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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

Until you've worked at a job where you're genuinely excited to get up every morning and hack, it's very hard to empathize with this sentiment. Doubly so because employers compelling enough to make employees passionate about their jobs often exploit this and have extremely substandard working conditions (exhibit A: academia). Despite that, once you've been genuinely passionate about a job, it's very hard to see the world any other way.

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> get up every morning and hack, it's very hard to empathize with this sentiment

Even if you have experienced the joy, it might not always be rewarded & the disillusionment burnout is always a risk.

The most bitter folks I've worked with are the ones who started with a lot of passion, but got turned around.

Not to mention that this Passion comes in many flavours.

I would not put a label on my experience, but "autistic joy" is a good comparison to what drives passion in my work - for my partner it comes from the final unveil and other eyes landing on their work.

I only realized this when reading Andre Agassi's book and being stuck in close proximity during the pandemic (and to "bear witness" to provide joy).

An interesting fact I learned: the original definition of "Passion" is the intimate suffering of Christ on the cross. It brings new meaning to corporations wanting Passion from their employees.

Exhibit B: video games.

Montreal (or any other video game hub) is a great place to start a software business. There are tons of highly qualified, underpaid and overworked software engineers to poach from the video game firms.

Exhibit C: Zoo employees

The music industry.

The film industry.

> Doubly so because employers compelling enough to make employees passionate about their jobs often exploit this and have extremely substandard working conditions

Another way to say this is the Law of Supply and Demand. It's no surprise at all that there are a greater number of people interested in a fun job, which reduces the pay offered. Conversely, dirty unpleasant jobs have fewer people interested, so the pay is greater.

It's hard to see here who is exploiting who.

Providing substandard working conditions narrows it down significantly. Corner cutting below certain threshold just because you can?

My dad was a professor in his later years. He once had a conversation with a secretary (back before computers replaced them) who complained:

"garbage men get paid more than me!"

My dad replied "why don't you quit and become a garbage collector?"

She angrily replied "but that's a filthy disgusting job!"

More apt advice would have been to unionize. Garbage collectors don't get paid better because the job is dirty.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your broader sentiment, but before Google I can’t think of many employers that provide the kind of open-ended projects and fringe benefits (Olympic-class gyms, rec centers, libraries, intellectually-enriched social environments, access to world-class research/engineering/media facilities, access to LexisNexis, etc.) that one gets working at a research university.

Empathize with what? Many people have experience with having free time and thus know what it’s like to do things that they like doing. Replace all of this job-passion with the fantasy of winning enough millions in the lottery to retire and yeah, there you go. People already fantasize about that.

But the above doesn’t involve making a profit for an employer. I don’t know if that was supposed to be part of the empathizing.

No one is arguing that people don't understand the concept of being excited. But I think a lot of people would be less convinced that it's possible to be passionate about your work.

I know and believe that it is possible for a slave to be happy because she is a slave.

Yes, that's a perfect example of what someone who didn't believe that work can be gratifying would say.

My statement directly contradicts “someone who [don’t] believe that work can be gratifying”.

I don’t have millions and because of $life, I’m behind where I “should be” with retirement savings. Don’t cry for me, I’m good and catching up.

But the idea of having “passion” for my job - even though I currently work at my favorite job I’ve had in 30 years across 10 jobs - just isn’t me. I would never give up a remote only job because I thought I would be “passionate” about another job and definitely not for less money.

Because of combination of remote work, low fixed expenses and a couple of other hacks, I don’t dread work or even really care about retirement. My wife and I travel frequently now, did the digital nomad thing for a year two years ago and starting next year we plan to spend a few months of the winter internationally and the summer away from home either domestically or internationally.

There was one job that I have had that was meaningful to me. I was an architect for a company that managed sending nurses to the homes and schools of special needs kids. I wrote back end and mobile apps for the nurses and actually had a chance to work with some in the field to understand how the nurses used the devices.

It wasn’t a highly profitable company since most of the revenue came from Medicaid reimbursements. I only left when private equity took the company over and it became a PE rollup play.

>Empathize with what?

Empathize with someone having the same degree of passion towards what they do at work and what they do outside of work.

>Replace all of this job-passion with the fantasy of winning enough millions in the lottery to retire and yeah, there you go. People already fantasize about that.

This is the exact opposite sentiment. People desire endless amount of free time (e.g. retirement) specifically because it lets them spend all of their time pursuing passions that no employer is willing to pay for. Their job is not one of those passions, and it is hard for them to imagine a world in which that could possibly be the case.

While most of my passions would not make for a very lucrative career, one of my passions happens to be solving scientific computing problems I find cool, and I have been very lucky that several employers have been willing to pay good sums of money for me to pursue that passion.

> While most of my passions would not make for a very lucrative career, one of my passions happens to be solving scientific computing problems I find cool, and I have been very lucky that several employers have been willing to pay good sums of money for me to pursue that passion.

You’re truly the lucky one in that equation.

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