> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it with a kind of passion. How is it you can love a machine?
As someone who went into software development because it was my passion and my hobby, its always disappointing how often that isn't the case for so many people in this industry. It's draining actually; The lack of enthusiasm and genuine interest is replaced by a clock-in and clock-out mentality. Bootcamps have just become farms for people who need a job, but not those who really want this job.
I want to work with more people who LOVE software and find the development of machines and the code that runs on them as fascinating as I do. Unfortunately, its less and less these days.
I think there's a number of hours a week I want to spend writing code, but while it's more than 10 it's less than 40.
Above and beyond that, I love software, but I don't love Zoom calls, on-call shifts, unnecessarily annoying processes that I'm not allowed to automate, Slack messages, KPIs, objectives that combine vagueness about what we're doing with strict rules about what we're not allowed to touch, horrific dynamically typed JS code where half the arguments to a function are obscure mashed-together objects, over-specified tickets that leave no room for creativity, trying to jam my code into a service where it doesn't fit because leadership wants to encourage code reuse but doesn't understand DRY, or anything else that makes up the actual profession of software engineering.
That's all not programming. I absolutely hate the corporate working style.
The programming part in itself is always interesting to me, because regardless of who sets the constraints (me in a hobby project or the leadership in a company), they are what make the problem challenging and exciting.
I think in this career it’s possible to optimize for 3 levers - WLB, money, and fun work. If you truly want to code a lot, a startup is the place, but you will earn less money and work more hours. Big tech offers big money and good WLB but often at the sacrifice of interesting work.
I had this attitude in college. I wasn’t a CS major, but I really enjoyed programming. I was floored by how many CS majors seemed to not enjoy the discipline.
My interest in computers and programming hasn’t waned. But with every passing year, I have become more invested in my relationships, obligations, health, and other hobbies. So programming is a much smaller slice of the pie these days.
I still think of myself as an interested and enthusiastic programmer, but I will admit that my interest and enthusiasm pales in comparison to my hobbyist coworkers.
That's well said... I feel this way even about pure fun pursuits like video games. Yeah, I still like video games, but I also like time with my daughter and wife or getting outside and playing sports or a bunch of other things I didn't use to do that kind of crowd out a well I've gone to many, many times anyway.
I think video games (like movies, books, etc) are a different kind: they are about consuming, while programming (electronics, carpentry, etc) is about creating.
Some games, like Sim City or Factorio, sort of blur the line though.
The phenomenon is mostly the same though: something I’ve enjoyed for a long time doesn’t have the same prominence in my life anymore because of other things I’ve taken an interest in.
Games are somewhere in between, you are engaged in the doing of the game and that itself can be creative and involve problem solving. Certainly moreso than TV, but less so than a craft of some kind.
The CS degree became the most popular at my school in a short period of time. I was told as recently as 25 years ago, hardly anyone was in the program so it's reasonable to assume that CS itself didn't change but the demand did.
My take on students in the program is that a CS engineering degree is viewed the way a business degree might have been for a different industry like finance. It's a ticket into a high paying, tech job. From there, many want to climb the corporate ladder and move into management. There are people who like the topic but also quite a few who treat it as a corporate credential. I think this second group is a very recent development that only started happening in the last decade or so.
I started as a software engineer who was "passionate about software" and could see my life revolving around it. The change in my mindset towards this, that gradually happened few years ago, i.e. the "clock-in and clock-out mentality" is one of the best changes in my life!
It always shocks me to see such sentiments from people. I mean how difficult is it for people to comprehend that that are too many kinds of people out there and hence too many kinds of software engineers out there!
Clock-in, clock-out doesn't mean these software engineers don't like the work they do, or do not write software that is good, or that they do not take pride in, or they do not feel responsible for it. Anyway that doesn't mean every other free hour, or any free hour in their lives, away from that day job (which is software engineering) have to be about software or code, or hell even an hour have to be about software.
Your job, your profession doesn't have to be your passion! Not everybody needs to be an artist, or a software artist (if I can say so)! There is a work that needs to be done and there are people who can do this and they do this and it can be just that, nothing more.
