On being in it for the money

One of the most common things I hear from recruiters is that the company doesn't want people who are in it for the money. But of course I'm in it for the money. The list of books I'd like to read would take more than a lifetime to finish, as would the list of personal projects I'd like to do. I don't have a lifetime's worth of blog posts, but I it would take years to finish up all the drafts I have and I have another few years worth of posts that I haven't even started, and I expect that if I wrote those I'd have at least another few years of ideas. My ideal life doesn't involve solving problems to make someone else money. It involves spending some of my time solving whatever problems are most interesting to me, and a lot of time doing things that don't involve solving problems at all. Why do I work? Well, I can get a job that's, say, 50% as good as solving any problem I want, and I can use the money to set up a situation where I can work on any problem I want indefinitely.

Although it's something you're not supposed to say, I don't think I'm unique in primarily being in it for the money. If you look at programmers who have struck it rich, a pretty large fraction of them don't work, and of the ones that do work, a large fraction of those don't have anything resembling a "normal" programming job. Of the people who still work, I suspect many of them are just working due to inertia. My (admittedly weak) evidence for this is the story about why Google eliminated sabbaticals: if you give someone who's been at Google for N years a sabbatical, it turns out a lot of people will retire instead of coming back after the sabbatical. It appears that once people realize how nice it is to not have a job and they're wealthy enough to not have a job, most of them will decide to stop having a job.