I joked that my opinion on The Technion, the University where I completed my B.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering (= "EE"), has become "untwitterable". The more I think about it, the more it seems that I think less highly of it, despite the fact that some people told me that it wasn’t a waste of time, and that I’ll fondly look back at my studies. Part of the problem was that I studied there only in order to get my degree (while I’m not interested in electronics), which I wanted in order to get more higher-paying jobs.
I paid money to study there, and the people whom were indirectly paid by me, while sometimes being helpful, often had limited time to help me, looked down upon me, and gave me hard tests and unfair grades. It destroyed my self-esteem, harmed my health, made me maniacal, put me on psychiatric drugs which harmed my health further, and taught me little of lasting value. Despite paying, I didn’t enjoy it, and only did it to get the diploma, so I can get a more lucrative job later on.
Paying and getting paid made the experience worse. This is the curse of professionalism, which used to mean doing something for money instead of because you love it and enjoy it.
Many years later, I started solving problems at Project Euler, one of many competitive programming sites. Since I had quite a bit of maths and programming background, I did quite well at it, and have solved over 300 problems. I didn’t have to pay, but I voluntarily paid a small donation. I am still unhappy by the somewhat degraded user experience of it, but am otherwise very content.
Despite not paying or expecting to be paid, or rather because of it, I was met with gratitude, respect and admiration by the people I helped on the freenode chat network with previous problems I solved, or by announcing that I have solved a new one - also without paying.
I was much happier as an amateur - someone who does what they do because they enjoy it and love it, not to get paid. See Paul Graham’s "What business can learn from open source" .
Lately, by inspiration from a correspondent on an Internet chat who mentioned someone’s one line Résumé, I wrote my "I’m a Rock Star software developer" Résumé. I included only amateur achievements there, including Project Euler, and excluded the Technion. At first I thought it was because EE B.Sc. degrees are quite common and so not notable enough. But then I realised something else: I wasn’t proud of my EE degree. These were the most vexing, toxic, soul destroying, unproductive, six years of my life. I regret doing it for greed of money.
That junkie stand up comedian whom I saw at a captioned twitter video was right: if you want to succeed as a writer, entertainer, and amateur philosopher: don’t work "hard".
Professionalism seemed the way to go throughout a large part of the 20th century. Frankly, the 20th century was not too bad: cities became self-sustaining, life expectancy grew, women became more empowered, acting became a honourable profession, there were many technological advances, and there were philosophical and ideological advances (including by cutting edge entertainers who were held in contempt ).
Nevertheless, during the 21st century, we need to rethink professionalism in the context of Capitalism because everyone agrees that people who do creative works because they enjoy doing that (= amateurs) can produce better results than those who do it only for money.