I had a discussion about my purpose in life in the middle of a discussion about how to set up various systems for testing. I was asked whether I was happy being a contractor and whether programming is what I want to do.
Of course, programming is what I like to do since I was 16, and I have never regretted it, and I have never been bored by it. But I think the question was more like whether programming was all I wanted to do in life.
Of course, it is all I want to do. But it is more than that. It is about satisfaction in life. The way I look at it, I want to be able to look back after I have retired to feel that I have not wasted my life on something that I don't care much about. I want to be happy about what the things I chose to do, whether they ultimately prove to be successful or not. I know for sure that if I become a manager now, whether I become a good or bad manager will not figure in my reckoning.
What I want to be able to feel is that I have tried to change the world, the programming world. Of course, I am hoping that I will be successful in the next few years. But even if I am not able to do anything about it at all, I know I will be happy if it is because I simply am not good enough to do much about it, or because the time is not ripe for such a radical change.
