Don’t do what you enjoy as a career. It will ruin what you enjoy and leave you with nothing.
Serious - Don’t follow your passion. I did. Went to school for something I was passionate about. Did well and graduated. I got a job in my field. But soon enough, my passion felt like work. My priorities shifted as I aged and I grew to hate what I studied and once fell passionate about.
Find a career path that makes you money. Once you have that money you can make time to dabble in your passion projects and hobbies. Just wanted to add a different perspective to the meme :)
Never follow the money. Never follow the money. Nothing is worse than having your soul sucked out of you hour by hour because you wanted to “follow the money.”
I’m sick and tired of this Reddit-ass kind of “advice” meant only for neurotypical white men. Male defaultism is one of many things we should not import here.
the thing about having your soul-sucked is that you can bounce back and recover. and let me tell ya, it’s a whole lot easier to recover with money than without. The second part of your response seems to come with a little baggage. Maybe you should follow the money to afford a therapist? LOL
I’m sick and tired of this Reddit-ass kind of “advice” meant only for neurotypical white men. Male defaultism is one of many things we should not import here.
Too late… Or maybe it was already like this before we migrated from Reddit. Comments are very black-and-white and tend to favor men over women, STEM over other fields (just read the comments here), global north over global south, etc. It’s obvious who the majority is and how biased the opinions are.
It is funny because Lemmy is the leftiest site I know, and still these problems are invisible.
You can do both and people have done for ages. The thing about work is that you need to do it even when you don’t want to, which makes some people resentful. But that’s the difference between a hobby and work. Passion has nothing to do here. There are passionate people who went into a job because of it and won’t trade it for anything.
I agree with what you’re saying. You gotta work even when you don’t feel like it. Being passionate makes it easier to work (in some cases).
Most of us have many different parts of the job, and like certain parts more than others.
A doctor may be passionate about actually solving medical issues but might hate communicating with difficult patients, dealing with paperwork and recordkeeping software, dealing with insurance companies, marketing his practice, managing staff, etc.
Programmers may actually love coding but hate dealing with customer requirements, or the office politics of sales versus delivery, or even the way their team is run.
It’s like that everywhere. If anyone is only able to do work they’re passionate about, that person is gonna have a rough career.
The degree itself was a door opener though, and college shouldn’t be job training anyway.
So many awful takes on this topic in the comments lol. “Don’t follow your passions” is just bs because they’re really just saying “suffer through this major and you’ll get to suffer through a career for the rest of your life.”
The truth is that your major doesn’t really matter. What hiring managers look for is mostly that you have a degree, and the major comes second.
I was told for YEARS that “humanities isn’t worth it” and that computer science/engineering/STEM is the only thing worth it. But guess what? Massive layoffs due to AI is killing computer science and STEM grads. Businesses are putting postings out there but aren’t currently hiring to maintain normalcy, etc.
For a bachelor’s, just do what you want! Look at the financial aid for each school and go from there. A lot of people struggle and burn out studying something they hate and sometimes end up dropping out. It’s better for everyone to educate yourself on something you’re passionate about, then do a master’s if you need a career change.
computer science/engineering/STEM is the only thing worth it.
It’s mostly engineers who make money. The actual sciences are basically a low paying career for how much knowledge it requires, and pretty much require much more than a 4-year degree to climb that ladder, or they just go into the same category as everyone in the humanities and the arts: go get a job that requires a 4-year degree but doesn’t care what your major was.
They are trying to kill CS with AI.
Software and Computer engineers are absolutely stupid expensive. And we’re necessary, because so few people understand it, and even less want to put in the required work to do it.
Unfortunately for them, they don’t understand it to the point where they inevitably push away the people they need to make use of AI tools, and cover the gaps that AI leaves.
Yeah, I’ve been playing around with some of the AI coding assistants as accelerators for data science projects. The one thing I’ve learned above all else is that this tech can speed up the process of coding, but it absolutely cannot replace computer scientists and engineers.
If you don’t actually understand coding, AI will give you stuff that runs, but fucks up key details and/or doesn’t actually do the thing you’re asking correctly. It’s hella dangerous.
Not always true. Sometimes you major in what you love, graduate, get a job doing cool stuff, (get fucked over by an asshole boss, change companies, kinda hate working there every day, find out through the grapevine the asshole fomer boss had been fired for being an asshole, return to the company you liked working at), well paid the whole time, and continue to love what you do so much you don’t get enough of it at work and do it more every evening and weekend as a hobby.
But then, my experience is a) a bit dated (I graduated college before 2010) and b) most likely atypical.
