Is Bill Gates still programming nowadays? He seems to have completely abandoned it. Which seems a little sad, because if he really liked doing it you'd expect him to at least work on a utility app or something in his spare time.
> My code no longer goes into shipping products so I am rusty. I do like to try the new tools to understand how they help. I just did a review of the low-code tools where there is a lot of great innovation.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/m8n4vt/im_bill_gates_...
To put into a very simplified example: I work 8 hours a day, sleep 8 hours a day, spend 4 on chores, and 4 on doing what I want. That's 4h/day. Bill Gates has almost immeasurably more money than I have, but he still, at best, gets 16h/day. He can do 4 times as much as I.
And I can guarantee you that "things I'd love to do" is significantly more than even 24h/day. I'd assume the same holds for Gates. This is one of the reasons rich people usually have an entire staff running their lives - if you make billions, spending $100k to save 30 minutes a year is actually a reasonable investment.
And so, even if he loves to code, he might well not be able to never get to it. (TBF: I'm not saying "poor Bill", I'm sure the other stuff he gets up to is reasonably fun :)
And then, how do you prioritize them an allocate time? Some of us might go for 'whatever is the most fun', others 'whatever delivers the most results (for society, or for some obscure personal goal like making a clock that lasts 10,000 years, or a speed metal guitar university for girls, or... anything).
I really like coding, and plan to do it into old age. But I suspect if I suddenly found fifty billion dollars, I would have so many new options for how to spend my time I might well never write a line of code again.
When you have no money, time is your friend
when you have money, you buy back your time.