Because if you're hired, you're basically allowing the company that hired to you subsidize your continued learning.
One of the projects that I spend my time working on was originally a way for me to teach myself about mysql, the next one was to learn about ajax, the next about CSS etc. This is all fine, but I'm doing this all on my own time, and I don't have the marketing budget to ever see if it can stand up to getting loads and loads of traffic.
Now lets say that I get hired by reddit, or twitter, or posterous, or couchsurfing, or whoever else. The types of technologies that these people use, while similar to what I'm doing with my personal projects, are on an entirely different scale. Getting to work on a database as large as reddit's would be absolutely invaluable to somebody that has an interest in large-scale databases. This is the type of thing that people typically pay thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars to go to school for. Getting the same (I would say better, actually) experience and having them pay you for it is awesome.
I guess my advice is: disregard money, acquire knowledge. If you do this then, hopefully, the money will come naturally.
I don't mean to cherrypick, but Reddit's database situation is highly abnormal and not desirable. They hacked up a spitshined Postgres-driven KV Store that is little more than cpickle->textarea plus an index.
Their database infrastructure is a major source of their pains and why they have to be creative with the caching side.
It doesn't help that the content is low latency and write heavy, more so than Facebook streams would be, I imagine since people aren't screaming into the void, but actually carrying on a conversation.
It's a damn good thing Reddit has a proper queue setup.
One of the projects that I spend my time working on was originally a way for me to teach myself about mysql, the next one was to learn about ajax, the next about CSS etc. This is all fine, but I'm doing this all on my own time, and I don't have the marketing budget to ever see if it can stand up to getting loads and loads of traffic.
Now lets say that I get hired by reddit, or twitter, or posterous, or couchsurfing, or whoever else. The types of technologies that these people use, while similar to what I'm doing with my personal projects, are on an entirely different scale. Getting to work on a database as large as reddit's would be absolutely invaluable to somebody that has an interest in large-scale databases. This is the type of thing that people typically pay thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars to go to school for. Getting the same (I would say better, actually) experience and having them pay you for it is awesome.
I guess my advice is: disregard money, acquire knowledge. If you do this then, hopefully, the money will come naturally.