That is a really important question because I think, to some extent, the tone of the industry is set by Academia, because most people coming out are expected to have a degree in, typically, Computer Science. ...If you are an academic ... you are dealing with a very delicate product in your students, and ultimately when a student gets into the industry it is not how well they can analyze a particular function or the depth of knowledge in this particular architecture, it is their passion that drives them forward. And as an academic I think you have a responsibility not to squash that passion, I think you have to find ways of nurturing it.

I think it is really important to be well-rounded ... so you need, for example, to not just write Java code for 4 years as part of your degree. ...I think you have to understand that there is a certain beauty to computing, that you may not see if all you have been exposed to is Java. I think that is important. And ... a lot of colleges are focused on computing for the computing students, so you sit there and you have all your courses in software on whatever it might be. Some of the best hires that I have ever done have been music majors, history majors, philosophy majors, who never saw a computer in college, they saw probably the inside of a bar most, and they turned out to be really really good developers. Because they cared, they were smart, they could synthesize, they could draw parallels, all these kind of things that you have to do when you are working with clients in a real software situations. You could teach some of the programming language but you can't teach someone how to work the parallels between this and that.

For some people yes, for other people no. There are clearly people who are enjoying themselves, having a blast. They are trying new things, doing great work, and for them it's a wonderful place to be. I mean, after all, when you think about (this is not me, this is Fred Brooks): "Software is like poetry: you start with a blank piece of paper and anything you can imagine you can create," and that's a unique place to be as an industry. But it is also really challenging, it is very hard work. So a lot of people don't get that part of it, they don't enjoy that part of it, for them it's a job: they turn up, they do the work, they go home. Which is fine but it's a really really hard way to make a living.

...Frankly, if you are not enjoying it, you are not writing good code: you might ask yourself: "Am I really in the right job? In the right industry?" Because I think everybody has the right to be happy. When you spend 8 hours a day, half of your waking life doing something, I think you deserve to be happy doing it.

I think the question is "As an industry are we happy?". Some yes, some not. "As an industry should we be happy?" Absolutely! I would say that the people who are not happy really deserve to ask themselves "Am I really in the right place?" and then do something to make themselves happy. Everybody has the ability to find something that does make them happy. They have a right to do that. And I think now for the first time in a long long time we actually live in a world where that is possible.