What if money was no object?

Currently Listening to:
Noisestorm - Solar
Love Automatic - Save My Soul 

One of my favorite things to do in this world is problem solve. Other things that I love to do include teaching peers. These two passions of mine come together quite often, helping fellow students learn new technologies, or helping them understand something they didn't quite understand in class. I've quoted some of my favorite people in the past like Daniel Pink and Sir Ken Robinson, but today I'm going to talk about Alan Watts. One of my favorite lectures included the "What if money was no object" talk.

How many of you reading this actually like what you do at work? Maybe the environment is bad, maybe the people are annoying, but do you actually like what you do? Most people that I've talked to seem to not enjoy their job. This baffles me. They go to work day in and day out trying to make money but they don't like their job. They have the "fun" on the weekend. "All rech and no vomit" is the phrase Watts used to describe this mentality of forcing yourself to do this, "... you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living. That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing... Which is stupid!"

Personally I love what I do. If I lived in a post-scarcity utopian society, I would still do what I do now. I may not be the best person to come up with an algorithm, I may not be the best coder, but at least I can say I love what I do. Asking students in the computer lab about what they want to do, I get plenty of answers that have nothing to do with coding, and to those students I've started asking why they went into computer science. "For the money" is a typical response I get. These students are about to graduate and they either don't know what they want to do for a living, or actively don't want to go into software development. I understand that knowing how to code can improve almost everyones problem solving techniques as well as help them with the day to day for their job (knowing how to script a mundane task saves you in the long run), but I have problems when the students seem to despise what they do.

Another issue that I've seen recently is the lack of effort on the part of the individual to better themselves. Ignoring the population that does not like what we do, we are left with those who I would assume are like me, motivated to better themselves over the weekend by working on a project, reading a book on the subject, contributing to a big open source project, or attending a conference/seminar. I've tried to put on events for my fellow students and peers in the area, including BarCampCHS, local programming competitions, helping with the Hack-a-thon, teaching teachers how to teach, and so on. However, when I start telling everyone to attend these events for the learning experience, or the meet and greet that they would have with local gurus in the community as well as people in a position to hire you, I get the same students every time. I've started referring to these students as "my go getters". They are the ones that attend/plan/promote all the events. All in all that is about 30 students that seem to enjoy what they do enough to want to better themselves. I can't say that the other students are bad, because honestly I haven't met them. They don't want to hang out in the lab (understandable, I know that I'm a very extroverted person and most of my peers would define themselves as introverted), or they don't think that going to these things are very important.

When I'm talking to some of my friends who do things in the local community I'm normally asked to give recommendations to them about who I would hire, and to pass on the message that someone is hiring to them (remember it is who you know, not what you know). Why would I recommend someone who I've only met once in the classroom who never speaks out. I would rather recommend someone who I've dealt with outside the classroom in a professional manner. The planning team of BarCampCHS sits pretty high on that list seeing as how I saw on a weekly basis their problem solving techniques as well as planning and execution of running a big event. Students who talk to me on a regular basis about interesting problems or new technologies are right behind them. The conversations I've had range from talking about ICPC problems, new technology stacks, hosting of web apps, design issues, high performance computing, low level hardware coding, open source licensing,  and many other topics that range from an individual problem to problems spanning the entire field of software development.

I've had conversations about why students don't want to do these things, and the mutual agreement is to just not even care about them, so consider this my last plea to those who don't seem to care (and honestly, if you are reading this either you do care, or you just like me): Instead of that one game of league maybe you could solve a problem on UVa, instead of going to r/funny you can instead read an article from r/learnprogramming or r/programming, instead of complaining about your grade in advance algorithms maybe you can implement your own library containing sorting algorithms and different data structures. I promise you, if you do these things you will feel better about your choice in degree/job. You will start to hone in on the part of programming/computer science that you enjoy most, because as Alan Watts said, "Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really 'with it' and then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. Therefore it's so important to consider this question. What do I desire?"