I dunno. Enjoying programming is not even on the same planet as having a passion for it. I have a genuine passion for programming. I do it in my spare time, bec

I dunno. Enjoying programming is not even on the same planet as having a passion for it. I have a genuine passion for programming. I do it in my spare time, because I fucking love programming. My employer gets forty hours a week. More, very occasionally, you know, when there are fires or whatever. But I spend some of my spare time programming that I would otherwise devote to personal relationships, or watching cat videos, or whatever everybody else does. There is a mountain of difference between the programming that happens at work, and the programming you do in your spare time because you are passionate about programming. I am 100% confident after twenty years in the industry that if you aren't taking some amount of your spare time to write code for yourself, you aren't really passionate about programming. End of story. Nobody says you need to blow your weekends and stay up all night behind your computer. But if you are clocking out at 5pm and never touching your IDE until 8am the next morning, you just aren't passionate about programming. And if you used to spend some personal time programming out of passion, and you don't anymore, consider that you might have lost the passion you once had. That happens, you know. You've just become passionate about your kids these days, instead. And is that wrong? No. But it's not wrong either that employers are rewarding people who are genuinely passionate about programming. Can it be an expectation? Sure! Why not? Go work for BigCorp or whatever, if the position here requires passion for programming. But think for a minute that every company that says they only hire passionate programmers also says they only hire 10x programmers. We all know that's not true. So if you enjoy programming, but you aren't really passionate about programming, there's nothing stopping you from telling people in an interview that you've got "passion" for programming. Might as well tell them you're "10x for sure, bro". They won't know the difference anyways.