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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

#41

The discourse on "passion" in the context of CS has gradually been poisoned by commercial interests. It started as a way of describing great programmers. Those who are at the top of the field probably are very passionate about it. Once "the best programmers are passionate" became established as a common meme, it was co-opted as a hiring signal since everyone only wants to hire the best. In response, all job-seekers a…

I agree with you. My point was mostly that people should pursue fields that better fit with their own interests and enthusiasms, and that programming as a career is not a bed of roses and if you're going to go into it without passion you're gonna have a bad time.

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

#42

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…

You can get interested in anything, you put your mind to it. Passion isn't some intrinsic thing like talent or good looks. It can be fanned into flame by enthusiasm and hard work.

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

#43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Well the alternative is that you narrow your knowladge to a small problem domain which sounds horrible for 1) your own mind, 2) your ability to talk to people who work outside of your problem domain, and 3) your ability to think outside of the "box" that is held by your field.

How is the alternative to always learning narrowing your knowledge to a small problem domain? It's not. The alternative is... taking a rest every once in a while.

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

#44
This is more of a philosophical stance than one related to any given industry, and one I rather strongly disagree with. It revolves around the idea that a good enough person has a passion, that passion has been obvious to them since age 10, and it is something they should devote themselves to that in totality.

An essay of PG's [1] is in agreement with this concept, but even it at least makes note of a certain important point:

"Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

I think PG's essay was written with fairly privileged people as the audience, though. Most people are surviving, they don't really have room to study different things and juggle professions. What kind of people often do? Software developers. For all the bad rap that software gets, it still strikes me as one of the most mobile professions out there, and it's fairly easy to branch out into something else from it, and it provides enough money for a good buffer that such life changes need. Yet the blog suggests you shouldn't even touch software unless you're already passionate.

But, aside from that point, I have never seen any evidence that every single person on Earth has a passion deep inside of them that needs to be unlocked. That sounds very metaphysical, like some mysterious force out there is bestowing passions on people (especially ones that neatly fit into societal boxes called "jobs", and, yes, I know PG is not saying that, but the blog post author appears to imply it). I'm sympathetic to metaphysical ideas, but they need to have a reasonable basis, and this one just seems to be wishful thinking. You would at least hope that passions are more diffuse or that people can have multiple ones, because some programmers must have been born when computers didn't even exist yet!

This seems like a very dangerous idea to throw around, too, how are people without a passion supposed to feel? The implication seems to be that something is deeply wrong with them and they need to go fix it. Also seems to be ripe ground for impostor syndrome.

My guess is that single point passion is likely a genetic or early developmental trait, and is an uncommon thing, especially since the average person usually needs to do lots of different things at varying skill levels. I imagine it's also somewhat associated with impulsive behavior because a characteristic of a passionate person is that they can't stop themselves from engaging with their passion. Most people are not like this and can't understand it, from what I've seen. Most people want to do multiple different things, hence hobbies. I would like to have 3 professions, just not do them all 8 hours each, and preferably ones not really related to each other. Like programming, martial arts, and cooking. Really, I'd like to do 10-20 things, and the list can get bigger than that, but I'd be pretty happy with 3.

There is someone that this idea really benefits - that each person will pick just one thing, and work almost exclusively on that one thing and little else - but I don't think that someone is the person themselves.

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

#45
post #5

Ignore this blog. Pursue whatever you like. Don't ever worry about whether you have sufficient "passion," that's a trap.

> Ignore this blog. 90% of the time this holds true for the whole medium.com platform :)

and the rest of the internet.

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

#46

The discourse on "passion" in the context of CS has gradually been poisoned by commercial interests. It started as a way of describing great programmers. Those who are at the top of the field probably are very passionate about it. Once "the best programmers are passionate" became established as a common meme, it was co-opted as a hiring signal since everyone only wants to hire the best. In response, all job-seekers a…

I feel very torn about this whole topic.

I do think that many (most?) people would be able to learn to program to the point where they can make a good living, in an age where it's harder and harder to make a good living doing anything.

But I've been passionate, at least in some definitions, about programming since I was a young teen. Before that, even, if you count simple programming. Passionate may not be the right word, though. Obsessive might be better. Or driven. I can't not learn about programming.

But I try not to claim that everyone has to be passionate or obsessive or whatever. Yes, I am. And yes, I'm quite a good developer. But I've worked with and encountered plenty of people who get the job done and who clearly aren't passionate about code. And they're making a fine living at development.

Low-skill jobs are going away en masse over the next 50 years. Maybe new jobs will magically come in to replace them, but I don't think so. Not all of them; not this time.

And so discouraging people from learning to program may be discouraging them from learning the one skill they can pick up in a reasonable time frame that keeps them from collecting welfare while working at WalMart.

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

#47
post #24

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 othe…

If you don't mind me asking, what did you do after you had your realization? Become a project manager or something?

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

#48

> If, like me, you have no interest in managing other people and want to just do coding for your career, then you’re eventually going to hit a ceiling in any organization I can't think of one job where you won't hit a ceiling if you don't want to manage people.

This is a fair point. My thought was that some careers have a higher ceiling at least in terms of pay. Very quickly in programming you hit a point where you have to manage a team or manage projects or manage entire departments in order to get any more big raises. But you might be right that this is true for 90% of careers.

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

#49
Not every job requires passion. I would venture to say that most jobs don't. Is it a desirable trait? Sure. Is it the only trait that matters? Most certainly not.

The idea that all programmers are super-passionate about the craft and never have any other interests can lead people to assume that if you don't have that single-minded focus that you aren't a real programmer. This is an industry where many people deal with imposter syndrome already; they really don't need any additional help with questioning whether or not they have what it takes to succeed.

It's a common human tendency to assume that others in your group are exactly like you. The programmers with passion for the craft assume that everyone else who is a developer must share that passion. This is pretty short-sighted and exclusionary. Not every developer codes in their spare time. Not every developer learns new programming languages for fun.

I agree with the author that you need some level of enjoyment from the process of programming in order to succeed in it as a career, but I doubt that's specific to programming, either.

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

#50
What is passion anyway? It would suffice to say, that a person should like some parts of developing software in a way that creates a recognizable tingle of pleasure. Because that's what you will do. And sit in meetings. And if there is no tingle of pleasure from either of these, a career in programming will make your life less than it could have been.

The term "passion" makes me think I'm required to passionately make love to a superclass while domain requirements strap me to a table of molasses and legacy code, crying "Yes! You filthy amalgamation of mixed paradigms, take me any which way you like! Procedural! Functional! I want it all! I want you to be my precious Ruby! My cup of hot Java! My serrated blade of C! A twisting tangle of Python! A furious steed of Fortran and assembly!"

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