[zelphirkalt]

I think this hits the mark, or almost hits the mark. I think there is more to it. People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts. There is at least one additional anxiety, which is, that in a company people don't listen to those, who do it with passion, and rather play hierarchy games. When they don't listen and the things you predicted then happen, impacting your work, then it sucks and it was entirely preventable. So the anxiety is, that people will think of not passionate employee A the same as passionate employee B, even though one of them has a lot more experience due to lots of free time projects and exploring things outside of work, and will give their opinion equal weight, potentially leading to bad decisions, that impact what B needs to work with.

[devsda]

> People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts.

Those who are passionate also have a tendency to use their personal time to "try/do/fix that one last thing for work" because they are really excited.

The problem is the said extra work gradually eats into personal time & projects and it raises baseline expectations from the employer even when it stops being fun. Then the grind begins with no personal time or projects. That's a common recipe for burn-out.

Those who can have strict separation between work & personal time or projects will obviously not fall into this trap but when you are excited and passionate, its hard to realize and fight against it.

[erosivesoul]

This is something I had to learn the hard way. My first job, I didn't even sign up as a programmer. One day someone was like, man, this is such a boring task (setting up excel sheets from one format to another). So I wrote a VBA script to automate it. At the time I was playing with C# and bash at home, setting up a home lab. So when I started getting asked to write other things, I was elated. Fast forward a year or two and now I'm the "VBA/bash/C#/typescript/react/sql/blah" guy and I've gone from solving work problems for fun and doing it just because I have to. That job didn't last long after that point. My current job has pretty clear-cut lines. I only work on work-related stuff at work, and personal stuff at home.