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by arabelladonna 2018 days ago
> If that's what you aspire to, and aren't passionate about software -- which is perfectly fine! -- I guess learning some COBOL is a reasonable career choice.

This is a completely unfair assessment. Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions about jobs. I doubt that most people choose, say, Java jobs because they're passionate about Java, or even software in general, for example.

From what I gather, most people leave the "passion" part of their work to part-time hobby work, allowing them to do both. If it then translates into money, good, but the few successes that have been put on blast have blinded people to the reality that passion != money.
1 comments
the_af 2018 days ago
Believe me: writing Java is on average more interesting than COBOL (I've done both, including some terrible Java systems using Enterprise Java Beans -- I still shudder at the thought -- and Java still wins). Then again, Java has been called "the next COBOL", so that's an interesting comparison.

> Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions about jobs.

For a lot of people, yes. Not for all. And even then, it's hard to argue that COBOL is cool or interesting. It's just paying the bills, but nothing to get hyped or write gushing articles about. And there are more interesting programming jobs that will also pay the bills, anyway.

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arabelladonna 2018 days ago
> And there are more interesting programming jobs that will also pay the bills, anyway.

Unless there aren't.

Either way, you're judging people simply for taking a different path than you, which is completely unfair.

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the_af 2018 days ago
If there aren't, there aren't. In that case, there's no choice to be made.

I didn't mean to judge people and in fact tried not to, though perhaps clumsily. I said it's fair to not be passionate about the job. Often I haven't felt passionate about it either, or even particularly motivated. And do note I have worked in COBOL, so I understand the need. I just don't like the language and I don't want to see people selling the idea that it's "interesting" or a particularly sound business decision to learn it -- like those articles that occasionally get posted to HN.

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arabelladonna 2018 days ago
> I said it's fair to not be passionate about the job.

That's not what you said, though. This is what you said:

> If that's what you aspire to, and aren't passionate about software

Those are completely different sentiments and your original "aren't passionate about software" statement is the statement I took issue with.

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