What bullshit. Virtually all successful programmers fell in love with the machine when they were young and would program for free. And surely you noticed this.

That's not been my experience at all. That's so far outside of my experience that I sincerely wonder if you're having me on. I assume you're not, but I apologize for the subsequent wall of text if you were just joking.

I won't be so uncivil as to suggest that your perspective is "bullshit". I suppose the 'successful' qualification is sufficiently ill-defined to give a lot of wiggle room, but if I take that to mean financially successful, a minority of the programmers I know would describe themselves as lifelong machine lovers. Certainly some do, but I'd say more are the sort to get cross with you if you try to "talk shop" outside of work; they have interests and hobbies unrelated to computers and use work with computers to fund those interests and hobbies. And those that do have programming as a hobby rarely work on hobby projects that resemble the work they're paid for.

As an aside, if the industry really were filled with technophiles as you suggest, I think I'd enjoy it a lot more. As it stands, relatively few around me seem to share my interests. I've found the best way to find people who share my technophile inclinations is to look for groups and clubs that form around technical hobbies. And what I've found in doing so is that many lifelong technophiles don't work in tech at all, and of those that do work in tech, most don't get paid to work on the sort of tech they're actually passionate about.

I apologize for the incivility, it was uncalled for. By successful I mean people who are really good at programming. The overall point I was trying to make was that good programmers are drawn to the machine at young age, out of love not out of the desire to make money. So, no, I do not think men started to be drawn into the field when they " started to notice that you could hit the jackpot and become a billionaire,". There is a certain kind of mind that is drawn to tinkering with computers and typically, but not always, that mind lives in a male body.