There’s one big difference between hobby work and professional work: If you do hobby stuff, you can spend as much time on it as you want and you are doing what you want. So likely, you will do the best you can do with your skill level, and you are done when you are done, or when you give up and stop caring.

If you do professional work, there’s a budget and a deadline. There’s a dozen things you need to do RIGHT NOW and that need to be finished until yesterday. There’s not one person working on things, but dozens and your code doesn’t live for weeks or months but for years or decades and will be worked on by someone when you are long gone. It’s not rare to stumble upon 10 or 20 years old code in most bigger applications. There are parts of the Linux kernel that are 30 years old.

Also in professional work, you have non-technical managers dictating what to do and often even the technical implementation. You have rapidly shifting design goals, stuff needs to be implemented in crunch time, but then gets cancelled a day before release. Systems are way more complex than they need to be.

I am currently working on the backend of the website and app for a large retail business. The project is simple, really. Get content from the content managers, display a webside with a webshop, handle user logins and loyalty program data. Not a ton of stuff.

Until you realize:

• The loyalty program is handled by what used to be a separate company but got folded into our company.
• The webshop used to be run by the same team, but the team got spawned out into its own organisation in the company.
• The user data comes from a separate system, managed by a team in a completely different organization unit in the company.
• That team doesn’t actually manage the user data, but only aggregates the user data and provides it in a somewhat standardized form for the backends of user-facing services. The data itself lives in an entirely separate environment managed by a different sub-company in a different country.
• They actually don’t own the data either. They are just an interface that was made to provide customer data to the physical stores. They get their customer data from another service, managed by another sub-company, that was originally made to just handle physical newsletter subscriptions, 20 years ago.

We are trying to overhaul this right now, and we just had a meeting last week, where we got someone from all of these teams around a table to figure out how different calls to the customer database actually work. It took us 6 hours and 15 people just to reverse-engineer the flow of two separate REST calls.

If you see bugs and issues in a software, that’s hardly ever due to bad programmers, but due to bad organizations and bad management.

I don’t mean you can literally understand everything about a computer, just that you can understand everything you need to in order to do 99% of things and this isn’t some crazy thing. You would obviously use openGL or vulkan or direct X to access the GPU instead of writing binaries.

This is exactly what the software crisis is, btw. With infinite time and infinite brain capacity, one could program optimally. But we don’t have infinite time, we don’t have infinite budget, and while processors get faster each year, developers just disappointingly stay human.

So we abstract stuff away. Java is slower than C (though not by a ton), mostly because it has managed memory. Managed memory means no memory management issues. That’s a whole load of potential bugs, vulnerabilities and issues just removed by changing the language. Multitasking is also much, much easier in Java than in C.

Now you choose a framework like Spring Boot. Yes, it’s big, yes you won’t use most of it, but it also means you don’t need to reimplement REST and request handling. Another chunk of work and potential bugs just removed by installing a dependency. And so on.

Put it differently: How much does a let’s say 20% slow down due to managed memory cost a corporation?

How much does a critical security vulnerability due to a buffer overflow cost a corporation?

Hobby development and professional development aren’t that similar when it comes to all that stuff.