Did you every think about yourself, how you got into software engineering? Did you really always want this trade - truly? Was this genetic in some way? Or some kind of divine intervention? I mean I know I am getting facetious here with this analogy but just look at it before pointing a finger to a whole new generation of people who are maybe just different.
I kinda disliked it, at the beginning of my career, when I saw my engineering peers moving into finance, MBAs and what not, but slowly I have started to appreciate it as I am getting this idea sunk into me deeper - work is work, nothing else. There is whole lot of rest of the life out there. Go where you want, how you want to, immerse yourself into something only as much you want, there doesn't have to be a scale of "passion" you have to conform to.
It is so tiring and frustrating to keep encountering this mindset so often. Luckily my generation is genuinely starting to stop giving a fuck about this and the newer generation is more vigorous in rejecting of "your work has to be your passion" regressive mindset.
I understand this point of view. Unfortunately, for those who entered computing out of a passion for it, it’s difficult to work for employers or managers where computing isn’t a passion. This leads to all sorts of practices that suck the joy out of programming (e.g., Leetcode, meetings, KPIs, PIPs, certain design decisions, etc.), reducing it to a corporate “monkey dance.” Maybe I have rose-colored glasses, or maybe I’m simply expecting too much from employment, but it seems to me that back in the 80s and 90s there was a lot more passion in the field compared to today. The pressure and the constraints are enough to make me want to change occupations at times away from computing and treat it as solely a hobby or as a side venture, except I can’t think of any other occupation that pays enough to live in America’s expensive cities that doesn’t require returning to graduate school and getting into five or six more figures of debt for a professional degree.
You can work with passionate people. You can work for a large corporate, for a huge paycheck and stock options. Pick one.
I work for a small company, and I make a great living, but it's a fraction of a fang salary, and there is no stock to option.
On the upside I'm responsible for my code base, I work on whatever I like, (which largely overlaps with customer needs since I like getting paid.) I rarely have a zoom meeting [1], I have in-person catch-up with colleagues once a month, usually at a restaurant over a meal.
The rest of the time we gave informal chat, we push the boundaries of the possible, we experiment, try out big ideas,and generally it's still enough fun to get me out I bed in the morning.
[1] I have a few corporate customers. They exist to remind me why I don't work for a corporate. We have a weekly zoom catchup meeting. Their two lead programmers go from meeting to meeting. Its hilarious and I mock them ceaselessly for it.
But they get paid a lot more than I do, and frankly they're welcome to it.
I hear you and share the sentiment (for the most part). I don't understand what's with leetcode. Granted it's not the best for way to judge the capabilities of a programmer, but then what is? A design round can be gamed as much as an algorithmic round can be. At least with leetcode, people become aware of different ways of thinking. By different ways, I don't mean different algorithms. I mean, given a base set of capabilities (algos), how to use them effectively to solve a much more diverse set of problems. This kind of pattern almost always exists in my day to day job. The constraints are limited, and I need to figure out an effective way forward.
It’s not Leetcode in of itself that I hate; in fact, I enjoy programming challenges such as Project Euler and Advent of Code, and I occasionally read my Knuth volumes for fun. It’s the interview process that sucks the fun out of it, where you have to compete against those who just seem to eat, sleep, and drink Leetcode. It reminds me of my high school days when I stressed out over grades and SAT scores. I understand that for highly-desirable companies there needs to be some mechanism for culling the mass number of applications they receive, but when just about every company seemingly asks difficult Leetcode questions even if the job doesn’t require sophisticated algorithms, it’s very demoralizing. I’m getting tired of monkey dancing and I’m researching alternative ways of making a living.
Unfortunately that's true. I think he companies can ask interesting questions that are not in leetcode, but it's basically a game where the companies make up new questions and they get added to leetcode. I don't think any company wants to spend their employees fighting a battle that's not worth it.
Leetcode is actually one of the things that makes me feel energized about programming... it's just the pure problem-solving part without logging, legacy software constraints, tedious debates about code styling, and the other lame parts of the job.
Programming in your free time isn't "work", though. The people I've worked with who aren't programming in their free time have all been worse than the ones who did, which really isn't a big surprise.
