Just wanted to chime in from the supposed 1% as someone who isn’t running a business earn money but earn money in order to continue running the business. A business building something I’m passionate about, with the addition of an end goal I expect will make the world a better place.

> There is nothing nobler or kinder about tech businesses. All those "mission statements" are just pure fluff for PR purposes.

true, but would it be wrong to assume that the following ratio:

(the number of people who are passionate about xyz and curiosity and pure joy are major driving forces) / (total number of people working in xyz)

is probably much higher for cs than for plumbing?

Being 'passionate and curious' have nothing to do necessarily with 'making the world a better place'.

If anything it's kind of a personal issue.

Surely most scientific discovery comes along with passion and curiosity, so there's some overlap there, but most work doesn't get done out of either of those things. Most of the things that move the ball forward are a grind.

I only want to hire a plumber with passion, who is making the world a better place one clogged drain at a time. Haven’t been able to find one yet but I’m still looking.

Plumbing, building, electrics all require understanding the current state of the system (eg: house that 20 different cowboys have messed with over the years), and weighing up the different possible solutions - sure there is a measure of simple/straightforward work, but same can be said of software engineering.

We work in a different medium, but at a high level I think the process can look very similar, and there's satisfaction in a job well done

> I only want to hire a plumber with passion, who is making the world a better place one clogged drain at a time.

Don't know about the passion, but they really are making the world a better place, one clogged drain at a time.

It's probably the same. Some CS people like to work on side projects. So do a lot of plumbers by renovating their homes or tinkering with other stuff in their spare time.

I'd have guessed, most CS people would do OSS and only a fraction of them turns these projects into products.

I met too many business people who just wanted to run a startup no matter if it was software or physical products.

Doing plumbing for fun is like parsing old logs as a hobby. But plenty of people do woodwork,metalwork, bread-making, brewing, etc for fun.

It can be both. There is no mission without money.