[Chinjut]

Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation. Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one thing truly worth doing.

[gohrt]

I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a minor league team and I program to pay the bills.

[sanoli]

Sports is different, in that the number of positions available that are good enough financially are very, very few. So for sports, you're just not good enough. As an analogy, if you were a doctor in a smaller town, in a tiny hospital, and you loved it and were good, you'd be fine.

[enraged_camel]

That's probably because sports can't really be considered vocations except by those who play them professionally. Minor leagues aren't really professional level.