It's not hard for me to understand why someone would want to only develop software during work hours, but that doesn't mean I have to force myself to like working with them as much as I like working with people who do engage with programming outside of work.
> I mean how difficult is it for people to comprehend that that are too many kinds of people out there and hence too many kinds of software engineers out there!
How difficult is it to accept that if you're not doing much to become better at your craft you'll also likely not be deemed as good as your peers who are? I don't know why people who admit to not caring as much as others about growing their skills and expressing enthusiasm about programming are so offended that some people would rather work with people who are doing those things.
All things being equal I'd rather work with someone who can tell me about their weekend project on Monday.
P.S.: If someone said "I don't like working with people who program in their spare time" that's also fine. We don't all have to like working with each other and pretending there is some kind of fairness equalizer that makes everyone as good as everyone else helps no one. If work is truly just work, just do your work and accept that some people don't like your attitude.
"Work is work" is a perfectly fair conclusion. It works pretty well (so to speak) and you can live comfortably like that. Many people do.
On the other hand, there's something that eats at me all the time: the fact that a huge portion of my life is spent on work. If I had to choose between zoning out for 8 hours a day vs working towards something I care about for 10+ hours a day, I can't help but feel like the latter just sounds better. Maybe not easy to attain, but definitely better.
> Clock-in, clock-out doesn't mean these software engineers don't like the work they do, or do not write software that is good, or that they do not take pride in, or they do not feel responsible for it.
I don't think "zoning out for 8 hours a day" is a fair representation of that.
Plus an interest in developing one's career eventually means focusing on things other than growing slightly better at writing code (such as mentoring, designs, apportioning work, working with many stakeholders, and so on).
At least where I work, it's hard to have passion given the fundamental issues with the codebase that there's never any time or money to address. It's like being on a ship pockmarked with holes and water coming in, that by all rights should be sinking, but is kept going by the endless pockets of our customers paying us to man the various pumps and keep the engines from flooding. And of course throw on new features that create yet more holes that there's no time or money to fix. However there's never any money to patch said holes, despite the buckets that get dumped on manning the pumps on a daily basis. The ship does something important, so you can take some pride in fulfilling the mission in spite of circumstances, but that tiny sliver of satisfaction is all there is.
If you're passionate about the mission/coding you will just produce a lot of impotent anger, because there's no way an IC is going to restructure the program given the layers of bureaucracy in the way. Maybe if you went management and then spent a decade or two climbing the corporate ladder, and even then you'll run into brand new managerial constraints. So if you're going to stick around, you learn to detach. It's one of the many reasons I plan to have a new job by Christmas :)
I have a similar experience. Working as a programmer is what killed my joy of programming. When I’m done working, I don’t want to look at a computer anymore. Or rather I can’t because I’m exhausted of all the firefighting and bullshit I have to go through for a paycheck.
My most enjoyable moments are the times when I’m in between jobs which I try and stretch for as long as I can (months) and which make me start new side projects just for the fun and enjoyment of it. But once I’m back to the grindstone, I start questioning my life again and wish I was doing anything else than programming.
I think turning a hobby into a career is a good way to ruin that hobby, so I can understand clock punchers and sometimes wish I could just “turn it off” and become one. It would save me a lot of frustration, anger, and unhappiness.
While I certainly clock in and clock out for my day job which is mostly writing crud apps, I still am passionate about programming. I'm just also more passionate about things like family.
I'm one of those folks who loved writing code before I realized people would pay you to write code. As a result it has been my recreation for a long time.
A surprising number of acquaintances of mine have failed at retirement[1]. That has never been my problem :-). That said, I still do consulting because it lets me play with equipment that I might not otherwise decide to buy (like million $ RF labs :-)) However I've structured it to take a back seat to my own projects and the opportunities as they present to go camping or on other adventures.
I also know a bunch of people who never wanted to see a computer again after they didn't need to work, one of whom actually went back and got a degree in creative writing because they really wanted to be a writer all along.
It is also super helpful to have a spouse or partner you like to hang out with. One friend of mine opened an office so that he could be out of the house sometimes when things got too hectic.
All good problems to have.
