[smokel]

> The advice I would give, is: Do what you are passionate about, what really interests you.

I don't mean to offend, and I'm happy for you that you've been so successful, but the advice does not make sense for people whose interest is not in popular demand.

For example, there are many failed artists out there, and it would be more helpful to these people if they were given realistic advice early on.

Finally, I meet a lot of young people (developers as well), who do not know exactly what their passions are. They are quite miserable in feeling lost, searching for their "true passion" -- which they probably simply don't have.

[bachmeier]

> I don't mean to offend, and I'm happy for you that you've been so successful, but the advice does not make sense for people whose interest is not in popular demand.

That argument comes up often enough, but it's built on an assumption that "interest" is singular. Most everyone is interested in a wide range of things, and they'd be happy doing any of them at a high level. Some of those are likely to pay enough to cover the bills.

[steveBK123]

Exactly, I find this argument weak. People can have many interests. I enjoy gardening, photography, reading history, and travel. It turns out those are things you do not get paid for.

Fortunately I also find financial markets interesting enough that the programming problems they present to be engaging. It helps if you have "T shaped skills" as they say, where you can apply your technical skills & domain knowledge.

Most jobs will not be as fun as sitting at home and arguing on the internet, for example.

[ghaff]

In some cases, you can align interests though. At peak, I had a job that involved traveling almost 50% of the time. It wasn't all fun and games but enough was.

[steveBK123]

Well that's the idea right.

If you have the mindset to make the best of things - hey I'm traveling, let me do a little sightseeing and max out rewards points, cool.

If you view your job exclusively as a burden then every minute commuting/in office/logging in/travelling is bad, and you probably won't have a great career.

[ghaff]

I was never in a position where every minute had to be scheduled so business travel actually allowed me to subsidize a lot of personal travel which I made a lot of use of (and I like doing). I understand it's a burden on many people for various reasons--including not having a choice and routinely going to less interesting places.

[sasaf5]

Also, I have seen several times someone "following their passion" and doing something that was not required by the business. The end result is a huge mess of overcomplicated things that doesn't do what was needed and no one else can fix.

Many times the business just needs a boring old solution for a tedious problem that no one would be passionate about, and it's normal to engage in that kind of grind.

I would change that advice to "do what you are passionate about, among the things that the business needs, and understand that sometimes you just can't do that".

On the other hand I have seen several devs who were just good at quickly tackling whatever was necessary at the moment and became very successful without ever showing a sign of passion for computing. For them it's just a craft and they go do some hobby after that.

[hahajk]

On the other hand, I often do non-required things just because I'm curious and they have often been boons for my team. As an example, as a proj manager at a big org I went through the steps of setting up my own tenant account in our org's AWS system so I could play around with compute nodes. A year later they had issues with the team that managed the AWS environment and couldn't create new accounts for almost a year. As a result, no one in the org could bring on new contracts requiring cloud computing. Except my team: Our contractors could be added to my tenant account and continue work. This was a huge deal when we were trying to get a few experimental projects off the ground very quickly.

Almost all of my success has been a result of doing things no one else did because I was curious about them.

[willis936]

That's just because your metric for success is different. I consider someone who was able to pay their bills and do what they really care about well everyday for 10 years far more successful than the person who did a passing job at something they didn't care about but were able to afford a house or whatever.

My advice is do what you care about and make sure you won't go broke. If you're good and lucky you'll have that opportunity. If you're extremely lucky you'll do better financially.

[TrololoTroll]

Ah, to be capable of being that optimistic/irresponsible

Money doesn't solve all of life's problems... But it does solve a lot of them, and just paying the bills is a safety factor of approximately 1

[fhd2]

Depends on where you live I suppose, but you can get by even on unemployment benefits in most of the EU from my experience. That's a good safety factor.

And I don't think anyone here said to only do things you want to do at all costs. I doubt _anyone_ gets away with that. But I'd argue you can generally use the skills related to your passion to make good money.

Being realistic: If you're doing things you reasonably enjoy 80% of the time, that's pretty much a dream job.

[elteto]

Yes. This sort of advice can be so misguiding, even though it came from a good place.

Reality is that your passion is only profitable if it’s in high demand or if you are an outlier. It looks like OP is technically capable so he is probably above the median, and he is passionate about a field in high demand. That’s like a double bingo! A lot of people on HN fall into these two buckets so for them this advice works.

[nsagent]

You left off an important caveat from the next sentence:

> But of course I have been very lucky, there.

You do have to be lucky enough to be relatively secure in life, but nearly everyone in tech can achieve an adequate living. Not everyone will be a top earner and there are of course compromises you have to make, but should actually consider if the trade-offs for potentially earning less yet being more fulfilled at work are ones they are happy with.

In some sense I'm the starving artist in my family. I eschewed money and moving up the tech management hierarchy to pursue my passion. In pursuit of my goals, I've previously been unemployed and in recent years paid 10x less than I was in big tech.

I'm totally happy with that trade-off.

[raincole]

> For example, there are many failed artists out there, and it would be more helpful to these people if they were given realistic advice early on.

I don't like "follow your passion" advice either, but as someone who knows more than one failed artists in real life, I believe it has little to do with whether they followed the passion (anecdotally ofc).

[arcbyte]

As others are commenting, failure has little to do with "following passion". There is a market for everything.

[mattpallissard]

I tell my children to do whatever they want.

But I also tell them they'll always have programming skills in their back pocket should they ever need to finance their passions.