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.

I don’t disagree in general, but I remember the world before careerists and we were also listening to and collaborating with customers, and delivering results.

Maybe significantly more tham today.

I remember talking constantly with end-users 20 years ago, something I’ve seen countless PMs dreading, postponing and treating like an absolute chore. I’ve experimented, A/B tested and rolled back code in enterprise, something that is a bureaucratic nightmare even in agile startups.

If they have rights to a paycheck, then we should also have rights to not have the joy sucked out of it.

There's more anxiety in the people who only code for $$ because deep down they know they're at a disadvantage, so they try to suppress the hobby/passion people with all kinds of "x should y" statements.

According to you, is it possible to do a programming job well while not deriving enjoyment from it?

> Companies should only care about what I get done at work. What I do at home is my business.

I mean to some extent you're right, but obviously there are limits here. And, it can be used as a signal to see how interested a person is in something.

As one example, I don't have any college education or beyond that, and when I wanted to start working as a programmer it was kind of hard to get any response from companies and with a tiny local startup ecosystem (this was in Spain back in 2012), I managed to only find one company that was interested in hiring me as an intern in the beginning, to at least give this person without any professional experience a chance.

Since I always done programming as a hobby just for fun, it was way easier for them to evaluate if it was an outlandish bet or a somewhat safe bet, as I already had some projects on GitHub that I had done in my free-time they could look at and displayed some eagerness to program professionally.

I don't mean to say that you have to program in your free time just to be "hireable", but I'm 100% certain individuals who do that (and publish results at least sometimes) have a way higher chance of getting hired, especially if they're just starting their career.

That assumes the world is zero-sum. If my employer has a code base that I find more enjoyable / fascinating than any of my side projects, maybe the employer does get extra out of me from me putting in extra hours, but I also get more out of him by both delivering what's expected of me and getting to toy around in a code base that I find fun. I might even be improving my earning potential (if the "fun" argument isn't good enough for you) by building skills working on that production code base that I wouldn't by just messing around on side projects. The dynamic is obviously very open to abuse and people have to protect themselves from that, but I don't agree "extra hours = sucker" is universally true.

I like building stuff. During the day, I get paid to do it for my employer. In my off time, sometimes it takes the form of a personal project. Sometimes it takes the form of a house or garden project. And sometimes I’m still thinking about something that I’m enjoying at work, so it takes the form of a little more work on a work project. If I’m enjoying it and I’m not doing it to the exclusion of family time, then whatever, I’m happy.

> I agree with all that. But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

This is the same in every space/community/hobby I've ever participated in. The people who don't live and breathe $SUBJECT 24/7 are often passed off as "posers" and only doing it for the money, in everything from software engineering, finance, gardening, music making, game development or whatever.

Eventually, we grow up and realize everyone needs food on the table, and everyone isn't chasing combining their passion with their career, and sometimes just do their career to earn enough so they can continue with their passions.

It's one of the few highly paid fields where you can do it for fun. You cannot really practice medicine or law in your free time on whatever you want. You can only really do charity work in your free time. Not medical or legal research or anything like what OSS / personal projects are for us.

For other types of engineering, I think there is a bit of a thread of doing it for fun. The Homebrew Robotics Club comes to mind. The easier it is to actually create something in your field, the more there will be a thread of doing it because you love it.

>But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

Software scales differently, that's why software companies that benefit from that scaling pay so much for top talent.

I can't think of an area where being hyperfocused on your discipline isn't viewed as a a given to get to the top. It's just that most engineering positions that I know of don't care if you're the best to do X, and are more "can you do X". Equivalent to enterprise 9-5.

I only encountered this attitude during college, when doing smart extra work outside of class or internships definitely put you ahead.

In the real world, I literally can’t name a single Senior+ engineer (at the FAANG+ companies I’ve worked at) who codes for fun outside of work. Plenty of them have other constructive and interesting hobbies, but not coding.

Put another way, your hobby app that got 15 downloads doesn’t matter at all if your day job regularly has you shipping code to millions (or especially if it’s billions) of users.

You can, but I think it might be a little hard to do so. I mean it is a well known thing and so people will game it, right? We have people grinding levels leetcode now to trick you. Of course you are probably savvy to that. But who knows what else they’ll do? Getting a good job is a life-changing event, so they are very motivated to trick you…

I love programming. How much? I’ve written a bunch of little programs that nobody else will ever see, just for fun and just for me. Why? I just enjoy doing it. It’s more like knitting than studying. Sometimes it will come in handy—once my boss had an idea an I got to say “oh, I actually implemented that for fun the other day,” which was very funny, but it isn’t intended to be useful and 99% of the time it is just a waste of time.

If a company’s goal is to bring rockets to mars/solve world transport logistics/create driverless cars/etc/etc, you are not going to care about what is fair or what creates pressure. You will find the persons that can get the job done. Things like preventing burn out or balancing work with personal life will be dealt within the scope of reaching that goal. Many sensitivities in this thread or considerations of whats fair and isn’t, is really irrelevant. What goal is being pursued, and how can it be reached sensibly, is what matters in the end.

You can hypothetically do whatever you want, no one in the real world is hiring you because you "love programming".