Although I recognize it may be provocative, this is a genuine question.  What brought you into... Tagged with career, programming, beginners, discuss.

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The article discusses whether programmers enter the field for money or passion and asks readers what they will do in the face of a flooded job market and dropping salaries.

Money or Passion?

money makes you start, passion keeps you going

While true, passion is important.
But i’ve found that some developers take that passion a bit too far.
To the extent that they overcomplicate tasks just to get a challenge, want to rewrite things that should take 2-4hrs but because they want to make it special it takes 16-32hrs. while it might become better clients aren’t interested in spending that amount of money because the developer didn’t want to sit in an old codebase or didn’t want to sit with a function not written by themselves.
While i enjoy the challenges at work, i am not invested enough to invest my evenings/weekends to continue with a sideproject.

Programming has become a field where you are somehow expected to have passion to be interesting to employers. Reading out of interest and working on a side-project after hours has somehow been normalised. No one expects the HR accountant to go home and work another 4 hours on an HR side-project, but programmers are expected to do so.
Perhaps, by giving so much passion away for free, we made the corporations expect an unreasonable amount of work from the next generation of devs.