>I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever
This hasn't been my experience. While it's certainly true that much of my time as a corporate cog has been wasted in non-fun things like department meetings and stand-ups and Jira and MS Office documents and reviewing or debugging bad code from other devs, there's also been some time working on genuinely interesting programming problems.
But you're right about music: interesting programming assignments don't come along every day, whereas I can pick up my guitar at any time and play something (however badly) and hear something nice right away.
This hasn't been my experience. While it's certainly true that much of my time as a corporate cog has been wasted in non-fun things like department meetings and stand-ups and Jira and MS Office documents and reviewing or debugging bad code from other devs, there's also been some time working on genuinely interesting programming problems.
But you're right about music: interesting programming assignments don't come along every day, whereas I can pick up my guitar at any time and play something (however badly) and hear something nice right away.