pouët.net

I conducted many interviews with sceners in the course of the years. A good example is the interview with kb, from 1999 when he was 23 years old. I think many of us had similar life stories and that is also the reason why we got together in the demoscene. Many computer science students enrolled at uni because they thought a cs degree would get them rich. They have no prior programming experience and there are even such who cheat their way through uni and graduate without having written a single line of code. By contrast many of us started coding prior to our 10th birthday and the reason why we did it was not that we wanted to earn money. The IT industry actually demands different skills than what we use for our hobbyist projects. And yet most of us work in the IT industry since it is one of the most profitable areas of business.

also sprach adok^hugi

Haha. For real, kb looks damn fantastic for his age.

Thanks (i guess) :D. I'm kind of happy tho how much i _did_ grow up in the last 20 years tho. Pheew.

Also Adok, that second image is from 2007, way after the interview. Stop changing stuff after the fact.

No it doesn't.

Aww, don't burst his bubble that his day-to-day job has to be boring! ;)

but what about prostitution?

Not to mention drugs, weapons trade, slavery...

stop it guys, it makes me feel i picked the wrong hobby!

It really surprises me if we get an intern at my workplace who does actually know his stuff. You would think that Git, Python and/or JavaScript and a bit of C is common knowledge among young aspiring computer experts. But far from it. Only a few are into studying computer science (aka Informatics in Germany) due to the inert curiosity about the computing device and controlling it. When I started studies in 2004 I already met people who plainly said that they are into it due to the money.



I can only partly agree to this. You still need the curiosity that drives you to learn new things, the ability to get deeper into new APIs/platforms/languages/concepts by just trying them out and experimenting with them. You still need the debugging skills you trained while sitting hours on your computer and finding that one bug that keeps crashing your program occasionally. You need the experience to find bugs without a debugger.

If that statement was about "who needs the skills to make a pretty spinning cube?", well you are probably right. The industry needs people who code Java, who know about all these mystical words in the enterprise Java world, or C# world. Know how to spin up a Kyberneted cluster of Containers on an Amazon cloud. Skills like knowing Windows quirks in and out, so you can quickly fix the printer at the office. These days often also juggling words like "Angular", "React", "mocha", "Selenium" in the JavaScript ecosys^W hell pit.

And skills like writing a clean and proper CSV/Git/SVN commit message are not trained at home. (How many times did I already `git commit -a -m "."` just because I know how noone would ever read that message anyways).

WeirdCtor you sound like someone coming straight from the Heise forums, where all the old whiny farts keep telling themselves that all new things are shit and how great the good 'ol days have been.

Do they do that on the Heise forums? I wouldn't know, I don't read that.

kb, ok, I've removed the second picture.