I am a developer, but this is not my passion
Hi, Habr!
The team of our educational project Hekslet consists of people who love programming. Still would! We love so that we consistently release practical courses for novice programmers (and not only beginners in fact), while we really value this craft, so we don’t like courses in the style of “print, but now the cycle, and this is called class, animal “Dog, congratulations, coding is easy, right?”, and we begin our “ Basics of Programming ” with abstraction, pure functions, recursion and data structures. Although, of course, the courses “become a programmer in 2 weeks” wouldmake it possible to earn more money.
Whether the developers of Hexslet have a passion for this field - it is better to ask each one individually. But I think you have met (perhaps you yourself are?) Truly passionate developers who are completely passionate about their work. They are willing to spend hours discussing frameworks and technologies; they prefer books on code, films and TV shows to artistic books — reports from conferences. If they like to speak and perform with this, then they become the stars of meetings and conferences. And we all know people who start this career, because "programmers are well paid." Naturally, these are two extreme generalizations, and in reality people are to different degrees motivated by different goals and desires.
')
It is believed that a good programmer passionately loves his work. In vacancies, along with “guru”, “superstar” and “ninja”, one often encounters “... who is passionate about programming ...” as a requirement for a candidate. To say that you are not very buzzed by coding, but you are satisfied with your work and salary, and at least they will look askance. However, there is a big difference between “not having passion” and “hating and not wanting”.
Today's translation of the essay by Antonin Januska is devoted to programming without passion, programming as an exclusively work. Nowadays, such an opinion is already an old school, almost an archaism. Today it is not customary to alienate work from life. But perhaps you will see in this opinion something close to yourself.
I am a senior web developer in a Houston startup, and I have to confess something to you. According to my observations, few developers recognize this.
At each interview, which I conducted or attended, there was always a hint of “passion” for the product. Or it was mentioned that the current lead developer is passionate about his work. Well, almost everyone interviewing must be passionate about development.
I may have even said it myself and probably believed it. But this is not about me.
Now that I have rejected all startups that pay a small salary, but allow you to use “the best and newest technologies to ignite your passion for development”, let's dig deeper into this topic. Let me tell you the truth about why I became a web developer. And I wonder how many developers are hiding behind this “passion” credo, out of shame that the real reason for their activity is very different from that given by the media and from that voiced by (future and current) employers by the developers themselves.
When I was younger, I experimented with programming and a bit of web development, but didn’t get very far. Only a few years later I started freelancing (as a teenager). The reason for my interest in freelancing was simple: I managed to do it, there was a demand, it served as a source of scanty income - if measured in several haircuts, trips to a manual therapist (and many disappointments).
The real start of my career as a programmer (not counting HTML + CSS) was the moment when we reconnected with my close friend Rafael Keyzeta after a five-year hiatus. He was a successful web developer. After only two years of his career, he had already published on Mashable, sold his websites for good money - he had the right business skills, and it was the best time for such people. And for me, this time also turned out to be the very thing.
By the time we started talking again, I was a laborer in a supermarket. I worked 30+ hours a week and at the same time went to college. My monthly salary was satisfactory for a 19-year-old, but in comparison with what he received - zero. I remember one night when everything changed for me completely. I just got my thirty-week week minimum and celebrated it with a cheap cigar, delving into the internet.
Rafael went to chat (AIM or MSN, I don’t remember) and told me how tired he was, but he was excited excitedly. He had a client who wanted a WordPress blog, but with a completely different backend. The client hated WP’s private office (but he liked its functionality). Therefore, Rafael had 9 night hours to develop a completely new backend client, which would be built on WP. Rafael argued with the guy, but in the end, he couldn’t convince him to just enjoy the disguised WordPress. Fortunately, the client was ready to pay his request in full.
I laughed at Rafael, as he stupidly did. I slept well, but he didn’t sleep all night - kodil for some dude.
But the next morning, Rafael sent me a screenshot of his Paypal. He said: “I earned so much last night,” it was one and a half times more than I received in a month. I plowed in the supermarket 30 hours a week, every week. And how much he got per night, I earned 45 days.
It was ridiculous.
Raphael asked me to study web development several times. “You liked it when you were younger, why not come back to it now?” And this argument was the last straw - I started to learn.
Fast forwarding a couple of months ahead: and I (again) began my freelance career.
The bottom line is that I did it for the money.
