Programming is the Great Game - excerpt from the writings of Orson Scott Card

I have taken out two excerpts from How Software Companies Die -by Orson Scott Card

Why you might ask?  Ah because they are very insightful observations.  Do you get it? Do you see it?

"Programming is the Great Game.
It consumes you, body and soul.  When you're caught up in it, nothing
else matters.  When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover
that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than
the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes
lying around, it must be spring already.  But you don't care, because
your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight.  You won.
You're aware that some people think you're a nerd.  So what?  They're
not players.  They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand
with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language.
They barely exist.  Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the
opinions of civilians.  You're building something intricate and fine.
They'll never understand it."

"The only person whose praise matters is another
programmer.  Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly
matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to
get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified
genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other
people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks
the junior programmer.  He looked at my code.  That is enough. If a
software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep,
love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of
the money."