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

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

#21

Post by RubenSandwich »

gravypod wrote: post #18
RubenSandwich wrote: post #4

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…

> I need to be always learning, even on my spare time! You should always be learning even in your spare time. Maybe not always about programming but about something. If you don't then you've relegated yourself to walking around like a robot repeating the same things you do every day not ever thinking about your actions. Right now I have a huge facination with machining/metal working. I can't own any gear for doing su…

I meant coming home from your job and continuing to work on your job in some form or something that directly relates to your job. Because that strikes me as indicative of deeper issues. Does your job not give you enough time to finish projects? Does your job not give you enough time to stay up to date in your field? Do you constantly feel like an impostor?

I have no quarrels with someone having side projects. But those side projects shouldn't be fueled by some existential dread related to one's job or position.

I have corrected the language to be more specific.

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

#23

Post by jasode »

riebschlager wrote: post #22

There's a really great counterpoint linked in the comments of this article. I dunno about you, but this pretty well sums up my take on it. https://medium.com/@WordcorpGlobal/programming-doesnt-requir...

That Modmaj article is not really a counterpoint to DM's article because Modmaj's focus is whether passion is required to acquire "skill" at programming.

David Matteson's essay is talking about passion as a prerequisite for programming jobs to help with "happiness" and life satisfaction.

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

#24

Post by Jhsto »

I drifted to a career in programming because I loved it. I used to do a lot of hacks and side-projects, but once in working life, I came to realize just how much legacy code bases I'm going to deal with. Nobody in general likes rewriting or fixing legacy code, but unlike others, I felt unable to enjoy the feeling of getting the legacy work done. As I worked more with legacy code, paying off the technical debt of others, I started having signs of burnout towards programming. I stopped doing side projects and even glimpsing code on the weekends felt bad.

Then I came across this career advice which suggested choosing a job which's struggles you love to solve. I realized that I loved the struggles of self-discipline to get the last 10% of a project done, the struggles of dealing with bad clients and the struggles of marketing and acquiring the first ones. I realized the programming required in professional software engineering was not the struggles I wanted to deal with.

Later on, I met a startup founder who had struggles with their company. The founder told that it seems like the end is near. Despite all the efforts throughout the years with many ups and downs, it seems like a single mistake took the venture down. It seems like the years were wasted on not becoming rich and successful, but then added that despite not becoming rich, she was happy with her life all the long way down. She told me that as long as I am comfortable with my life, I should not worry about the risks of running an unsuccessful company. Ultimately, a greater regret would be to push forward a life in which you don't find yourself happy in.

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

#26

Post by jccc »

treyfitty wrote: post #3

Why is "passion" such a driving-force for our generation? We keep hearing this word, and we keep applying it to the context of jobs. The more we talk about it, the more people get bogged down by the two not intersecting. Let's agree to disagree and say "some people have passion, some people don't. If passion and job intersect, that's dandy. Either should be okay, just pay the bills and live your life the way you want…

Because young, eager, "passionate" uber-hackers are easier to exploit.

The idea of "passion" for programming might or might not have originated on the hiring side, but that side sure seems happy to run with it.

[EDIT: Not disagreeing with the original post, though. Just responding to the above comment about where this word comes from.]

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

#27

Post by riebschlager »

jasode wrote: post #23
riebschlager wrote: post #22

There's a really great counterpoint linked in the comments of this article. I dunno about you, but this pretty well sums up my take on it. https://medium.com/@WordcorpGlobal/programming-doesnt-requir...

That Modmaj article is not really a counterpoint to DM's article because Modmaj's focus is whether passion is required to acquire "skill" at programming. David Matteson's essay is talking about passion as a prerequisite for programming jobs to help with "happiness" and life satisfaction.

My apologies. It's just that "counterpoint" was easier to type than "an article that examines similar but not perfectly analogous ideas from a differing point of view."

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

#28

Post by BigJeffeRonaldo »

Passion is not really interesting. I'd rather hire someone who is skilled, easy to work with, and will get stuff done. I don't really need him to get hyped up on caffeine and write medium articles about how passionate he is; I'm paying him to do a job.

I also am not sure what to make of the Op's mention of starting to program at 10. I read my dad's copy of K&R and installed some Linux distribution at that age too, but I didn't make any real progress until I realized that it's just a job and started acting more like a professional.

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

#29

Post by Saanti »

gravypod wrote: post #18
RubenSandwich wrote: post #4

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…

> I need to be always learning, even on my spare time! You should always be learning even in your spare time. Maybe not always about programming but about something. If you don't then you've relegated yourself to walking around like a robot repeating the same things you do every day not ever thinking about your actions. Right now I have a huge facination with machining/metal working. I can't own any gear for doing su…

> You should always be learning even in your spare time. Maybe not always about programming but about something.

Actually, one of the most important things I learned 'the hard way', is that you should actually 'learn not to learn' (i.e. really rest), and let go of any anxieties that may urge you to 'always be learning'. This insight improved my joy in life and tech, and also my focus and productivity, by much more then an approach of anxiously trying to be learning all the time.

Maybe for others things work differently, but generalizing into 'everyone should always be learning' seems too strong a claim to me.

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

#30

Post by gravypod »

RubenSandwich wrote: post #21
gravypod wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I need to be always learning, even on my spare time! You should always be learning even in your spare time. Maybe not always about programming but about something. If you don't then you've relegated yourself to walking around like a robot repeating the same things you do every day not ever thinking about your actions. Right now I have a huge facination with machining/metal working. I can't own any gear for doing su…

I meant coming home from your job and continuing to work on your job in some form or something that directly relates to your job. Because that strikes me as indicative of deeper issues. Does your job not give you enough time to finish projects? Does your job not give you enough time to stay up to date in your field? Do you constantly feel like an impostor? I have no quarrels with someone having side projects. But tho…

> But those side projects shouldn't be fueled by some existential dread related to one's job or position.

If you're looking at it like that then you're not going to have any interest in programming after work. If you look at it like "I am a tradesman and I can either pay someone to do this for me or I can just take a few minute and hack together solutions for myself then I can save time and money".

I write a lot of software for my own tasks to automate things I need to do like recently I made a remote Steam Streaming machine so I can finally fully migrate to linux and to do so I needed to write a control service on my machine and write a daemond that listens for a packet to run a `shutdown /h` on the windows machine. It was a bit of programming but it wasn't "existential dread" and it definetly wasn't in some attempt to bettering myself as an employee. It was because I wanted a product that doesn't exist so I made it and I think more software developers should be interested in that. Not for work reasons but because making things is cool and we live in a time where people are happy to give you perfectly good hardware that they think is "garbage" because it's 1 version out of date. This is the perfect time for the engineer to live, and not just the Civil or Software but any engineer.

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