[1] To fail at retirement is to have the resources to pay all the bills and do fun things without "working" but getting bored from the lack of interesting challenges and so going back into the workforce anyway.
How can a child fall into programming when the computer yells at you, with cryptic messages, uncomprehensible for a child, moreso since I was French-speaking only. “ERROR!” It even accuses you: “YOU are about to reformat this DISK. Do you want to proceed?” (7-year-old me looking up “proceed” in the dictionary, missing “reformat”. Ah, fdisk, so many nights crying that I had lost my computer).
But, speaking from experience: At least it’s your fault. You can do something about it.
Now compare to the sand pit at school: You play marbles with a girl, if she loses she goes crying to the teacher. It’s not your fault, you followed the rules, teacher tells you off, ah, gotta learn the rules of life. “Girls have cooties” is the most funny self-reflection on my childhood. There was no way as a child to learn navigating that complex rules of social precedence, implicit expectations, social cues, untold obvious rules. Even today: I’m bad at office politics, so I’m a CEO and make a million a year.
At least, with computers, when it doesn’t work: It’s my fault. I can do something about it. Same with business. It’s my fault. A provider defects? Still my fault. Economic crisis? Still more my fault than playing by the rules in the sandpit and being told off.
When people didn't know what to do in the 90's, they went into e.g. advertising or banking. They just wanted a job, advertising was big, seems fun, let's do that. Now those kinds of people "get into tech because you can earn a lot". So you get people who focus more on what they can extract rather than the craft. They arrive, do a job, pretend to be value adders because it's good for bonuses, go home to do what they really want to do.
I guess that's ok, it takes all kinds and it's a big world. But the passionate, the people who love to create and love to refine and want to contribute and make a mark, those are my people. I think they're more likely to be there when you're in the first part of a company's life, before the extractors arrive. Right now I work with many of the builders and it's just wonderful.
I also think that as companies change, get more sluggish and require more paperwork, passion goes out the window and the organisational imperative drives the experience.
I get frustrated by how much "math" is a dirty word in engineering circles.
There have been plenty of times where I have felt that utilizing formal methods would benefit some problematic patch of code, but when I suggest something like TLA+ or Isabelle, every engineer in the room will wince at me and act like I asked them to solve the wave equation. It'll usually be dismissed in some form of "we don't want to force every engineer to learn all that math".
It's frustrating to me because, I mean, we're engineers. Any high school kid can learn to program for free on YouTube these days. If we're not utilizing theory, then what exactly are we doing to earn our ridiculous salaries?
> I want to work with more people who LOVE software and find the development of machines and the code that runs on them as fascinating as I do. Unfortunately, its less and less these days.
While I like software I'm beginning to see it as a rather bad career. While you make more money early in the career, you stop doing so rather fast and other jobs catch up quite quickly and surpass you.
I guess there's always the exception company, etc. but as a non-US career, it can get taxing to see de-growth.
Wow, that's depressing. So that seems to suggest that assuming I am smart (which I'd like to think I am), I should have already ditched software engineering and gone into a different field altogether.
It's got some interesting points. I'd love to hear more about their assertion of how someone who is a fast learner benefits from a more stable field. It sort of makes sense as they wrote it but I'd like to read more about it.
Here I thought I was always going to do software in some capacity as long as I was working professionally, but maybe I really shouldn't. No idea what that would be though. Just going into management isn't it, at least not for me.
It is depressing and I think I'm starting to see it around me. Many (bad and good) devs I know are ditching software development per se and moving into related areas (management, startups, compliance, etc) where experience and business know how matters more.
Because... while there is such a thing as software development experience, it's not that relevant for the majority of projects. Somebody sharp with less experience will more or less compete head-on.
I used to be _into it_. Self taught, burning the midnight oil, loved the challenges, loved the highs.
But canceled projects, inept managers and deadend startups led by brain dead CEOs knocked it all out of me. I’m heading into my 40s and I’m officially a clock puncher. Could not care less who knows it.
I wish I could work somewhere that would just get the fuck out of my way and let me build, fix and make, but tech is full of people riding on the coat tails of engineers now, pretending we’re all on equal footing. We’re not. We don’t need the middle managers and HRs and dozen VPs. We just need some good designers and some good engineers and we can blow peoples’ minds.
