I'm glad I lack passion to be a programmer

> It lets me be a bit more objective in a field that's prone to a lot of subjectivity and - like almost any field - pride and ego

Unpopular opinion: pride and ego actually drive personal ambition, technological achievements, and human progress. No one accidentally stumbles over being "passionate" and no one truly passionate divorces their personal identity from their work. That's why some of the most successful people in their respective fields also are often the most egotistical. There should obviously be some checks and balances there that everyone needs to take stock of, but that's just my two cents.

I don't remember wanting to "be the best programmer I could be" - I just wanted to build stuff and it made me feel smart/good when I solved complex problems.

Nowadays I get paid to solve trivial problems, self-inflicted complexity, and work in problem domains I have no interest in. But it gets me a nice living.

Since I was 12 (I'm nearly 50) my drive to program has always been about understanding, duplicating, and then exceeding the work of others. Part of this is ego- the desire to be respected for my intelligence- and the other part is a desire to see certain science fiction futures come to pass (elective gene therapy, interstellar travel, machine singularity) through my discoveries.

At some point I realized I'm not going to be the equal of Lord British or Jeff Dean. This was a huge blow to my ego. Like the author, this had huge impacts on me. So instead, I worked harder: more hours spent programming, tediously working through all the bits and pieces that smarter people can solve quickly. And that taught me something: grinding like that comes at a price (life satisfaction).

What drives me still is passion: the desire to be able to do something I know is possible, with my own hands.

For me it's different. I've always been a person that likes challenges and to improve, and programming was just what I needed. It's an endless road of challenges. I am trying every day to get better, and this doesn't have much value besides for myself. Companies that I work for doesn't need much of a knowledge I have.

I feel the same way, but I want to caution people: this only works if you have already achieved some measure of success in your career and respect from your peers.

It's easy to be egoless if you're already working at a FAANG, just as it's easy to not care about money if you're already rich.

Still, it's worth trying to remove your ego from the equation, even if you're a struggling student trying to get your first job, just as you should care about things other than money, even if you're poor.

I think the balance of engineering to the point of not over-engineering, and making simple yet efficient programs/code is an art that gets better with practice and experience. Trying to improve your skills do so will of course give you a market advantage. But, I think key to avoiding burnout is to try and have a rich personal life outside the "9 to 5", but also depends on your circumstances. For those younger, probably putting more hours to improve your skills is worthwhile in the long-term.

Programming is like golf.

In reality, you are competing only against yourself. Can you force the machine to conform to your will, or will you not be successful at that?

I think that the passion that is often sought in hiring candidates is slightly misguided. It's not uncommon to hear that the employer is looking for passionate $language engineers. Although this approach could be helpful in the short term, it's less helpful for the long term. Why? Because organizations and teams generally don't stay on the same technology stack for the long term. And what happens when the particular technology that someone is passionate about is phased out? Instead, I think it's more rational to be passionate about solving certain kinds of problems (not related to a specific language). The other potential downside of passionate developers is that being passionate can make one less objective. I would even argue that the engineering approach would favor dispassionate developers where they're more likely to be objective. FWIW.

I have passion to be a programmer. What companies don't understand is that it doesn't mean I enjoy my job. I stopped programming the things I am passionate about in my 20s because I had to eat. I wouldn't work on your dumb SaaS if I were financially independent.

I'd like to hear about how the author's interactions with other coders changed after the transformation from "being a programmer" to "doing programming". In particular with those that are still in the "being a programmer" mindset.

I am always thankful when people share their life experiences. I think the post captures the growth that many programmers experience throughout their professional life.

However I do think that the naming is a bit off. I don't think many people would describe a great programmer as someone that chases fassion, drinks kool aid, overengineers things and rejects proven technology and practices.

Their description of their approach now ("I'll do so only when it's the simplest and most maintainable solution to the problem") is much more aligned to what I believe great programmers do.

While I enjoy the overall message, I don’t love the sense of finality in the author’s tone. Makes it sound like it’s an all or nothing thing, where you either identify or you don’t. In reality, it’s a spectrum that we’re always moving back and forth to some degree on

I suspect the author’s mean on this spectrum has shifted and variance has decreased

I don’t trust anyone that says they don’t feel a particular thing anymore and they’ve permanently moved on, especially in the case of the author who had quite the affinity for being a great programmer

I am in the minority I think but I am a passionate programmer. My passion at the moment comes out in several forms such as my side project / personal website (https://dustinbrett.com). But I have loved tech and computers since I was a kid and I love consuming anything about them and I wake up thinking about cool things to do with them. I wouldn't want to live without some kind of passion to drive my interests.

> But I'll do so only when it's the simplest and most maintainable solution to the problem, and not because I want to be the greatest of programmers in my or other people's eyes.

The problem I run into is the simplest and easiest modification, the yagni for any one ticket, if sufficiently small seems to be a great algorithm to find local maximas in the design.

