Don’t Pursue Programming if You Aren’t Passionate About It

Articles like this seem to be promoting the Cognitive dissonance that most developers hold. Namely: 1. I need to be always learning about programming, even on my spare time! 2. Work/life balance is important.

"Imagine a doctor who doesn’t actually like helping people with their health problems. Or an automotive engineer who actually thinks cars are stupid and boring."

Lots of doctors and automotive engineers just do their job and then come home, in fact most employees don't come home and continue to work on semi work related things on their spare time. My wife is a civil engineer and yet she doesn't build a 1/16 scale bridge in our basement when she comes home. Does that make her a bad civil engineer?

"If you aren’t passionate about programming I don’t think you should become a coder."

"... lifetime of constantly learning and working in your spare time ... to keep your skillset fresh and relevant."

I have asked a few programmers I know what makes a successful programmer and I have always gotten the answer of "passion". But what even is passion? Maybe they are super passionate about VB and FactoryFactoryObservers? Is that good passion? Okay our field changes a lot. but then shouldn't seek the ability and willingness to learn rather then some vague 'passion'. Employers should also set up our teams in such a way that learning is encouraged. (Work Time + Money for conferences/continuing education.)

Edit: Changed the first cognitive dissonance to include the term programming as that was my implied but not stated meaning.

The word has definitely been abused. Employers use it to mean work 80 hours a week. That's not what I meant.

I meant what I said in the post; you really like doing it and have a lot of interest in it. I couldn't think of a better word for that, or I would have used it.

Most people do work in jobs they don't have any passion for and I think that's fine, but some fields are really hard to do well at without that extra level of enjoyment. More extreme than programming would be music. Pursuing a career in music without passion would be truly horrific, as it is so hard to build a career in that field.

It's a tool just like any toolset. You don't need an undying passion for mechanics fueled by a thousand suns to use and understand a torque wrench. The allure around this job is invented and idealized in too many cases for it to be genuine to me. It has too many ordinary and mundane problems shared with other industries (i.e. social) to be a special industry. If it were really special, people would be tripping over themselves to get out of your way and see what you build or do next. Some people get to this level but the vast majority don't. Compare to being an astronaut.

There's also no tragedy in being a doctor that just wants to do a good job. Not every case is going to be an interesting medical mystery. In fact, it's probably gotten more frustrating as people suddenly start trusting internet articles and you have to endlessly urge caution and explain anything they've got wrong.

I just spent several hours debugging a nasty npm / shrinkwrap dependency clusterf* across multiple repos and I don't think passion has any bearing on my state of mind right now.