has to make a living writing advertising jingles. At least I get do use my talent, but it's not what I'd create if I had complete freedom.
I often dream about having the freedom and unlimited time to code whatever I want, on my own schedule, to my own standards, without any concern about whether the product could make money or not. One lifetime would not be long enough to code all of the cool ideas which I'm constantly thinking up.
Re:I'm confused... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's useful... probable primes [wikipedia.org] are much easier to test for than true primes, and the error is small enough to be acceptable for RSA. There's a whole branch of complexity theory dedicated [wikipedia.org] to probabilistic algorithms.
Re:Ask the retired (Score:5, Interesting)
I mostly use scripting: bash and tcl/expect. Over my career, I learned and used about four dozen languages. I see them now as being more the same than they are different. There is rarely an inherent benefit in one over the other. Bash is always available on the platforms I use. When I need more complex code tcl/expect provides command interaction and timer-based processing.
In both cases, the code executes more than fast enough on a single user modern desktop. Compiling code is unnecessary, especially when the majority of the heavy lifting is being performed by highly optimized GNU utilities.
I don't have a problem learning new languages, I just see less of a reason to. Just as fewer people see a need to write assembly now (I did that for 15 years), I imagine in another couple of decades (if that long) compiled languages will seem antiquated to most. You'll be telling someone on Slashdot that you coded in a compiled language for 15 years then. And it will seem just as strange. :)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd really be able to peel yourself away from the tropical island with 10 servants on the clock 24 hours a day to serve you 200 year old wine, your private library larger than Google's (except all in hardcover first editions), baths of gold coins, a private jet with built in casino, and your 200 square foot bed covered with silk sheets and priceless animal furs and dotted with down-fluff pillows to just browse slashdot?
OK I probably would too. I'd do it with the processing power of my private botnet which I paid Microsoft to build into every NT-based OS since NT4.
Nah that isn't right either. TBH I think I would buy a nice, small house in some suburb with FIOS. It'd be mostly bare except for ludicrously expensive art I liked which I'd hang inconspicuously in my bedroom. And I'd have a couple of machines which I'd keep updated. Maybe I'd buy some of those $50,000 cisco clunkers to play around with occasionally. I'd browse slashdot, read wikipedia, and learn everything there is to learn.
And for some reason when I imagine myself rich I see myself doing daily tasks (mail, slashdot, irc) on the very latest MacBook. I just might.
I absolutely, wholeheartedly second this. (The infomation-sponge and CCNA in me both approve, too.)
Re:Ask the retired (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought of work in a somewhat reversed manner than most. I like learning, mostly the sciences. My primary interest is in computers and networking. I worked at the places I worked because of what I could learn - I probably would have done the same for free. That they paid me was really a bonus. Fortunately, they didn't know that. :)
I started reading about computers when I was in elementary school, at a time when that meant mainframes (that few people even knew existed). There's always the discussion of whether programming is an art or just a job. It's both, just as some people are artists and some are house painters.
That doesn't make me a great programmer (on the contrary, I'd rate myself mediocre), just as every artist doesn't have a painting in the Louvre. It's just something that's inherent in the way I'm wired. It makes me happy.
Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's strange. Eternal weekends start to get boring after a while. You start running out of stuff to do. Then you don't do anything. Then a month down the line, you wonder what just happened to the month before.
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.
What happens to people on an eternal weekend after a while is an accelerated mid-life crisis. Life itself becomes meaningless.
As to answer the question myself, I probably wouldn't code if I didn't have to. I have other interests and hobbies that I'd be interested in pursuing. It's nothing terribly grand, mind you, just things that I'd rather be doing that's not coding.
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how well it would work: you'd still have to spend a lot of time telling this team of programmers what you want with exacting specifications, and then you'd have to chase after them to get it done and fix the bugs. You could hire someone else to crack the whip, but even so it's not going to be the way you want it unless you spend some time making sure it is.
"If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."
Of course, if you're like me, even if you had a billion dollars to do stuff like this, I absolutely loathe the idea of managing or directing other people, so my pet projects would either get done by me by myself, or they just wouldn't get done at all.
Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to be attempting to answer a question irrelevant to this article.
Money buys you freedom: the freedom to do what you want, when you want, without having to worry (as much) about earning money to pay for your own continued existence (food, rent, bills, etc.). Sure, you can decide to make less money and live on this lower income, but that means cutting something: not taking any foreign vacations, living in a smaller house or apartment, having a crappier car, having your wife leave you because she doesn't want to live in the ghetto, etc. Something's gotta go.
So, you've abandoned programming to work in a lower-stress job? I guess you didn't like programming all that much then, or you would have found a better job in the same field (not every programming job requires 100-hour weeks, in fact that's rather rare). I would wager that many people here on Slashdot (myself included, as I'm an embedded software engineer) got into programming, because it was something they were fairly good at, and they liked it better than most other jobs. I can't imagine something else I'd rather be doing for money other than programming or electrical hardware work; certainly not anything like management, sales, marketing, etc. So your experience really isn't a very good comparison for others here IMO.
Doing what you're good at, and what you like (better than the alternatives), is usually the way to make the most money, and buy yourself the most freedom and happiness. Save up enough and you can retire early, or move to part-time consulting or something like that which doesn't require a 40-hour week. Willingly taking a very low-paying job, OTOH, is going to either trap you in a cycle of poverty with bill collectors constantly chasing you, or condemn you to a life where you can't afford to enjoy some of the nicer things in life, like a car that doesn't break down every week, nice vacations every year, higher-quality food, the ability to have a stay-at-home wife so your kids aren't screwed up, the ability to afford kids at all, the ability to send your kids to a decent school so they actually get a decent education, etc. (Some of this only applies if you live in the USA so I apologize in advance if you don't.)
Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be pointless, because they would fire you before you had a chance to make any kind of difference. They don't care if you're willing to work cheaply (they don't pay teachers much anyways in most places), they want underlings who do things the way they say to do them, just like everyone who's in power.
If you get that rich, you'd be better off starting your own private school, or funding scholarships at good private schools for kids who can't afford them.
I'd do something noble with my dough (Score:3, Interesting)
Like, buying out MS and shutting it down. Just to see how company exec starts sweating who lived by the mantra "buy MS, they'll never go away".
Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? (Score:2, Interesting)
From what you are describing, it seems that you hate your workplace/work unfortunately. Still, that is not a reason that fun and work couldn't go together. I am only required to work 37.5 hours / week but still I go the office on Saturdays sometimes because I can't wait to finish that code that I have been working on Friday. Oh, I have a great office: quiet, cool, designer furniture, big glass windows, and a nice view of the sea. And I feel the sense of satisfaction that my code is going to be part of the lives of billions of people around the world. Money is really just the icing on the cake (disclaimer: I work for one of the largest corporations in the world).
JMP rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a few games I would like to write.
What I would like to see is a space fighting game, but with real physics. Something like this [youtube.com], but from the inside.
I think Freespace 2 [indiegames.us] would be a good start, it's already Open Source.
Re:Who needs to be a billionaire? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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."
Not really. It starts out that way but then what you started out loving becomes your job. Next thing you know, thats the last thing you want to do in your spare time. Whatever your job is, do the best job of it you can. Not because your employer deserves it, they probably don't, but because you spend a substantial portion of your life doing it. You can also make more money but you can't make more time. Time is not money, it is far far more precious.
Honestly, given the freedom to ignore financial concerns I would probably leave technology behind at this point in my life. Think private monastery in the mountains and a very zen lifestyle.