But if you keep with good design principles from ticket to ticket the end result is better.

I lack the passion to be anything. Identity's for losers.

Cultivate the passion to do cool shit, and just do it. No need for titles.

This reads to me like a "stay away! don't hire that guy" warning. When things get tough, who is going to put in the work to make the project a success:

a) The person with the "it's just an activity" attitude

b) The person who tied his/her self-worth to delivering a good result on time

;)

That word: "passion" doesn't mean what HR people seem to think it means. "Passion" is like making out in the broom closet. Highly emotional. That is NOT how anyone should approach S/W development.

You didn't lose your passion, you lost your virtue signaling.

Wonder not passion.

I find this article confusing. I agree with some of what it's saying, but I think my framing is completely different.

> The removal of the ego from the equation has yielded much more benefits than the passionate pursuit of being a programmer.

I think identifying as a software developer isn't really tied to how ambitious you are; I believe what's actually going on here is people feel some sense of shame to be associated with what they feel the industry has become. (Undoubtedly, I'm right there with them on that.)

Truthfully, while pride and ego need to be tempered, they're just as important as anything else. After all, if you have no pride or ego whatsoever about what you do, it's hard to imagine having a work ethic. And while I am a bit nihilist with regards to life, I still find myself feeling like it matters that people give a shit.

> I'd avoid PHP and jQuery simply because of the popularly negative opinion of them, and not because of any valid technical reasons.

It's good that you stopped doing this, but there's almost a kind of implication that every card-carrying software engineer thinks this way. I don't. In fact, I was a huge PHP user before I was a huge PHP hater, mostly fueled by Wordpress, phpBB, Postnuke, etc. in addition to the widespread availability of PHP as part of the "LAMP" stack (and much cPanel hosting, and development environments like XAMPP.)

In fact, the truth is, modern PHP development has turned around quite a bit. I still think there's more to go before I'd really consider looking back, especially since the world around PHP has improved very fast (Go and Rust especially, but still Python/Django and Ruby/Rails, and of course Dotnet.)

> Rather than write a simple main() method which solves the problem, I'd "architect" code bases that adhere to the SOLID principles, with countless interfaces and factories that ensure flexibility.

Again, not sure what this has to do with passion or pride of programming. I've always been a hard critic of design patterns. My personal anecdote is that using design patterns or systems like SOLID to build software is like using TVTropes to write fiction. Of course I'm not saying that these things are useless, but overconfidence on using them as a tool to build with is something I associate more with consultants than with passionate devs.

> My passion didn't die; instead, it changed priorities. It was no longer about my identity of being a programmer, but rather about my activity of programming. My ideal for software development is to find the simplest solution to the practical problem. I focus on ensuring that I program in such way which adheres to my pillars for a great program: simplicity, maintainability and above all, value.

Maybe there's some truth in here, but I still can't help but feel this is more of a semantics thing. You can pretend you have no ego or pride, but we all do. I would love to be objective. I think objectivity as a concept is useful even if it can never be 100% attained. But at the end of the day, my body is not a cold, careless hunk of silicon, and it'd be silly to pretend that in my desire to use programming to solve problems effectively and write better code, that I am not prideful at all or that I have no ego.

I think this post is more about learning to not fall into groupthink and control pride and ego than it is about a lack of passion or a change of heart.

I can't relate to this at all and I'm one of those "passionate programmers".

Perhaps it just manifests itself differently, but things like I've always preferred PHP to RoR because the PHP community is so much more practical and "gett'er done" mentality.

For me it's about knowing I've done good work. I don't need external affirmation, it's about _ME_ knowing I've done good work.

I had a good friend tell an allegory about a bricklayer who refused to build a porch for a house that was run down and when asked why the brick layer said he would not be proud of showing the work to his son.

I once built and maintained a system over a 5 year period that after the first 6 months never went down or stopped working unless external dependencies it relied on went down (think mail server going down causing emails to be unsent). It wasn't a simple system either, it deployed across multiple data centers around the world.

I'm quite proud of that work, what I'm most proud of is that no one ever went to work worried that system may prevent them from doing their job. I'm not saying it was completely bug free at all times, new features are always a risk, but it damned well did the core work day and day out and came to be something most employees of the company relied on every single day. That company was sold about 6 months after I left and the owner told me the system I built was one of the things they wanted access to.

I left my last job because their systems were complete and utter shit and the person who originally wrote them wielded enough power that he actively prevented us from fixing it. My problem wasn't the state of the system, my problem was being told I have to work with it like that without being able to improve it. Just to give you an idea, this guy once told me he had been doing it for 20 years and never needed to test on real data. Which is bullshit, when he did it he had access to everything, including production. I left because I'm not willing to not be able to improve a system that needs it that badly.

Long story short, I don't agree with this person description of what a passionate programmer cares about, at all. It feels like a caricature to me. But the amount of times I've seen complete and utter shit pushed as "it doesn't matter" is too high. system stability absolutely matters.