But makers making things makes people who can’t make anything uncomfortable.
As a young software engineer.. I had an insane amount of passion right until I got into the workforce.
As a kid hacking around was great and I thought that's what the job would be like. As soon as I entered the workforce it was pretty apparent that it's not about creativity, curiosity and being passionate and knowledgeable. It's about being agile and delivering quickly, quantity over quality, being good at talking, socializing and networking. And all the older people in the jobs I've worked with were definitely not passionate, they struggled along trying to do what they could to somewhat do the required tasks of the job.
I'm still passionate about it but now mostly on weekends when I can use the two days to work on my own side projects.
But i think an important point is also, we younger people have a pretty bleak outlook and seemingly uncertain future ahead. With covid lately and other challenges like AI and whatnot there may just be no time to be passionate because it is time spent worrying.
> With covid lately and other challenges like AI and whatnot there may just be no time to be passionate because it is time spent worrying.
It was always like that, it's basically the human condition. You may choose not to worry and live your life how you'd want it to be lived. You might get crushed in the process, though. If you don't, you'll die of old age anyway, but the overall ride may be more comfortable.
In my experience, people staying in the field as developpers for 5~10 years have a genuine interest in the trade.
It might be different if they have some other personal/skill issue, but I've seen anyone doing a decent job for a few years get a path to either management, PM or something more "businessy", and in effect many PMs around me started as programmers. That's where I see the natural filtration of those who actualy saw it as a career and not just as a starting job (pay is usually not that different, or better when you go to a businessy path).
Now, that doesn't mean they (we) don't have a clock-in/clock-out mentality. E.g. I want to have multiple hobbies, and programming is only one of them. I deeply respect people who breath programming day-in day-out, but don't see it as an ideal or something to long for everyone. That's where I'm a bit sad it actively disappoints or drains your energy. I hope you'll find a happy place with people you enjoy working with !
My younger self was loathe to programming. It was just a job for me, clock in clock out as you say. I was always in this zone of product managers and managers are superior as they were always in some meetings and it gave me the impression that important work gets done in meetings. I hated being a lowly engineer right from the start.
Only when I got into those meeting rooms, did I have a rude awakening. I realized the value of shipping software. I rolled up my sleeves and started getting back into building software, reluctantly initially but then I fell in love with the craft eventually.
Today if I find anyone who is getting disillusioned as I was, I try to educate them and help them find the joy in shipping software. Am not sure if it has really helped anyone, but I think it's the right thing to do.
It's been nearly a quarter century since I began university as a CS major. I had been hobby coding for a couple years and the courses were not interesting at all to me compared to actually building things. So, I decided to get a gig writing code. It was sort of a part-time job ahead of when people normally would get an internship (which back then anyway, was not common in first 1-2 years). This job was excruciating. I realized I had no interest in writing code for other people/companies/etc. but my hobby was really building things that I thought were interesting. Anyways, I switched majors and continue to code as a hobby/entrepreneur and have continued to enjoy it. I really don't think I'd like it as a hobby if I went into the profession.
My passion was sucked away by leetcode interviews, BS management processes, writing more JIRA tickets than code and ineffective management mistakenly thinking PIPs will somehow produce better output and improve team morale.
The reality is that this industry operates with a factory worker mentality. It is no surprise to me that young people don't care about programming. It just isn't valued.
The past few years have seen salaries climb to what could even be claimed as crazy levels, when compared to what other professionals make, esp non CS engineers. Compounded even more by the portrayal of the software dev lifestyle. Working from home, or being in an office with lots of free perks.
This naturally led to lots of people wanting in.
I like you, originally got into programming as a career as it was what I loved doing, it was a given I would go that route. This was at a time where engineers made far less than they do today.
Maybe salaries are crazy in Silicon Valley, but in Europe I really don't see this. I got a decent starting salary 25 years ago but having remained in a technical role I've never got more than minimal pay rises. I now earn way less than my contemporaries from University who went into other fields. And if I look around for job vacancies, they're never offering big money, certainly never close to 6 figures. Yet the perception in the wider public seems to be that CS professionals have loads of money even here.
