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I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession.

He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be?

When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. 

Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying.


As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds profane. We should all be passionate developers! I wonder how well a job interview in tech goes if you say that you want to do boring stuff?

Perhaps it should go well. Frankly, the term passionate developer is misleading.

A passionate airplane pilot probably does not fly close to the ground or try to do a 747 loop-de-loop. Similarly, a passionate developer doesn't cowboy-code the whole backend with Remix in one sprint just to get a dopamine rush. A passionate developer is passionate not only about being nice to colleagues but also about code quality in a way where their fingerprint remains unnoticed, much like the airmanship of a skilled pilot. 

My airplane flying friend and I derive pleasure from a clean, by-the-book (by-the-documentation tbh) solution. I'm not too keen on leaving my mark on a codebase. The library I (and only I) love shall remain only on my personal pet projects. That must make me a dull, undesirable 1x engineer.

If everyone writes unpassionate code like me, that is likely a bad thing repressing the growth of new, better ideas. Perhaps a codebase needs, from time to time, someone who rewrites the weird auth part over the weekend in a manic flow state. However, my gut feeling is that we developers are a bit too biased towards doing just that.

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