Throughout my career, money has been a major motivator. Neither technology, nor passion, nor "impulsiveness", nor "product." Always only money (and, frankly, social. Package). I found myself in my permanent job not because I was very impressed with her. Just the opposite. I was afraid of office work! But self-interest to some extent lived in me. I wanted money, I wanted stability, and, most importantly, what I wanted was to move to a private house from the apartment in which we lived with my best friend (now my wife).
The first few months, everything went sucks. I lived with my best friend at that time a year and we were not used to not seeing each other for more than 8 hours! I worked on contract jobs to avoid the devastating despair that is being stifled by office work!
But it was not so bad. Money and benefits have improved all aspects of life. Finally, we were able to afford new clothes, buy normal food and feed our dogs with high-quality meat, rather than scraps that came across at the sale.
After a while, we realized how much we liked this “better”. We could go to restaurants, engage in new hobbies that were previously unavailable (like a gym or video games!), Etc. Plus, now we had a nice big rented house. From scratch we came to everything, thanks to one job offer.
My subsequent career steps were made from the need to find a job and raise salaries. I quickly doubled my income in a couple of years, since the first permanent position and eventually tripled it for a while (until I decided on a job that paid less, but with an expanded social package).
Benefits also added weight exponentially: the transition from work that could end at any moment to permanent work with guaranteed vacation pay. From lack of health insurance to full-fledged paid insurance. And, finally, from strict office work, from bell to bell and dress code to completely remote work.
All these advantages attracted me to a new career more than any other aspects of work. More than the technologies that were offered, more than “beer in the fridge,” more than the company's shareholding (which, at best, is an adventure). Money and soc. package.
I looked at jobs in large Java studios, .Net studios, wherever it was possible to increase my income and save benefits. The fact that someone worked with “Go in Docker with CouchDB and Cassandra” did not attract me as much as the opportunity to work from home.
I like programming. Do not misunderstand me. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t become who I am now. But this is not my passion. Programming is my hobby. This is a hobby that damn well paid, it affects me positively and allows me to do what I have real passion for.
One day, several years ago, my wife asked me why I complained about my work, because I like it. How can you complain about the place and work that you love? I told her that I did not like what I was doing. I just like it. Then she asked me why I should not find a job that I would love. It was difficult to answer this question, but this is what occurred to me:
There is a saying, I will try to rephrase it. Its main idea is that you do not need to love what you do for a living. You should not turn passion into work, because then you will lose the pleasure that your passion brings to you. Hobbies remain aside, and you do the work that you enjoy the most in the long term.
That's what programming means to me. This is what I am good at, what I like and allows me to be known in parallel with all sorts of interesting things.
Find a job that you can do well and not get tired of it quickly. If she lets you do what you love, even better.
This is my credo.
Development brings me pleasure, because it looks like an interesting puzzle. It's like a Lego verbal, except that you constantly come across new details that need to be used in a project. I love to learn, and what is not so important when I am quickly drawn into the process. I hung up for days on Wookipedia when I found it, stuffing my head with useless information. Did you know that Tatooine was once a rainforest paradise until it was crystallized by the Rakata empire? source of
The technology is attractive for the same reason, except that the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper. You can never master them, and you can never know everything about them. It is like knowledge of a fictional universe that is constantly changing. It is changing, in fact, so quickly that you can never be aware of everything, even if you have the latest information.
I like it a lot. That's cool. It's cool that I can collect 20+ articles today and learn something that can be used in the project tomorrow. Did you know, for example, that ES6 allows you to use computed property keys? Source of
So, I have the opportunity to spend time, free time, learning new material in an ever-expanding programming universe and use this information for my daily work. Everything is constantly changing, so you never get bored. And over time, the more you study, the easier it will be to master a new material.
This is something special .
Writing Writing can be said, my most important passion in life. I have written short stories since second grade. I wrote comics, sketches, novels, novels, documentary books, blogs, and more. In fact, with the exception of work, writing is the world where I spend most of my time!
The habit of writing is the main reason that I support my blog . Not at all because of the passion for the development, namely to writing. But literary work is not paid enough, and writing is not inspiring (at least for me). I cannot imagine myself as a literary slave for someone who does not care about content; as a copywriter for magazines that do not interest me, or a whiner trying to find high-paying jobs. This is an area that seems to me a much worse compromise when compared with programming.
However, I can’t say that I wouldn’t change my business if I had a good opportunity. If one of my books, which I published myself, would have been included in the list of the 100 best on Amazon, and the publisher contacted me, I would have grasped this opportunity. If one day I found a story so convincing that I wanted to create some kind of unique interactive book, I would present it on Kickstarter and try to get funding. Damn, if I were as lucky as E.L. James (also known as Eric Leonard, author of the book Fifty Shades of Gray), I would have no doubt left programming. I would continue to write code, but again, just because programming is more of a hobby for me. I would freely move to work in any area related to my other hobbies if they had the same advantages (and who knows, maybe I will do so): the music industry, conceptual design, marketing, games, photography, etc.
