Well, I mentioned on my about me page that I am self confessed passionate developer, I even named my business Passionate Development. However I’ve been thinking to myself, what does it mean exactly by passionate. Well now that I have some time to do more thinking, I will try to unravel my own thoughts on being passionate developer. I want to start of, by answering the question, if you are a developer:
Is it ok not to be passionate about development?
I want to firstly say, I know this is a controversial and I might sound contradict myself here, but my answer would be:
Yes! it’s perfectly OK to be a developer and not passionate about it.
I have a mate who is a pretty good developer, very analytical fellow but he doesn’t read technical blogs, he doesn’t know OOP, never heard of MVC, agile etc, he doesn’t know Adobe owns ColdFusion engine. For him, being a developer is just a day job, when he gets home, he wants to other things that he loves like reading and writing.
I used to ask myself – why would you want to work in something that you are not passionate about? Well, turns out to be there are lots of different reasons.
One good reason is, you do it for the money, you do it to put the food on your table. That doesn’t sound too exciting, does it? Well yeah, it doesn’t but that’s a very legitimate reason of taking development as career / job option. You can earn good money being a good developer (although you are not necessarily be passionate about it) and when you are at home you can go about doing your own hobby or just chill out with your mates and your family. I can’t see anything wrong with that.
Being almost burnt out myself, I now see the wisdom of treating development just like a job. You see, there’s a downside of being passionate about something and that is, you can easily being consumed by your passion and start to neglect other things that are important in your life.
Well, why the heck you want to be passionate then? Are there any benefits then being passionate? And again that question, what exactly is a passionate developer? Well, hopefully I can formulate my thoughts on those questions later.
My point from this post is, if you are a developer but your heart is not in it – it’s ok, don’t feel bad, however I want to ask this, why not give up development and pursue the things that you really like?
To me, it comes down to how much you want to enjoy your life. You spend a large majority of it working; even if you don’t do any extra effort for work, you still spend 5 days a week working and commuting for decades upon decades. If you are not passionate about it, I think it almost doesn’t matter what you do in your spare time, your life is going to be less enjoyable.
As far as being burnt out, let me share a masterful piece of logic my father shared with me when I was younger:
“Things always suffer more from disuse than overuse.”
You might feel burned out or stressed… but imagine your life without something to be passionate about? I fear my mind would turn to pudding.
Hello Felixt and Nadel
I am in a very strange situation which are similar to your posts. I’m a software developer for two years now, and i dont see the point. I’m not at all passioned by this domaine, and i want out. Why ? because, you spend your day fighting to find out why your sql query wont work out, why the connection to the web service is failed, etc etc…things that don’t passion me. And i come to your question Felixt :
“why not give up development and pursue the things that you really like?”
The reason that i dont do this, is because i have only a M.Sc degree in computer science; nothing else ! so i cant do what i really like (which would be communication, or human relations), because they always ask for diplomas (at least here in France where i live). I’m stuck in the computer world and i can’t seem get out…
Hi Marion,
Thanks for sharing, I am actually love development and programming and passionate about it – however I am lately starting to think through what does it mean by passionate and what does it take to continue being passionate.
I could definitely relate to your pain, before working in web development I was working in various roles that I don’t particularly passionate about. It seems to me that you don’t like web development at all. Most of the developers that I met are people who actually don’t mind doing development but it’s just not their passion in life.
I think if you can find a way to do something that you really love, you should work towards that bit by bit – it might not happen in 1 or 2 years time but you can always move towards your goal. Perhaps you can do a part time course while working? Or talking to people who are in the field that you like? Joining interest group etc2. There are lots of ways that you can explore as long as you keep your mind open.
Don’t think that you’re stuck – there is always a way out