You should try to do whatever makes you happy. If it makes you happy to give your labor away for free to some large profitable company, then by all means do so. I would personally try to use my time for myself (either to make more money or to do things I enjoy), but it's a personal choice after all. Only you can make that choice.

That said, having balance is usually a good idea. If you have interests indepedent of your work, you will be able to lean on those interests when work isn't going well. This may not seem important now, but some day you may find yourself tired and lonely working late at night without seeing the fruits of those labors and suddenly your stuck with nothing else going on in your life.

I believe that most of us that 'made it' (past the kickstart/young-ish phase) have experienced burnout at some point, and we know how much it can delay us from making progress...

That's why I think we should at least try to warn our younger friends that all that eagerness to 'make it there' might actually hurt them in the process. Consistency is key and will take you far, because you'll keep on delivering.

Your boss most surely won't remember of your "weekend hero/superstar" phase when you're having a one or two month downtime period because your head isn't right, and your body isn't working okay from all those jolts you've given yourself from your caffeine micro-poisonings. He'll ask "are you gonna keep me those deadlines?" :-)

So yeah, we should leave the young people be young but the more information, the better.

Why is the alternative nightclubs and counter-strike though? Why not, getting a good nights sleep, reading books and lifting weights?

Do what makes you happy, but don’t neglect your health (mental as well as physical) and take breaks/holidays. I spent too much of this year hating computers due to burnout and it’s extremely draining and depressing to have your primary passion leaving you feeling annoyed, frustrated and empty. It’s taken me pretty much all year (most of which I spent out of work) to get to the point where I can work without feeling too bad, but I still struggle to get any code written for passion projects despite having tons of ideas that excite me (until I sit down to work on them). It’s nuch easier to prevent the problems than to fix them after the fact.

In my personal experience, the way to prevent burnout for me is to have other hobbies, to stay physically healthy (especially to get enough sleep, but exercise and diet are super important too), to take plenty of holiday time, and to work on passion projects that are meaningful to you. Working on stuff to make someone else rich isn’t meaningful to me (especially when you see people getting burned by employers again and again — it’s rare that companies will return the favour)

Also, go easy on the coffee. Caffeine is a bad substitute for sleep.

When I was in my early twenties, hungry and looking to prove myself, it was fun for me to stay up all night programming, put in wild hours to get stuff done, lose myself in overly ambitious projects etc. At some point I realized I kept hitting a wall (which was just actually me burning out, but I didn't recognize it at the time) and finding it basically impossible to care or get even the simplest things done for weeks at a time.

My overall productivity was extremely bursty then–herculean efforts followed by barely anything at all. Now, years later, I'm much more defensive of my time, it's far easier to maintain a consistent flow of good work, and I no longer wake up in the middle of the night having had a bad dream about my code crashing.

> Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though?

Working all-nighters to the point your health starts to suffer is not being young. It's exploitation the likes of which the chapters on the industrial revolution warn us about.

More importantly, we as a society should actively discourage this sort of abuse. It makes no sense to let our health waste away just because a manager wants to boast about a target or a deadline.

This doesn't make much sense. You can very well code at night but at least that shouldn't be related to your day job. I'm not sure what you get out of "coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week". If you code something for yourself that's the best.

Also, not sure if Counter Strike should be regarded as bad as alcohol, though indeed both might become addictive if careful.