Chris Kiehl put “It’s Still OK to Enjoy Programming” on his blog on Saturday, October 17. By Monday morning it sat at 160 points and 158 comments on Hacker News — roughly one reply per upvote, which is what happens when a post is less an argument than a negotiation.

It’s a decent, warm-hearted piece, and it’s right that the doom feed is contagious. But early on Kiehl offers a deal, and the deal deserves a second read. At work, he writes, “the economics of purely hand-written code have changed. But that’s work. Work is not life.”

Keep the joy. Hand over the profession. That’s the settlement, and most of those 158 replies accepted it.

Nobody Writes Poetry for a Living Either

One of the first responses made the obvious point: of course you can still program as a hobby — you can also write poetry for nothing. The reply was meant as a dismissal. It reads instead as the whole column. Poetry is a fine hobby and a catastrophic apprenticeship.

Programming was strange among professions because the hobby and the job were the same activity, done with the same tools, in the same language, often in the same chair. That overlap wasn’t a perk. It was the training system. Nobody paid the nineteen-year-old who spent a weekend fighting a segfault; the possibility of eventually being paid is what made the weekend rational. Firms got a decade of free skill formation and booked it as culture.

Which is why the current market matters more than either camp will admit. The optimists say the tool changes and the job changes with it — learn to prompt, stop whining. The doomers say the job is simply gone. Both agree the fun survives. Neither notices that the fun was the capital.

The On-Ramp Just Got a Cover Charge

Look at Hacker News’ own “Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)” thread, the monthly ritual where people advertise themselves. It’s full of hobby projects offered as credentials — a game on Newgrounds, a side repo, a weekend build — because for twenty years that was the working ladder: bedroom to first job to senior engineer, no credential required, and the industry bragged about how little it cared where you came from.

That ladder had a paid rung at the bottom. Remove it and the filter stops being talent and starts being savings. Two years of building for free is cheap when you’re 22 and sleeping in your old room; it’s impossible when you’re 30 with a lease. The Indeed software-development postings index the St. Louis Fed publishes as IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE won’t show you this, because a count of postings can’t see who quietly stopped applying.

Conservatives who trust markets to route talent should sit with this one. Some inputs a market consumes without ever pricing them, and free apprenticeship is the cheapest input American software ever had. Burning it isn’t creative destruction. It’s a firm writing off an asset it never carried on the books.

What Doesn’t Transfer

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: a great deal of software quality was never professional. It came from someone who cared past the point of obligation — who chased an edge case at 11 p.m. because it itched. That isn’t romance. It’s the mechanism.

A platform manager at a mid-sized insurer, in a Slack DM she sent between two meetings, put it better than I can: “The bug reports that matter come from the person who couldn’t let it go at six. I can’t schedule that and I can’t buy it.”

You can specify a feature. You cannot specify the itch. An industry whose junior ranks are staffed by people doing it strictly for money, supervised by people who used to do it for love, will discover the difference in production, at the worst hour, on a Tuesday.

Kiehl is right that it’s still okay to enjoy programming. He shouldn’t have needed to write it down, and we shouldn’t have needed to read it. When a profession starts issuing permission slips for the fun part, the fun part has already been reclassified — and so, more quietly, has the profession.

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