If this was generally perceived as fun, then Amazon would charge money for you to "play" mturk. The fact mturk work pays tells me that mturk is pretty much nobody's hobby.
That the pay is fun (or enables fun) does not make the work fun. Here mturk was named a potential "hobby", that's just ridiculous to me.
> Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doing some mindless menial tasks for a couple extra bucks to go out on the weekend?
You could argue that EVE setup is "work" required to enable some "fun" play. I don't think anyone would consider EVE setup (just the setup) as a hobby.
People like grinding. Just not when they have to accept that they're grinding for the sake of grinding. There needs to be an upcoming battle or achievement or texture pack unlock or a few extra bucks in the bank in order for them to get their "I'm being productive" kick every time they complete one of their many short, simple, well defined grind tasks. Just a continuous stream of little wins.
There is clearly a patter here.
Bull. If this was true trey would line up to join our company and I could charge them at the door for working with us.
Some programming is fun. Sure. Many part of my work are fun. But I'd rather do other things with my life if money was not an issue.
Programming on stuff I care about is fun, and for some beautiful moments at work there is overlap of "stuff I care about" and "stuff that is valuable to the business", but most of the time the work is "meh" and I mostly view it as "this is much better to me than most other jobs would be for me".
I imagine just about nothing is 100% fun 100% of the time. If many parts of your work are fun, it’s fair to say your work is fun. If you’d rather be doing something else, you could try that, too. Maybe you’d like it more.
But when I compare programming to RPGs, I feel the same way. In both of them, I spend a lot of effort supporting the really fun parts with work. I enjoy both, and I keep doing both. But RPGs have a ton of grind that I generally don't like except that it enables me to get to the fun stuff.
Most of my hobbies are like this. There are things I have to do in prep for the fun stuff, or after the fun stuff to finish the project. And I do them to get back to the fun again.
I would program even if money was no issue. There are many who would.
Then programming usually does not come by itself: meetings, company politics, little mgmt, all usually come with it when programming professionally. Many of those tasks I consider less fun than the programming itself.