The fashion for passion

Indeed. I've can absolutely familiarise with that kind of burnout. So much effort and nothing lands. Lots of lessons and hindsight is wonderful thing. But at the time it becomes very demotivating and pointless.

I love what I do, but most folks here probably think I'm crazy (and they may have a point).

I work (very hard –possibly harder than I ever have, in my life) for free. I'm grateful to have the means to do that. I got those means by working on stuff I didn't like working on.

I love coding. I love solving problems. I love shipping. I love writing user interfaces. I love writing device control code.

But I have found that working at the whim of others, does not end well (for me).

It's worth it, to me, to be in a position, where others don't dictate what I do, and where I'm not dependent upon others.

I am currently working for a nonprofit, on a team, where I'm doing the lions' share of the work. It's a fairly robust social media/resource location application that consists of a few backend servers, a couple of SDKs, a whole bunch of dependencies (almost all ones that I wrote), and an iOS/iPadOS app.

I've been working on it for a couple of years. That's a long time, for me. I can usually bang something like this out, in a month or two.

The reason is that I want to bring the team along. It's a big learning experience for most of them. They are a lot younger than me, and, for most of them, this is the first time that they've ever been involved in a soup-to-nuts software deliverable. They didn't really know what they wanted, in the beginning, and we had to spend a great deal of time, prototyping various user experiences, before finally settling on the final one.

Now, we're in the home stretch. Once we had consolidated the project into a concrete workflow and user experience, we brought in a designer, I rewrote the core of the app into a platform-independent engine, and we're writing it from the ground up. It won't take that long (but still, longer than I usually do, on my own).

It's fun. I have learned a great deal, myself, during the process, and, to add a cherry on top, the software will be used to help people to rebuild fairly shattered lives, so it's all good.

I understand the pragmatism but....it took me around a decade+ of doing crap jobs, that I hated, in order to subsidize the pursuit of "my passion" Its now been 6 years where I have been able to make a living doing what I love and I have to say, it was worth the risk. Do I recommend putting all your eggs in one basket, and going through life without a 'Plan B' - no...but the twist is, the maniac dreamers, whose passion run into the gamut of iconoclasm - those people simply will not (or more realistically) cannot abide by pragmatism.. but this obsessive nature is usually symptomatic of greater 'issues' (that then may bear fruit) and everyone who forges their own path in such a way must pay the toll and suffer the consequences (think starving artists, alienated high functioning individuals, persons inhabiting or transgressive practices, etc)

Reminded of advice my former boss, who spent a decade plus leading an elite military unit, received as he set out in his career:

“Be careful how much you give this organization, because we’ll take it.”

>I unfortunately suggested that maybe for a company like Google, too high salaries would bring people in who "work for money and not passion".

I mean, that is literally the argument for education, social work, elder care, domestic abuse advocates, CASA, and any other number of social services fields. Why not google? Why shouldn't that argument apply to google as well?

Also:

>Still, trends like Quiet Quiting seem like the worst response.

How so? How is that the worst response?