Comment by JKCalhoun
5 years ago
I don't know. Possibly it's simply because when you accept a career in the thing you're passionate about the thing you're passionate about becomes work.
Another thought that has occurred to me of late: when I started in this field it was "Computers" (capital "C") — a thing really by nerds, for nerds. Increasingly it's the web, mobile. Our "customers" are increasingly not us and so the decisions that would have come so readily to us on how to proceed, what features to implement are instead handed down to us from design, marketing....
There are quite a few topics in CS I like, from compiler construction to robotics. That was the "hacker tech" for me. For a long time, I managed to have work with an interesting angle, but slowly it got to the point where I'm solving a fucking npm caching problem that caused a junior headaches, moving a server with an EOL OS with minimal service interruption, looking for another 2FA mechanism, and getting older tools to play well with mobile. None of it is interesting, and it takes a lot of time.
Not that it used to be better: many of my fellow students ended up in business administration. Some might even be architecturing COBOL systems on an IBM mainframe.
Yeah, I don't think there's anything special about working in tech. I've seen the same exact dynamic happen in lots of other fields. People who love cooking and become professional chefs only to leave after a few years is extremely common, for instance.
So much so that I would have said it is pretty common advice that if you try to turn a hobby you love into a job, there's a good chance you'll end up losing your passion for it.
I still love programming and if I wasn't working I'd be doing it as a hobby. But its halfway satiated/suppressed by the sheer amount of it I have to do every week now.
Your second point hits close to home.
It's inevitable, now everyone has access to computers and that means the average audience inches ever closer to the average person.
But boy, it feels like crap to make something I'd never use in a million years.