<p>Sounds like the joy is gone for you. That’s too bad.</p>
<p>I’m 50-something and just got home from dropping my son off at college this weekend. He’s a fairly accomplished tennis junior, so I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with him traveling around the East Coast and less frequently deeper in the country to various tournaments. I’ve done a lot of homework checking too. ;-)</p>
<p>One of the things I’m most proud of is I was able to convey to him the importance of passion in everything we do: work, love, relationships, activities, …everything. Without passion, what’s the point? </p>
<p>If work has become a stale biscuit for you, find something else. We only go around once. And who really knows if there’s anything after this. Do you really want to spend it working on “the same technology as everyone else”? … marking your time while you’re waiting for your next foursome? </p>
<p>We owe it to ourselves to enjoy EVERY aspect of our lives. IMHO, it is our responsibility to our children to make sure they don’t waste their lives, just marking time in a job, until they could finally do something they could enjoy, then go back to their mundane job of building their 401K until their next “prison break”. You can’t possibly want that for them.</p>
<p>We should all constantly have goals and aspirations. “Where am I going?” “How do I get there?” “What’s next?” These are the questions that have driven me since my twenties and I hope they drive me until I die. I hope they drive my son as they have driven me.</p>
<p>As I’ve gotten older and more secure I’ve added other questions, like “Who can I help?” and “How else can I help?” And… try to forgive myself for not being generous earlier, but I digress.</p>
<p>Reading your posts keeps reminding me of “Joe versus the Volcano”. If you don’t know the movie, perhaps you should see it. It’s a Tom Hanks comedy with a profoundly important message that I think many people need to hear.</p>
<p>I don’t think the question is about passion. You can be passionate in your work even if you don’t work for a tech company. In fact, your passion will contribute more in smaller companies than in any large tech company. These large organizations generally require more of your time, so it leads to a work-life balance problem. Most of the people who climb the food chain in these companies give up love, relationships, activities, and everything else for their career. </p>
<p>I’m not saying that you should ever stay in a job you dislike for the sake of the salary. But you’re using a logical fallacy: a false dichotomany. You don’t have to choose between working in a job you are passionate about, and taking in the long hours and extra competition of a tech company in a metropolitan area. It is possible to have an enjoyable place to work in a “flyover state” where you enjoy what you do for less stress, and as a consequence, less pay.</p>
<p>Daggoth: You’re arguing against a point maikai didn’t make. maikai is simply saying (and I agree) that it’s important to have passion in work. He’s not saying that you need to work in a metro area in order to have passion.</p>
<p>I won’t say that I “hate” my work. I will say that I am past the point of continuous intense competition. Often times to remain ultra-competitive, one has to almost eat/sleep the subject matter.</p>
<p>Me? I want my Saturdays watching college football and Sundays watching the NFL. As for my software/technical career, I don’t want to acquire jobs requiring 4 interviews and the such. I’ll take something that is “hot in the streets” so that companies hire you basically for just knowing it. It was one of the reasons why I went into government/INTEL contracting. I figured…“well the USA will always have enemies, so this is pretty much constant funding”. Basically, you e-mail a recruiter your resume, do one phone-screen, meet face-to-face, they verify your clearance and you decide when to start.</p>
<p>I had to switch technologies because the No Such Agency finally grew tired of paying Oracle licensing fees (and probably us DBA’s too) so I switched all of the Hadoop/Cloud/Data Science stuff. I will ride that technology like I did PowerBuilder, Oracle and Data Warehousing until the next big thing comes out.</p>
<p>I rather get the steady job and money out the way first…then concentrate on the leisure.</p>
<p>Different people may have different experiences. In various SV jobs I’ve held (and some outside of the SV), I’ve not only had to eat/drink/sleep the subject matter, I’ve been told by management that doing that was a requirement for getting and keeping the job. I personally do not mind doing that as long as everyone else on the team from the CEO on down are doing likewise.</p>
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<p>Holding a high US security clearance is not an option for all of the aspiring software engineers, computer scientists, etc. here (especially those who are not currently US citizens). They will be more likely to have to compete with the high achievers (define that any way you want) for jobs. Better that they realize this right away so they are prepared to do that.</p>
<p>See, that is when I pull out my “optimization calculations” and ask myself how much am I getting paid for the eat/sleep currently and will it result in more money in the future. If all of the “eat/sleep the subject matter” is not gonna benefit me or take up too many hours, then I need to find something that I can just eat sometimes and not have gray hair.</p>
<p>I’m certainly not disagreeing with you here. However, your situation is unique with respect to most people who are seeking employment in the computer industry. You can’t just assert that there are more jobs available than candidates without also noting that all seekers are not eligible for these jobs. Also, even if the US will always have enemies, the tax money raised to protect us from said enemies does not always cover all job seekers. (Think of all of the war veterans who got trained in things like network administration, IT, etc. who are now jobless, for example.)</p>
