The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it - even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

Hey guess what kids, there ain't no "golden years" ahead! - so you better get smart fast and figure out a way not to get caught up in the mediocrity of the "J-O-B" bullshit that our great society offers you. It's this simple; If you don't figure out a way to do something in your life that you enjoy doing, you are fucked... PERIOD. You don't get the time back. You don't get no gold watch or reward for a "Job Well Done". Nothing I can tell you will prepare you for the grim reality that your life will become when you lose the thing that you can not possibly understand when you have it ... your youth.

How can I avoid turning into a pointy-haired boss?

The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer. What tempts programmers to become managers are companies with old-fashioned corporate structure, where the only way to advance in salary and prestige is to go into management. So if you want to avoid becoming a PHB, avoid such companies, and work for (or start) startups.

Livingston: What do you think makes a good hacker?

Spolsky: I think what makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need. To me, the most elegant hack is when somebody says, "These 2,000 lines of code end up doing the same thing as those 2 lines of code would do. I know it seems complicated, but arithmetically it's really the same." When someone cuts through a lot of crap and says, "You know, it doesn't really matter."
...

I don't know if that's what makes a good hacker. I guess that would be answering a slightly different question to what's a brilliant hack. I guess a brilliant hacker is someone who comes up with a brilliant hack.

But it's also a programmer who gets into flow—sort of what Paul Graham describes as an animal. I see it specifically as a programmer who sits down to do something and they get into a mental state where they're just cramming away. They're just generating stuff and the time is passing and they're not aware of it. They're just typing, typing, typing, typing, and great things are happening because they're in that particular mental state.

I think probably there are a lot of workaday programmers working on upgrades to Enterprise Java (now I've insulted all the Java programmers) who never achieve flow. To them, it's just kind of engineering step by step; it's never the magic of creation.