I have no idea if I am considered "young" (32), but I taught a few classes over the last few semesters to students who were unambiguously young, and I can definitely say that young people coding for fun are definitely out there.

A few students of mine would show me little games they were working on, or websites they were building. Sure, they might be doing this a bit for resume-fuel, but it was abundantly obvious to me that they were doing these things largely because they thought it was cool.

And you know what? It is cool! I tried my best to encourage them to keep at it.

The "it's for the resume" is a convenient excuse when people ask you why are you spending hundreds of hours on something that seems pointless but is fun to code.

Anecdotally true: when my non-technically-inclined parents ask me why I'm working on my personal projects, I vaguely mumble something about "it'll be good for my resume" and try to change the topic.

I definitely do not think these will benefit my resume in any way.

Yeah exactly when "normal" people ask me why I contribute to open source now I tend to mumble something like that, career professional development blabla. When I was at university I would say something like "learning/practice programming", though back then most of my classmates spent their time playing LOL/DOTA/etc, so if I wanted to program for fun no one would care really.

I've reached a age where I have to answer "define young". Early thirties is weird. All the people I respect and learn from are still older than me, but not old old.

I'm older than you and I actually considered that the author was talking about me! I thought "yeah, I'm an addict, we're still out there".

It didn't occur to me that I was old until your comment. Thanks!

Hey, 30s is the new 20s, and so on.

I'm in the same boat and I definitely still feel young. I mean, I'm fundamentally unchanged from when I was 16, and still like the same stuff like video games, computers, and so on. I have also always looked kinda young, which probably allowed me to propagate my youth until very recently. The biggest change I've noticed is not anything internal to me but how other people act around me; they talk to me like I'm an adult (which can be either good or bad depending on the situation), and the cashiers at the stores have stopped asking for an ID when I buy liquor (before 30 they still did!). Also, people don't give unsolicited advice as much as they used to; I suppose they think I know what I'm doing or don't care. This is definitely bad, because my modus operandi for life has always been to try weird stuff my own way and count on other people to stop me if I'm doing something completely stupid.

The "define young"-range seems to be a sliding window centered around your current age.

Perhaps at some point there will be very few older than you and perhaps then the sliding window will be offset accordingly, but at least for me (almost, almost 40) I'm still well within the "define young" range from my own point of view.

To even ask is ridiculous.

As a current undergraduate, programming for fun is ubiquitous in my peers. Surprises me also that the author has to ask.

In a bit of fairness, I know a lot of very competent engineers who do not code for fun at all. Programming is purely a job for them, and then they go home and hack on nothing.

There's honestly nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly valid to do something purely for the pay (so long as what you're doing is ethical, obviously). I suspect there are plenty of young people who see the bloated salaries that software engineers get and decide to learn programming for purely economic reasons.

This probably contrasts somewhat to the 80's and 90's, where it was substantially more difficult to "get into" computers, and as a result there was a strong selection bias towards really passionate people.

I struggle a lot with my hobbies because I do almost no coding or learning about code in my free time, at least not directly. I think I could be a great(ish) programmer if I did programming as a hobby, but there's just so many other interesting and worthwhile things to do. I get a lot of FOMO from people who code as a hobby, and I think it doesn't help that they don't seem to get FOMO about my hobbies. But I know I will always feel something is missing if I don't spend time marveling at the natural world and creating art, so I guess I'm stuck.

As someone who studied programming in the 90's, I can tell you that I was surprised about how many students were not passionated like myself. And this was already before the wave of scientist coming from other fields (physics, chemistry, biology) to computing in early 2000s.

In the 80s and 90s CS was often seen as a fallback if you couldn't do well in EE.

At uni, different styles do cluster.

There are the circles in which the nerds cluster who are really in the tunnel about whatever subject it is, here it's programming or CS in general. They do it for fun, they come home and sit at the computer all evening and half the night. Occasionally they do the homework assignments, and if those are interesting, they nerd out about them endlessly. And they are really good at it. They don't really go to parties and are a tad (or a lot) anti-social. But they don't care. Typical minor subjects are math or physics. It's beautiful.

Then there are the circles of the in-it-for-the-moneys. They do homework assignments because they have to, they go to classes because they have to, they read business news, go to parties, feel important and have dollar signs in their eyes every time they think about graduating and finally making big bucks. If lucky then they get help by some of the nerds (see above). But they actually detest the nerds, just as the nerds detest them.

There are more circles and I don't want to deep-dive here, but I actually this also reflects at the workplace 10-20 years later. It's easy to see from which of those two groups the high-performing ICs (some of them a bit socially awkward) come, and from which their managers, and why there is tension between those.

I interview a lot of students for co-op roles. Almost none seem to program outside of assignments -- or even show an interest in programming outside of assignments. We use that as a weeding-out criteria. Some terms we don't hire any students because we need programmers, not warm bodies looking for money in a hot field.

I'm honestly surprised. That was not my impression at university. Most people seemed to struggle with coding.

Older people are always scared of being made irrelevant by later generations.

It’s important not to internalize the fear response of having to shoot down everything that makes you feel threatened.

I'm 26 (so, born around the time author started at Apple) and took up programming as an on-and-off hobby in my early twenties. I've never worked in IT in any capacity and don't consider myself skilled or talented. But I love the thrill of figuring things out, of building (usually useless) things, of solving problems. I suspect there could be many like me, who perhaps never get into (or even try to get into) the industry, yet are enthusiastic about the field itself.