<p>The reality is that most seekers of jobs in the computer industry will be competing against high achievers. Not necessarily people who get near-perfect if not perfect GPAs, but people who are prepared to put in a lot of personal time and effort, above and beyond a “normal workday”, to establish themselves in the computer industry. Also consider that the competition isn’t just against other job seekers, it’s for the consumer’s money.</p>
<p>My husband works for one of those companies. He seems a bit bored by the work, compared to the smaller, small named company he used to work for. Also, he used to hate the bureaucracy he had to deal with, but he doesn’t say much about that anymore. But, I love the pay, the benefits, and so on. I hated his old job. The insurance barely covered anything. The pay was ok I guess, but really, not that great compared to what he could have been earning. It was in the ballpark I guess. And he was frequently working 50-60 hr weeks. Now, he works from home and works way less and gets paid about $40K more, and the insurance covers everything, even IVF and such. He is very happy for the most part and will likely try to stay with this company until retirement, if he can. I hope he can.</p>
<p>Work is work. The idea that you need to be passionate about it is naive. It certainly should be pleasant enough if you have a choice in the matter, but how many of you would still come to work if you had more money than you would ever need for the rest of your life?</p>
<p>It is commonly thought that the most productive software developers are an order of magnitude more productive than the worst software developers who have jobs. So it is entirely possible that the most productive software developers produce better results while working fewer hours than the typical or worst software developers in the same organization.</p>
<p>What I’ve seen is that the best are 10x better than the worst, but not 10x better than the average CS graduate of decent competence, as too many people think is the case.</p>
<p>“Genius” programmers are a bargain if you pay 1.5 times average for them. At 10 times average, 10 average programmers would be significantly better, and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary. Bad programmers will screw things up and make more bugs than they fix, but decent though not great ones will do fine.</p>
<p>You will find a few of the very accomplished early Apple employees are still working. There are other examples you can find. They usually are passionate about their work.</p>
These are few and far between. I’d also argue that many of these people have spent so long in their company that they really have no place to go anywhere else. Their work at Apple etc. is basically their life’s work.</p>
<p>How many of these people do you really think there are? And more importantly, why should others strive to be like that?</p>
<p>They move around quite a bit actually. They have not worked for Apple for a long time. Also, C++ and C# creators have been in the business for a long time too. There are quite a few actully if you know who they are.</p>
<p>Well that’s actually pretty surprising, if it really is true. But I could believe that.</p>
<p>However, a lot and/or most people just don’t get passionate about something like that. To go looking for something that you will just “love” is ridiculous. Either your personality allows for that (and will probably just develop an obsession over whatever business you get into anyways) or it won’t.</p>
<p>There’s an old saying my father used to tell me when I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. “Do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I’m sure you’ve heard this before. It’s so true. And when you do something you love, you become truly awesome at it and that has a clear and direct impact on your career. Does this somehow not make sense to you? Why exactly would that sound naive to you?</p>
<p>Explain it in detail. I’m sure you didn’t mean it as in insult, right? It was an intelligent comment, because you’re an intelligent man. Help us all understand then, and explain exactly how that line of logic is naive.</p>
<p>I’m saddened to hear some of you live a life without passion. I can lead a horse to water, but I can’t make them drink. I just hope any young people are reading this see the stark contrast between people like you who have been ground down by jobs they didn’t love and me who will not waste my life like that. We spend so much of the only life we have at work, it boggles the mind that anyone would stay where they are even a little unhappy.</p>
<p>The saying has a double meaning. In the good case, when others are willing to pay you to do what you love, work does not feel like work. In the bad case, when no one is willing to pay you to do what you love, you will be in the unemployment line.</p>
<p>Clearly, you see I have my foot in my mouth up to my ankle with this thread and now you dare me to go to the calf?! :-/</p>
<p>What criteria would I use to determine if a job added no weight to a resume? That’s too broad a question. I’d have to write a book. I’ve seen plenty of jobs at places like Motorola, GE, and L3 (household names), to name just a few, that wouldn’t add a single ounce to a resume. But hey! Little Johnny got a job at GE. Great! Impress the neighbors. </p>
<p>You really don’t need me to draw a map or provide criteria. You know where these places are. </p>
<p>Everyone knows the “mecca” center for semiconductors is… Ohio.</p>
<p>The center for software engineering?.. again… Ohio.</p>
… </p>