I keep pulling up one of my favorite bits on this attitude http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-10.html#e2018-10-21T09_53_29.htm http://

I keep pulling up one of my favorite bits on this attitude http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-10.html#e2018-10-21T09_53_29.htm http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 > ... > But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles. > Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life. > ... ... And there's also Programming Sucks ( https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks ) which takes a rather hyperbolic style of writing on the subject. The penultimate part of it is: > Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.