[bdw5204]

For somewhere like ESPN where you can reasonably expect to find people who are genuinely passionate about your product, this is reasonable. ESPN employees should be passionate about sports just as employees at a video game company should be passionate about gaming.

This doesn't apply to something that nobody in their right mind can possibly be genuinely passionate about such as insurance or tax preparation.

[skeeter2020]

and yet lots of people go to school for a very long time to study accounting, or do graduate work in actuarial sciences, so I think you're wrong. It's easier to communicate passionate about the verb than the noun. Like what if you applied to a tax prep company and they had an free version for low-income people? It would be easy to talk about how you wanted to really help people with a difficult and expensive requirement where there is real need.

[chongli]

and yet lots of people go to school for a very long time to study accounting, or do graduate work in actuarial sciences, so I think you're wrong

I’ve talked to tons of people in school for those very things. NONE of them were passionate about tax prep, auditing, or mortality tables. All of them were in the game for one reason: they wanted a well-paying, steady job at an accounting firm or insurance company. In fact, all those I talked to who had actually worked in those industries found the job incredibly boring and either put up with it in the hopes of some day making partner or flat-out quit the industry.

A big clue to how little passion there is for this field is the sheer number of co-op students employed at these firms/companies. Heck, when it comes to tax time they basically hire an army of co-ops to get it all done (and feed them pizza to keep them working late into the evenings).

They don’t use regular employees for the work because no one wants to do that as a long term job. People just put up with it as a kind of hazing (or paying your dues), kind of like how residents are treated at a hospital.

Oh, and almost all graduate students these days (in fields with decent-paying industry jobs) are people who can’t or won’t work for whatever reason (including visa status) and so they go to grad school to delay entering industry, not because they’re passionate about the subject.

[bdw5204]

That's pretty much how I'd always imagined those professions are. I'd imagine there are people in law, medicine and finance who genuinely enjoy those jobs even if most are probably just in it for the money. But insurance and accounting seem like things nobody could want to do except for money.

I actually went to grad school for computer science mainly because I just enjoyed being in school and they were paying me to go. Wish I'd scheduled an extra class my last semester so that I'd have a masters right now but I was both overconfident and totally burned out. I also discovered that I'm just not interested in academic CS research. I'd be interested in a stable tenured teaching job somewhere if writing peer reviewed papers and publishing them in journals nobody reads wasn't part of the job description. I'd say most of the other grad students, especially the non-international ones seemed genuinely interested in computer science and the AI research that almost everybody except me was doing.