Passion is a little different from a hobby. Passion for something involves striving for greatness, forwards and improvement. To gain self-satisfaction from their own efforts. Hobby is what you do during off-hours - it is rest or just some kind of activity, for a change.
In addition to creativity, I love my child. I love to spend time with her. I have friends who have no time for children, because they work all day and spend a few hours on the way there and back. When they return home, they are exhausted. Me not. I'm near. I spend lunch with my daughter, have breakfast with her. When I have a break, she is near, and when work ends, I just open the door of the office and take a few steps to get in the access zone.
I also have the opportunity to see the special moments of her life. My wife writes me a message saying that my daughter is doing something that happens “once in a lifetime” (like a first smile with an open mouth!) I run out of the office to look at it, and 9 of 10 times I'm lucky to be witness a similar event!
Again, I can not imagine how it is to be a teacher, or to work somewhere, taking care of other people's children, but not taking care of my own. My passion.
You might ask, who needs a developer who does not have passion in his business? I would say that to most companies. I bet that impassive developers can be much better than developers who live, breathe and eat code. An impassive developer is set to embody the goal in work, and not to satisfy any internal needs.
But then again, who knows? My employers were (usually) satisfied with my work in the past, so this is my only metric.
I work in a certain company, not because I have to unconditionally satisfy some drug-related needs to code (with this I write on ES6 and work with the Node / Angular stack), but because I want this startup to come to success, and I I could continue to do what I do. And I like the product we are developing. The code itself does not make sense to me. With his help, the necessary work is done, he copes with his functions, there are tests, so I can not worry about the violation of the existing functionality, and everything is quite automated. All described are those tools that help me to spend less time on all garbage and more on doing work. Yes, it was cool to write code, but it was a means to an end — no more.
Interesting, I'm not the only one? Or am I the one who dared to voice these thoughts? What do you think about it?
Translation: Natalia Bass
The team of our educational project Hekslet consists of people who love programming. Still would! We love so that we consistently release practical courses for novice programmers (and not only beginners in fact), while we really value this craft, so we don’t like courses in the style of “print, but now the cycle, and this is called class, animal “Dog, congratulations, coding is easy, right?”, and we begin our “ Basics of Programming ” with abstraction, pure functions, recursion and data structures. Although, of course, the courses “become a programmer in 2 weeks” would
Whether the developers of Hexslet have a passion for this field - it is better to ask each one individually. But I think you have met (perhaps you yourself are?) Truly passionate developers who are completely passionate about their work. They are willing to spend hours discussing frameworks and technologies; they prefer books on code, films and TV shows to artistic books — reports from conferences. If they like to speak and perform with this, then they become the stars of meetings and conferences. And we all know people who start this career, because "programmers are well paid." Naturally, these are two extreme generalizations, and in reality people are to different degrees motivated by different goals and desires.
')
It is believed that a good programmer passionately loves his work. In vacancies, along with “guru”, “superstar” and “ninja”, one often encounters “... who is passionate about programming ...” as a requirement for a candidate. To say that you are not very buzzed by coding, but you are satisfied with your work and salary, and at least they will look askance. However, there is a big difference between “not having passion” and “hating and not wanting”.
Today's translation of the essay by Antonin Januska is devoted to programming without passion, programming as an exclusively work. Nowadays, such an opinion is already an old school, almost an archaism. Today it is not customary to alienate work from life. But perhaps you will see in this opinion something close to yourself.
I am a developer, but this is not my passion
I am a senior web developer in a Houston startup, and I have to confess something to you. According to my observations, few developers recognize this.
Web development is not my passion.
At each interview, which I conducted or attended, there was always a hint of “passion” for the product. Or it was mentioned that the current lead developer is passionate about his work. Well, almost everyone interviewing must be passionate about development.
I may have even said it myself and probably believed it. But this is not about me.
Now that I have rejected all startups that pay a small salary, but allow you to use “the best and newest technologies to ignite your passion for development”, let's dig deeper into this topic. Let me tell you the truth about why I became a web developer. And I wonder how many developers are hiding behind this “passion” credo, out of shame that the real reason for their activity is very different from that given by the media and from that voiced by (future and current) employers by the developers themselves.
