Not all jobs are the same or similarly enjoyable. E.g. instead of working on CRUD apps for the rest of the life, one might prefer working on a Rust interpreter in Haskell or a Gameboy emulator in Prolog - would be hard to find such 9-to-5 jobs - and after all, one might not want 9-to-5 schedule at all.

In other words - one might want freedom, basically.

As for not helping someone - programming can be recreational, just for the sake of enjoyment.

> What's wrong with working for others?

Nothing really.

I guess what the parent was getting at was that if you are an employee at a point of your life when society expects you to be retired, then you will not be able to allocate your free time as you see fit. In other words, working for others past retirement means you never really retire enough to indulge in things you never had time for in your prime, like spending quality time with one’s spouse for instance [0].

[0] Google’s former highly-paid CFO decides to retire after working for nearly 30 years consecutively https://mashable.com/2015/03/10/googles-cfo-retires-memo/

Depends on personality too, I guess.

I finish projects when they're for work. Or at least, I stay focused.

My own hobby projects are more fulfilling to me, but I often put them aside for long periods - sometimes years - because I don't need to finish them to get pleasure out of doing them, and it's much harder to stay motivated to finish the often very boring parts when I don't have to.

But it feels good to finish things up too. I can push myself to do that for side projects, but the time and energy it takes to get me motivated to do that when I don't have the external pressure to motivate me is much harder.

If I "retire" I'll probably have to do a startup again to have some of that pressure...