[teirce]

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.

[DanielHB]

> 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

[codazoda]

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.

[teirce]

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.