Passion for working is different then coding or hacking on stuff or w/e you call it.
Personally, I like learning how things work and doing things at my own pace. Expecting passion for integrating SaaS apis and working with legacy code is not the tech that got me interested, I want to clock out of that ASAP.
What's there to love nowadays when it comes to software? I'm genuinely asking. What's there to love in making a company worth $2 trillion into becoming, what? A $3 trillion company? What's there to love in helping with making a tech dystopia more and more a reality each and every day? The dream of the '90s - early 2000s is well and truly dead, even in Portland.
Not all programming has to be for some megacorp. Clever solutions to (say) Advent of Code problems bring a smile to my face but they don't bring any sort of dystopia closer.
There are a few old-adage counterpoints here, such as: don't make your passion/hobby your job, have hobbies outside of your work, etc. But you also touch on something that has surfaced as the money in tech has grown and become much more loud in the last few decades.
> Bootcamps have just become farms for people who need a job, but not those who really want this job.
This isn't exclusive to bootcamps - they just happen to be the most expedient way to act on particular desire. The real problem is how LOUD money has become in 'tech' in the last several decades. When I started undergrad ~10 years ago, at a small school not known for anything Math or CS, there were still a lot of students who entered the CS program because they heard, from their family the internet or the world at large, that it was "a good job". (This also stems from college being seen as 'job prospect' improvement as opposed to something for learning, but that discussion lies elsewhere.)
I got lucky that I liked it. Most of them would drop out of the program / transfer to a different area of focus within a year or so. There were probably somewhere around 50-60 people in my low level CS courses. My graduating CS cohort was 9.
Despite liking it, I still find little desire to tinker on things outside of work. A large part of it is that it _is_ my job. I don't want to work, then go home and 'work' for 'fun'.
The other part of it is, as mentioned by others here, the parts of software a lot of us enjoy the most aren't usually what we get to focus on, in one way or another.
> I want to work with more people who LOVE software and find the development of machines and the code that runs on them as fascinating as I do. Unfortunately, its less and less these days.
I get the impression most of this is going to be exclusive to small projects, teams, and in particular startups. Bigger operations are going to prefer prioritizing the more 'stable' or boring sides of software.
> Despite liking it, I still find little desire to tinker on things outside of work. A large part of it is that it _is_ my job. I don't want to work, then go home and 'work' for 'fun'.
I am the same way, but when I take 5-week long vacations I usually start to tinker with stuff on week 3. So it takes me about 2 weeks to detox from job grinding
Funny to realise the best thing my job could do for employee training is to just give me more vacation. Not like they give me any official training though. They let people occasionally go to conferences but I don't really like those, so I don't
Just a small note… Making my programming hobby into a job has resulted in a wonderful and rewarding career for me. I’ve now been coding professionally for around 25 years. I go through waves, but you’ll often find me coding in my spare time before work, after work, or on the weekends. I do much of the stuff this author mentions too, such as designing and 3D printing parts for repairs around the house.
Anyway, to each their own, but I purposely made my hobby my career and I believe I’ve benefited greatly from that.
And if that has worked out for you, that's great! It's not wise to make generalizations about this kind of thing.
To be clear, I think using what I said in the first bit against the author or comment I replied to is kind of side-stepping the real issue. The first of my comment essentially translates to: turning a hobby into a profession is a high risk, high reward scenario. It can work out fantastic (as in your case) or you can come to hate something you used to enjoy.
Programming-adjacent things, I can enjoy. I like puzzles, I like factory building games, I could see myself building robots or getting into 3D printing random bits. But I don't think that I would ever sit down and write a software library outside of work without a strong personal incentive. I'd just rather spend my time on other things I enjoy equally as much.
I like to program as a hobby, but I still maintain a clock-in-clock-out mentality. If I didn't, my work would own my life. and why would I give that to my employer for free?
You can't expect to work with people who LOVE their work. That's just not how the world is set up. People gotta eat, so they take the least bad path to that. I can entirely understand why someone would pragmatically choose this career regardless of their lack of enthusiasm for it.
