The fashion for passion
economist.com
economist.com
I work (very hard –possibly harder than I ever have, in my life) for free. I'm grateful to have the means to do that. I got those means by working on stuff I didn't like working on.
I love coding. I love solving problems. I love shipping. I love writing user interfaces. I love writing device control code.
But I have found that working at the whim of others, does not end well (for me).
It's worth it, to me, to be in a position, where others don't dictate what I do, and where I'm not dependent upon others.
I am currently working for a nonprofit, on a team, where I'm doing the lions' share of the work. It's a fairly robust social media/resource location application that consists of a few backend servers, a couple of SDKs, a whole bunch of dependencies (almost all ones that I wrote), and an iOS/iPadOS app.
I've been working on it for a couple of years. That's a long time, for me. I can usually bang something like this out, in a month or two.
The reason is that I want to bring the team along. It's a big learning experience for most of them. They are a lot younger than me, and, for most of them, this is the first time that they've ever been involved in a soup-to-nuts software deliverable. They didn't really know what they wanted, in the beginning, and we had to spend a great deal of time, prototyping various user experiences, before finally settling on the final one.
Now, we're in the home stretch. Once we had consolidated the project into a concrete workflow and user experience, we brought in a designer, I rewrote the core of the app into a platform-independent engine, and we're writing it from the ground up. It won't take that long (but still, longer than I usually do, on my own).
It's fun. I have learned a great deal, myself, during the process, and, to add a cherry on top, the software will be used to help people to rebuild fairly shattered lives, so it's all good.
But that would only happen if the software is modified (as it was designed to do).
Unlike most of my stuff, this is not open-source.
I forget where I read/heard it, but some of the best career advice I ever heard was (paraphrasing here): if you keep searching for the job you love you'll never be happy. Find a job you are, for the most part, tolerant of doing every day. There will always be ups and downs, but if you can't even face starting in the morning you're definitely going to spend life unhappy.
You could be a famous actor or a rockstar and still resent the fact you have to come in to dub over voices, do the press tour, or play the show that didn't sell out where the monitors don't work properly. You could love to code (I did!) and then burnout because your boss has forced you to work on something you hate, to hit the deadline that's unreal. You could be working for yourself and find it's absolutely not the easy life you thought it would be. It could be the thing you love doesn't provide the income that makes for a comfortable life. There's so many things.
I'm well aware (personally, anecdata, I know!) that passions can become a chore when you think that everything has to be monetised. Sometimes you should just do the thing because you love it.
Of course there will be exceptions, but I think the advice is good. Most people won't love their 'job'. Hang on to the advice of "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" and you'll end up thinking the work that's actually fine really isn't and you'll end up unhappy where you are, or unhappy chasing an unattainable goal.
But hey, we're all different and this is just my 2c :-)
I know that in my line of work I can get passionate about plenty of ideas, but there's no real correlation between what keeps me going, and what clicks with a mass audience. One of the things that clicks with the mass audience is that I'm there seeking out really quirky, specialized things that might possibly result in something amazing.
In that sense the mass audience is more interested in me being passionate, than in every specific thing I'm being passionate about. Bit like a zoo. Watch the tiger code widgets! If the tiger codes an amazing, saleable widget, that's a real marketing story, but people will still be curious and watch even if the widgets don't suit them. If the tiger thinks every widget is gonna be a hit, he's going to burn out and quit in despair.
The Craftsman derives joy from mastering their craft, learning from past failures and improving every day.
You can be a Craftsman in any career which allows for outlier performance - public speaking, writing books, trading, academia, entrepreneurship, software engineering.
The Passion mindset is about finding your strongest passion and then working in that area. The problem with this is that most people don't really know what they will be passionate about from the start. And worse, it's even harder to know if the current thing is what you are most passionate about! You also may not have a skills edge in what you are passionate about.
"I Don't Know What I Want, But I Know It's Not This"
https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Know-What-Step-Step/dp/014312851...
