We need to normalize not being a passionate CS guru. You can be good at your job and not have passion for it. You don't have to dedicate your life to your career in every facet.

I don't expect plumbers to sit around their house all day during their free time hooking up water lines. Why is it expected that I'm always reading some dev book or learning some new framework or reading some tech blog?

I do other shit, and that's fine. My job earns me a paycheck and I'll improve on the clock, and when I walk out at the end of the day I leave that shit there.

At most I might converse with you informally about tech but I'm not going to spend my little free time going to meetups and pretending like I care more than I do. If you do that's great, but I'm not you and that's fuckin fine too.

Amen

You don't apply programming concepts to every single thing you do in real life?

You heretic!

I find your lack of dedication disturbing. Nah jk. Sure if it the interest doesnt come on its own then its just wasted time. Still, find your guru thing.

Totally relatable. On the other hand, the people who are really good are mostly those who do all that shit. But not to make a career - it's genuine interest because they made a job out of their passion.

@Fast-Nop yeah that's fine, I totally expect the top developers in the world to be such because it's in their soul. But I think that's too extreme for your average programmer, or even someone who is just regular old good. I think it should be encouraged to just be good at what you do without dumping all your attribute points into career you know? Lol

@Crazed I think it's a relationship of supply, demand and price. Other factors being equal, a "just good" dev is worth less money because he has less to offer.

No.

Yeah, a top-tier dev probably does all that stuff.

However, most companies probably do not really need top-tier devs. I feel that's a massive oversight in our industry - deciders make tech choices based on what's hip at the moment, not on what is really required, to pull off that really hip stuff you need more competent coders than would be needed to solve your actual problem, and this will create a much more complex architecture than neccessary. This will in turn increase the burden on deployment and maintenance.

And at the end of the day, most companies seem to be unwilling to really fork out the cash to hire just the top-tier coders required for such architecture (plus there's not an endless supply of top-tier coders). So most projects end up with sky high aspirations and maybe (when lucky) some top-tier coders that are constantly frustrated because mid-tier developers merely fumble around in the code to the best of their abilities.

Whatever happened to KISS?

But do you enjoy your job?

@Hazarth eh. I enjoy the pay and working with intelligent and talented people, and improving my skills. But formal devwork / business requirement are more of a necessary evil.