[christophilus]

I see it all the time in computer science. People become programmers because the pay is good. But without a love for the craft, they end up either hating life or being mediocre or both. It really does help to love what you do.

[peruvian]

Our field rewards mediocrity though, so it's fine. A mediocre programmer at an enterprise company can make a comfortable middle class salary.

[DharmaPolice]

That's a good thing though, right?

[Firmwarrior]

It's good until that mediocre dude makes a bunch of mediocre JavaScript-based crap. And then I have to either import 9000 libraries or rewrite everything from scratch every time I do anything

[marcosdumay]

Yes. More professions should be like that.

But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.

[scarface74]

I started being a hobbyist programmer in 1986. By the time I graduated college in 1996, I had programmed in four different assembly languages.

The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.

[grugagag]

Some of that liking what you do can also be attributed to chance in the career path one stumbles upon. I’ve had programming gigs that I loved and gigs that turned out, after slowly boiling like a frog in a pan, were disfunctional and skill eroding.

[pryelluw]

Not love, but have natural inclination towards it. That drives a sense of wonder to learn more.

Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.

[jemmyw]

I saw this at uni (2002), a lot of people studying there said it was for the job/salary and they didn't know much about it before starting.