It wasn't getting laid off but some time ago I experienced a set of let's call them "professional betrayals" that, from a certain perspective, I've never really recovered from (because I'm no longer really capable of caring that much about my job), but from another - and perhaps healthier - perspective have been the making of me (because I'm no longer really capable of caring that much about my job).
Don't get me wrong: I still work hard and do a good job, and even take pride in doing that good job, but it's nowhere near as tied to how I see myself - to who I am - and I'm much the happier for it. I've also become more successful. Honestly, I think giving fewer fucks has proven to be the best thing that happened to my once stalled career.
"I run a bitcoin casino"
"I build genetic algorithms to hack the stock market so I can make fuck-you money and quit this job"
"I distill my own whisky but I still go to the bar every night and get into passionate political conversations"
"Waste a lot of time on HN"
The stock algo continues apace.. I won't be buying a private jet anytime soon, but it did help me pay off a new roof...
I never even dreamed of seeing so many people taking issue with what I said. Many were saying that it's just a job and people should not be passionate about Google for working.
I understand that perspective. It sounds dystopian to have every employee be a character right out of The Office, protagonizing a corporation that's out there to just make money. A corporation that won't second-guess firing them because someone said things might get rough later.
Still, trends like Quiet Quiting seem like the worst response. Going emo and glorifying people who stay detached from their job doesn't seem to solve anything.
If passionate people are being let go too easily, it's a sign of poor employee representation in the leadership. But approaching that subject we enter yet another ick territory that's... unions.
Everyone works for money. That's the deal. People rent their time in exchange for a salary. If it was actually enjoyable, it would be called a hobby not a job and people would be the one paying to do it.
I fail to see the link between that, the awfuly named "trend" of "quiet quiting" - doing what you are paid for is not quiting, it's just doing your job - and collective bargaining.
Seems to me that most people just want to do their job well without having to swallow gallons of company kool-aid while doing so, be allowed to take pride in what they do, be afforded an amount of trust and consideration befitting an adult and provided appropriate working conditions rather than being treated like cattle.
So basically go back to the seventies before the "modern" world decided to follow Reagan and Thatcher in their madness and self sabotage.
I mean, that is literally the argument for education, social work, elder care, domestic abuse advocates, CASA, and any other number of social services fields. Why not google? Why shouldn't that argument apply to google as well?
Also:
>Still, trends like Quiet Quiting seem like the worst response.
How so? How is that the worst response?
It doesn't make you happier. It doesn't improve your relationships. It doesn't improve your skills. It doesn't make you more money.
“Be careful how much you give this organization, because we’ll take it.”
OTOH diving head-first into your passion and ignoring everything else, including such things as the need to earn a subsistence, is also a recipe for disaster in all but very few exceptional cases.
I'd say there is a middle way, of doing something of what the opportunity pushes at you, but selecting from it the bits that have a glint of what you enjoy doing. Sometimes you get better opportunities, sometimes worse, but you move in the general direction of your, well, "passion".
Being good at making enough money and/or freeing enough time by doing something which typically is not 100% your passion, you eventually obtain resources to indulge in your passion directly in your free time.
> OTOH diving head-first into your passion and ignoring everything else, including such things as the need to earn a subsistence, is also a recipe for disaster in all but very few exceptional cases.
I think this presents a false dichotomy and isn't really what I tend to see in my generation in my country.
What I personally see is a generation of people who were brought up on "do what you love", "follow your passion", who then went on to study degrees in things they enjoyed (photographic art, english lit., contemporary dance, illustration, to name a few).
After 4 years of racking up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt they all now work in call centres, warehouses, office administration. I.E, dead-end jobs that provide no passion. A number of them are being medically treated for anxiety & depression.
I think instead if of "Do / study / follow your passion" we taught the matra of "be practical, find a career that pays well, has room for learning new skills, challenges you in interesting ways but it might not be the thing you love dearest" would have lead my generation to study degrees or enter trades that provided a pathway for a rewarding career, both fiscally and mentally.
I'm passionate about computer science, but my real passion isn't writing middleware services for B2B customers. I do it because there's still interesting challenges, it's an outlet for my skillset and it pays well.