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OTOH, sometimes “passion” industries like say education are not only politicized to the extreme (given outcomes matter to so many people) but also are fundament

OTOH, sometimes “passion” industries like say education are not only politicized to the extreme (given outcomes matter to so many people) but also are fundamentally on a shoestring budget, wanting as much as possible for as little as possible. This may be a function of governments being involved, but I struggle to think of more laid back industries. Entertainment has been a decent industry as well, but most of the “tech” is on the money driven side and less on the creative side.

melony 5y ago
Because pursuing creative, passion industries often do not pay the bills (due to oversupply or labour gatekeeping). Game developers being exhibit A. For non software engineering examples, look at traditional engineering and STEM. Most aerospace engineers start out with dreams of human space travel, they will either end up building missiles and drones, pivot, or work for one of Elon's passion companies that are infamous for their work life balance. People enter life science with the intention of becoming doctors yet most will be stuck with debt and a dead end job after graduation with medicine being forever out of reach. Teaching and non-tenured/non-STEM academia pays so badly (not to mention the incredible gatekeeping to even get the job) that you will probably find more English graduates on OnlyFans than your local college's literature department. Writing JavaScript apps is hardly the most meaningful job but it is a safe career path with good growth for current roboticists or electrical engineering graduates. Software engineering may be materialistic and CRUD apps boring, but they are an easy, uncontroversial way to pay the bills for the massive pool of STEM (and occasional non-STEM) talent we have right now.