How it all began
When I was younger, I experimented with programming and a bit of web development, but didn’t get very far. Only a few years later I started freelancing (as a teenager). The reason for my interest in freelancing was simple: I managed to do it, there was a demand, it served as a source of scanty income - if measured in several haircuts, trips to a manual therapist (and many disappointments).
The real start of my career as a programmer (not counting HTML + CSS) was the moment when we reconnected with my close friend Rafael Keyzeta after a five-year hiatus. He was a successful web developer. After only two years of his career, he had already published on Mashable, sold his websites for good money - he had the right business skills, and it was the best time for such people. And for me, this time also turned out to be the very thing.
By the time we started talking again, I was a laborer in a supermarket. I worked 30+ hours a week and at the same time went to college. My monthly salary was satisfactory for a 19-year-old, but in comparison with what he received - zero. I remember one night when everything changed for me completely. I just got my thirty-week week minimum and celebrated it with a cheap cigar, delving into the internet.
Rafael went to chat (AIM or MSN, I don’t remember) and told me how tired he was, but he was excited excitedly. He had a client who wanted a WordPress blog, but with a completely different backend. The client hated WP’s private office (but he liked its functionality). Therefore, Rafael had 9 night hours to develop a completely new backend client, which would be built on WP. Rafael argued with the guy, but in the end, he couldn’t convince him to just enjoy the disguised WordPress. Fortunately, the client was ready to pay his request in full.
I laughed at Rafael, as he stupidly did. I slept well, but he didn’t sleep all night - kodil for some dude.
But the next morning, Rafael sent me a screenshot of his Paypal. He said: “I earned so much last night,” it was one and a half times more than I received in a month. I plowed in the supermarket 30 hours a week, every week. And how much he got per night, I earned 45 days.
It was ridiculous.
Raphael asked me to study web development several times. “You liked it when you were younger, why not come back to it now?” And this argument was the last straw - I started to learn.
Fast forwarding a couple of months ahead: and I (again) began my freelance career.
The bottom line is that I did it for the money.
Money money money…
Throughout my career, money has been a major motivator. Neither technology, nor passion, nor "impulsiveness", nor "product." Always only money (and, frankly, social. Package). I found myself in my permanent job not because I was very impressed with her. Just the opposite. I was afraid of office work! But self-interest to some extent lived in me. I wanted money, I wanted stability, and, most importantly, what I wanted was to move to a private house from the apartment in which we lived with my best friend (now my wife).
The first few months, everything went sucks. I lived with my best friend at that time a year and we were not used to not seeing each other for more than 8 hours! I worked on contract jobs to avoid the devastating despair that is being stifled by office work!
But it was not so bad. Money and benefits have improved all aspects of life. Finally, we were able to afford new clothes, buy normal food and feed our dogs with high-quality meat, rather than scraps that came across at the sale.
After a while, we realized how much we liked this “better”. We could go to restaurants, engage in new hobbies that were previously unavailable (like a gym or video games!), Etc. Plus, now we had a nice big rented house. From scratch we came to everything, thanks to one job offer.
My subsequent career steps were made from the need to find a job and raise salaries. I quickly doubled my income in a couple of years, since the first permanent position and eventually tripled it for a while (until I decided on a job that paid less, but with an expanded social package).
Benefits also added weight exponentially: the transition from work that could end at any moment to permanent work with guaranteed vacation pay. From lack of health insurance to full-fledged paid insurance. And, finally, from strict office work, from bell to bell and dress code to completely remote work.
All these advantages attracted me to a new career more than any other aspects of work. More than the technologies that were offered, more than “beer in the fridge,” more than the company's shareholding (which, at best, is an adventure). Money and soc. package.
I looked at jobs in large Java studios, .Net studios, wherever it was possible to increase my income and save benefits. The fact that someone worked with “Go in Docker with CouchDB and Cassandra” did not attract me as much as the opportunity to work from home.
But I really like it.
I like programming. Do not misunderstand me. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t become who I am now. But this is not my passion. Programming is my hobby. This is a hobby that damn well paid, it affects me positively and allows me to do what I have real passion for.
One day, several years ago, my wife asked me why I complained about my work, because I like it. How can you complain about the place and work that you love? I told her that I did not like what I was doing. I just like it. Then she asked me why I should not find a job that I would love. It was difficult to answer this question, but this is what occurred to me:
People should not waste themselves on the activities they love.
There is a saying, I will try to rephrase it. Its main idea is that you do not need to love what you do for a living. You should not turn passion into work, because then you will lose the pleasure that your passion brings to you. Hobbies remain aside, and you do the work that you enjoy the most in the long term.
