71–80 of 82 posts
Not quite as passionate Monday morning as I am Wednesday morning.
Decidedly less passionate after forced marches on crappy projects or putting up with BS.
Pretty passionate when things are just interesting enough but not frustrating, and most especially when I feel value in what is being done.
But really I've always felt passion for tools was a bit misplaced. Passion for results is where it's at.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, but that's based on wishful thinking. Very few people are lucky enough to have their passions overlap with a career that's marketable. What if your passion is woodworking? Making beautiful, detailed cabinets that sell for $16,000+ may sound profitable, but I took a class from a woodworker who did exactly that, and he said that the net pay after materials costs (which were less than $1000) came to about $7/hour…
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…
Everyone should write. Few become authors. It is the way of things. And programming will invade every corner of our essence. Much like this post, it is not the best, nor must it be for us to exchange information and better each other.
The real distortion in cs is the fact almost everyone needs a damn CS degree these days for mid-tier pay. Never mind needing to be under 30. (slight exaggeration to drive home the point)
I am not passionate about programming, yet I program computers. I use the tools that programming algorithms provide in order to do the things that I want to do.
Sometimes that is for work. I model some bio-thingy in Matlab, or I use Arduino soft/hardware to generate said data, I do stats automatically, I manage the website and do fun stuff with it, etc.
Sometimes I program 'for fun'. I use Markov and RNN analysis for side projects, I do non-textual analysis on stuff I want to look at, I manage my home via smart-home hardware, I play video-games or sports games and then use various python programs to analyze stuff I want to look at.
I am not passionate about the act of programming anymore than the act of soldering or using a socket wrench. Programming is a method, a tool, that I use for my passions.
So what does this make me?
You can burn yourself out to hell, being passionate in a shit environment that doesn't care.
In fact, you can lose your passion, in those circumstances.
Whatever you do, find a good environment for it. This is an integral part of enjoying what you do.
The problem with focusing on passion as a driving force is that it reverses the direction of how professional "passion" is often developed - through experience. I can't find the source now[0] but I recall reading about research investigating professional passion in college administrators. It found that passion was directly related to work years. In other words, experience and advanced skills bred more confidence and…
I'm a digital marketer and I love love love going deep on analytics, attribution, etc. as a part of that. However I wasn't even aware of half that stuff when I was first starting out.
Professional experience led to greater and deeper exposure of new areas of the discipline that were way more interesting to me than the fundamentals that first got me interested. I now engage in discussions on those topics with other professionals in my spare time because it interests me beyond my job.