Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…So given all that, can you give advice to young programmers? This is another question from Reddit, the infinite wisdom of Reddit. “What should a person in their early 20s do to move forward in the tech industry?” And this is an interesting addition to the question, “And by doing it, will this be walking on someone else’s path?” I am going to try to answer that question, I guess the best I can, which I think that if you’re entering into the tech world, one of the hardest pieces of advice that I took a long time to learn was I became enamored and addicted. Obviously, we talked about that I program for way too many hours, forgetting to spend the time I needed with my wife, with my friends, all that stuff, like totally wrapping myself up into one activity. I think though it made me who I am, it was probably an unhealthy activity and probably not a wise activity. And so the best advice I can give is that you got to develop the love, the skill, the desire for it. Whether that’s just only using AI agents, programming yourself, using Zig or programming JavaScript, whatever that flavor is that’s going to get you coming back every single day, getting the reps in the gym, if you will for programming. But also knowing how to value what is valuable and not getting lost in the sauce where you’re just so stuck on trying to make the next greatest startup that you sacrifice your health, you sacrifice your relationships. Or even worse, you sacrifice your own morals to take certain shortcuts that you probably shouldn’t be taking in life to be able to achieve these things, because I’m sure there’s hundreds of horror stories you could hear where people definitely shortcutted their morals for monetary success. Yeah. I mean, the golden handcuffs comfort can destroy the soul in some sense. Yeah, so that’s really important to remember. There’s young people kind of thinking, “Do I even want to be a programmer now?” It seems like AI is getting better and better at programming. If they were trying to make that decision, would you still say, “Yeah, if this is something that fills you with joy”?…

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