I wish I could upvote this 1000x. It's not just "you can do anything" ... it's that it's been coupled with "do what you love for your career" and similar platitudes.
I love cooking and photography as much as I love programming (maybe more). In fact, I recently told a recruiter that my "dream job" would be at a startup spending 1/2 the day being the company chef and 1/2 the day hacking. He thought I meant the Chef config framework :)
I am never going to pursue either of those as a career. First of all, because it's a lot harder to make a decent living at. Second, I've come to learn that once your passion intersects with the pressure to make a living and pay your bills, it's less enjoyable. Sometimes it's better to keep your passions as just that–passions.
Furthermore, I feel like the "do anything + do what you love" thinking can lead to a weird class division (I don't know the right term, sorry). The set of people's passions do not perfectly intersect with the set of people's wants/needs. I seriously doubt many people have a passion for standing in a field for 10 hours a day picking strawberries. Yet, we all love to put strawberries in our crepes. So, unless you're willing to live in a world where you can only have products/services that people are passionate about making (or wait for the strawberry-picking robots), it seems like a double-standard.
> I am never going to pursue either of those as a career.
I think that's a shame. I'm a coder and I also run a restaurant. My wedding photographer really loves what she does. Even when coupled with the pressure to make a living - which I have to say, programming fell under the same bucket for me - when you actually sit down and figure out how it could be done, it's very doable. The only reason I don't go with one or the other is that I don't enjoy one more than the other ;)
I also have friends that love to cook and are really good at it. Honestly the thing that pops their bubble about "I want to be a chef/open a restaurant" is not the cooking, it's that a restaurant is also about management, staffing, and food safety in a completely different manner from programming. My roommate LOVES to cook and cooks all the damn time and it wasn't until he got food poisoning from a super swank SF restaurant that he finally started to wash his hands more often and actually listen to food-safety-manager-trained me about cleanup and cleanliness, and forget about trying to do other standard stuff like labeling food to figure out when to throw it out or hiring people for roles he's unfamiliar with.
Would love to see more people in tech diversify a bit. Running a restaurant and knowing all levels of it is like a whole new fun challenge, and it also puts me at a different level from the rest of the stuff I do. I go from friends/coworkers making 6 figures sipping $5 coffees in SF, to a 30 minute train ride later in East Bay, employees that get paid just above minimum wage and people counting pennies to get something to eat. It's eye opening and worth seeing the differences when you're not exposed to it regularly.
I'm in SF! My restaurant is in east bay (around oakland airport). It's fast food - nothing fancy at all - but if you're ever planning to be in the neighborhood feel free to drop me an email :)
I chose to go with something simple because I'd love to expand in the future to bigger and better but if I don't even have basic experience with any kind of foodservice biz, I'm pretty fucked. Also the take-home profit is not that different anyway ;)
I love cooking and photography as much as I love programming (maybe more). In fact, I recently told a recruiter that my "dream job" would be at a startup spending 1/2 the day being the company chef and 1/2 the day hacking. He thought I meant the Chef config framework :)
I am never going to pursue either of those as a career. First of all, because it's a lot harder to make a decent living at. Second, I've come to learn that once your passion intersects with the pressure to make a living and pay your bills, it's less enjoyable. Sometimes it's better to keep your passions as just that–passions.
Furthermore, I feel like the "do anything + do what you love" thinking can lead to a weird class division (I don't know the right term, sorry). The set of people's passions do not perfectly intersect with the set of people's wants/needs. I seriously doubt many people have a passion for standing in a field for 10 hours a day picking strawberries. Yet, we all love to put strawberries in our crepes. So, unless you're willing to live in a world where you can only have products/services that people are passionate about making (or wait for the strawberry-picking robots), it seems like a double-standard.