Ok... why do all the people that just want to clock in and get a paycheck get offended that people willing to pay a lot of money want to hire people that actually care?

Because you want to have your cake and eat it too?

I care more about the quality of work that people do than the degree to which they “care” in the abstract-which are only loosely correlated.

Putting effort and time into a craft is not “loosely” correlated to being good. People that work harder, put in more effort and are frankly obsessed with their craft are, with few exceptions, better than those that are not. This is one of those “my grandma could have told you that” moments…

I have met plenty of people who were really enthusiastic about filmmaking, writing, sports of various kinds, etc. who were simply not very good. It’s probably hard to excel at something you hate but enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily translate into skill.

I dislike the word “passionate” in this context too. You don’t have to be in love with programming, but there definitely are qualities of curiosity, tenacity and pride of workmanship that are very important to high performing software teams.

To some degree that’s probably true of most jobs though. There are some people that paint software as something unique where it isn’t some all consuming nights and weekends interest you’re not a “real” programmer.

Let me separate your two sentences, because the latter is an immature viewpoint that I wholeheartedly disagree with.

WRT what makes software unique is that it’s a rare combination of opaque, hard to evaluate, long-lived, mechanically unforgiving and path-dependent. In other words, incompetent developers can make a huge mess of things that future developers can find it impossible to dig out from. Other jobs have some of these aspects, but I can’t think of any that share all of them.

There was a thread on Reddit yesterday asking what you would do if you didn’t have to think about money tomorrow. Like half the top posts were some version of “quit my job”.

This part of society is really broken. “I wish I didn’t have to deal with this thing taking up half of my life” isn’t a thing the majority of people should have to feel.

I don’t really have a point. Sorry.

I’m pretty sure that’s been true for as long as there have been jobs. At least at this point I wouldn’t be working for someone if I didn’t need to think about money.