I genuinely enjoy writing code at work (the same way I enjoy doing crossword puzzles), but I literally never do it in my spare time. I already spend a greater number of waking hours in front of my computer than I do with my family (or playing music or mountain biking or…), so even though writing code at home isn’t on my list of priorities it doesn’t mean I lack of enthusiasm, it just means that itch is already being scratched.
I mean... I don't know, I've done this as a full-time job for 10 years already. I still like it but I have other stuff going on I'm interested in and it's hard to sustain the same level of enthusiasm after that much time. Even in a career like acting or pro sports a lot of people eventually are just working for a paycheck and not really sustained by a passion for their work.
I agree. I understand there’s a diverse set of people in the world, with various degrees of interest and passion in their work. But I only much prefer to work with people who are intensely attracted to their work. It’s contagious. Passion breeds passion, and too much “balance” leads to people being ambivalent about work.
What I tell people who get into software because they need a job is always that the industry also needs people with quality assurance and management skills.
Not because I want to offload people who are just looking for a quick buck onto those fields, but because I sometimes find that people with the right skills just take the long way around to transition into those roles. (I've even seen this happen once with a UX designer, but I think artistic people mostly know to try for those roles.)
People don't really consider the fact that it is a successful industry, but there are more roles in the industry than just developer. When the company I'm part of was a small startup, it was hard to find good people who were interested in taking on entry-level QA/scrum master positions.
You’re looking at it wrong. Some people really love flying planes. Some pilots clock off and go straight home to not think about their jobs until they’re back. If you want to work with people like that, look at the programming equivalent of your local airshow, not SFO.
I think one would have to be mad to love many ordinary software jobs out there. Being a cog in the machine, with average salary, and a job to maintain boring legacy apps, now that really doesn't sound fun to me. It might be a decent job, but not something to love.
I have loved programming (literally) my entire life. Some of the books I learned to read on was TS-2068 BASIC program listings in kindergarten.
Luckily for me, before I got too far down the road into choosing a major, it became clear to me that I would never love getting paid to program. Writing code as a career was not going to appeal to me. Being able to keep it as a hobby, where I can choose how much time I put into it, has kept me happy.
I will always wonder about "the road not taken", but I do think others are coming to that realization.
In my experience, most of my coworkers have been passionate about some aspects of software development at least.
People aren't always passionate about the projects we work on at work, but most are passionate about things like software craftmanship, quality, or maybe just technology itself, or the problem solving aspect, or some are perpetually in love with how software allows you to create almost anything out of nothing.
The lack of enthusiasm and genuine interest is replaced by a clock-in and clock-out mentality.
In my experience people who treat programming as a job rather than a passion often build better apps (note that this is different to saying they write better code..). They don't try all the latest shiny things, they treat things like tests and docs as a boring necessessity rather than something they can ignore, they go for simple solutions they can think about less over complex abstractions that require lots of time. They're also happy to stick with something a bit dull like maintaining an old app so long as their pay keeps coming.
Passionate and enthusiastic devs are definitely more fun to work with, but if I'm going to be on a team with 6 or 7 others for a couple of years I would rather not come in to work to be faced with someone's 'clever' idea that they opened a PR for at 2am every day.
I'm really, genuinely happy for you that the thing you're passionate about is something you're good at and is extremely lucrative, but if I tried to make a living doing what I'm passionate about I'd live in a cardboard box. The reality is that software eating the world (and admittedly a number of other things, but this is a big one) have made it much, much harder to make a living doing just about anything else. I got a job in software development because I was good enough at it and I needed to pay the loans from pursuing my passion. I continue doing software development because it's a way to eventually maybe escape capitalism without swallowing a bullet.
As someone who went into software development because it was my passion and my hobby, its always disappointing how often that isn't the case for so many people in this industry. It's draining actually; The lack of enthusiasm and genuine interest is replaced by a clock-in and clock-out mentality. Bootcamps have just become farms for people who need a job, but not those who really want this job.
I want to work with more people who LOVE software and find the development of machines and the code that runs on them as fascinating as I do. Unfortunately, its less and less these days.