That's what programming means to me. This is what I am good at, what I like and allows me to be known in parallel with all sorts of interesting things.
Find a job that you can do well and not get tired of it quickly. If she lets you do what you love, even better.
This is my credo.
What i like about this job
Development brings me pleasure, because it looks like an interesting puzzle. It's like a Lego verbal, except that you constantly come across new details that need to be used in a project. I love to learn, and what is not so important when I am quickly drawn into the process. I hung up for days on Wookipedia when I found it, stuffing my head with useless information. Did you know that Tatooine was once a rainforest paradise until it was crystallized by the Rakata empire? source of
The technology is attractive for the same reason, except that the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper. You can never master them, and you can never know everything about them. It is like knowledge of a fictional universe that is constantly changing. It is changing, in fact, so quickly that you can never be aware of everything, even if you have the latest information.
I like it a lot. That's cool. It's cool that I can collect 20+ articles today and learn something that can be used in the project tomorrow. Did you know, for example, that ES6 allows you to use computed property keys? Source of
So, I have the opportunity to spend time, free time, learning new material in an ever-expanding programming universe and use this information for my daily work. Everything is constantly changing, so you never get bored. And over time, the more you study, the easier it will be to master a new material.
This is something special .
Why do I have a real passion?
Writing Writing can be said, my most important passion in life. I have written short stories since second grade. I wrote comics, sketches, novels, novels, documentary books, blogs, and more. In fact, with the exception of work, writing is the world where I spend most of my time!
The habit of writing is the main reason that I support my blog . Not at all because of the passion for the development, namely to writing. But literary work is not paid enough, and writing is not inspiring (at least for me). I cannot imagine myself as a literary slave for someone who does not care about content; as a copywriter for magazines that do not interest me, or a whiner trying to find high-paying jobs. This is an area that seems to me a much worse compromise when compared with programming.
However, I can’t say that I wouldn’t change my business if I had a good opportunity. If one of my books, which I published myself, would have been included in the list of the 100 best on Amazon, and the publisher contacted me, I would have grasped this opportunity. If one day I found a story so convincing that I wanted to create some kind of unique interactive book, I would present it on Kickstarter and try to get funding. Damn, if I were as lucky as E.L. James (also known as Eric Leonard, author of the book Fifty Shades of Gray), I would have no doubt left programming. I would continue to write code, but again, just because programming is more of a hobby for me. I would freely move to work in any area related to my other hobbies if they had the same advantages (and who knows, maybe I will do so): the music industry, conceptual design, marketing, games, photography, etc.
Passion is a little different from a hobby. Passion for something involves striving for greatness, forwards and improvement. To gain self-satisfaction from their own efforts. Hobby is what you do during off-hours - it is rest or just some kind of activity, for a change.
In addition to creativity, I love my child. I love to spend time with her. I have friends who have no time for children, because they work all day and spend a few hours on the way there and back. When they return home, they are exhausted. Me not. I'm near. I spend lunch with my daughter, have breakfast with her. When I have a break, she is near, and when work ends, I just open the door of the office and take a few steps to get in the access zone.
I also have the opportunity to see the special moments of her life. My wife writes me a message saying that my daughter is doing something that happens “once in a lifetime” (like a first smile with an open mouth!) I run out of the office to look at it, and 9 of 10 times I'm lucky to be witness a similar event!
Again, I can not imagine how it is to be a teacher, or to work somewhere, taking care of other people's children, but not taking care of my own. My passion.
Passion is not everything
You might ask, who needs a developer who does not have passion in his business? I would say that to most companies. I bet that impassive developers can be much better than developers who live, breathe and eat code. An impassive developer is set to embody the goal in work, and not to satisfy any internal needs.
But then again, who knows? My employers were (usually) satisfied with my work in the past, so this is my only metric.
I work in a certain company, not because I have to unconditionally satisfy some drug-related needs to code (with this I write on ES6 and work with the Node / Angular stack), but because I want this startup to come to success, and I I could continue to do what I do. And I like the product we are developing. The code itself does not make sense to me. With his help, the necessary work is done, he copes with his functions, there are tests, so I can not worry about the violation of the existing functionality, and everything is quite automated. All described are those tools that help me to spend less time on all garbage and more on doing work. Yes, it was cool to write code, but it was a means to an end — no more.
What do you think
Interesting, I'm not the only one? Or am I the one who dared to voice these thoughts? What do you think about it?
Translation: Natalia Bass
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/267407/
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