I don't make as much as my finance bro buddies, but they work A LOT. And they work year round. I work six-nine months at a time (maybe a year if the contract is right) then I take at least a couple months off.

If I was a career/full time guy, finance would probably be the better choice, but as someone who spends his life trying to maximize the life part: software really does it for me. It helps that I love doing it, for sure, but tbh finance is a complex, challenging field that's quite technical and mathy so it would likely be fun as well. Except for the people, many of the people are, uh, tough to be around. Not all, but many--still, tech bros aren't exactly the easiest either. Glass houses.

As a translator in Eastern Europe, I feel like I have a lot more freedom than the software devs here. I can work as little as 2-3 hours a day and pay all my expenses and save for the future. The job is remote by its very nature, so it doesn’t matter whether I am in my own country, or I am traveling in Patagonia or Madagascar. I am able to dictate deadlines to my clients, I don’t have to work to their schedule. For example, If a job will only take me half an hour to do, I can tell the client that I can return it in one week, and in the meantime I can travel or whatever.

I do some coding as a hobby and occasionally visit the programming language etc. meetups in my hometown. The software devs there make around the same amount of money I do each month, but they complain of the 9 to 5 routine, office politics, and how unhealthy it is to spend all day sitting in front of a computer.

Translators def have a solid situation, I met a translator last year when I was traveling and she lives that digital nomad lifestyle, works a charm.

Sometimes i think i should have studied Finance instead!

The reason i do this (all software related activities) is because it's my real passion. I see many people engaging in "coding" bootcamps but only because of the market demand, not because they are passionate in any way about doing it, which is sad.

   This is just about the only professional career I've heard of where people talk this way...

In fact my first choice for counterexample would be your example - accountants. But in my experience they are often passionate about proving a helpful and necessary service, eve if they aren't passionate about the work itself.

For that matter, let's talk about a closer career to ours. How many people who are system administrators complain about relatives asking them for free consultations? Would that be an issue if they just loved configuring and troubleshooting computers so much? Even if you like computers a lot, what you get paid to do with them isn't necessarily fun.

-- From "Real Programmers Don't use Pascal", a classic in programmer's humor.

also, medicine, law, automotive engineers, pilots, merchant marine, musicians, actors... people are passionate about different things.

maybe you haven't heard people talk about their passions in those industries because you aren't in those industries?

what a bizarre thing to have to explain to someone.

When I ask them, their passion tends not to be "finance" so much as "helping people" in various forms. Whether that passion is sincere or not is a separate argument.

Personally, that sort of incentive one of the major motivators that's missing from the pure software industry imo. When I worked in derivatives trading as a programmer, I made a good chunk of change finishing projects early, with high quality, etc. At my current position, there's no such obvious incentive. Promotions and solid bonuses could require years of this type of work as a prerequisite and may not even be recognized at all.

Almost all the young finance professionals at my place do a non-trivial amount of coding.

The transition doesn't come without heartache though, there are risks including job security and potential growth. No one has a crystal ball. I made a choice that felt more fulfilling in the present. Whether that was a smart choice or not 50 years from now - you'll have to ask me then.

So, you were either in the USA or East Asia, wern't you? I guess you were not in Europe.

> I guess you were not in Europe

EU labor laws don't actually prevent those hours, if that's what you're implying. Most of my banking buddies in Europe work 70 hours.

ML does not eat software in the same sense, because ML and software engineers generally do non-overlapping work. ML involves analysis, software involves synthesis.

There may be a day when ML automates software development, but it’s nowhere close yet.

At most, ML is merely dominating current hype among software-adjacent technologies (along with block chain).

not in the mainstream right now. Check back in 10 years.

Could you elaborate on this one?

If you have any links to papers demonstrating anything close to what you are stating, feel free to post them.

We've been automating programming since the very beginning, moving from machine language to assembly to high-level languages to using libraries and frameworks (although making different libraries cooperate is sometimes just as labor-intensive as writing the functionality from scratch).