Nothing wrong with that, but if I ask you why did you become a developer and you list that as a main reason, then I will immediately dismiss you as not being serious.
Why? Nothing about that reason has any bearing on whether you will be any good at it. Passion provides motivation to gain skill but it's not the only thing that can provide motivation. It's not even the only reliable motivator. Having a better career or pay can also be pretty reliable motivator.
Dismissing someone as “not serious” because of their reasons for following a particular career path says a lot more about the person doing the dismissing than those being dismissed.
By the parent’s criteria, I am “not serious”. My record on OSS and early work at companies which were acquired or have outsized valuations suggests the parent is 100% wrong, however.
You can’t imagine that there are people who are smart enough to code, but wouldn’t otherwise be doing so if the salaries weren’t so good? The pay is really good right now. Lots of people I know who did boot camps were doing things like research in other STEM fields. They are definitely coding now because coding offers them a more comfortable life, not because writing enterprise software is more rewarding than say, researching climate change.
I definitely would be doing it if salaries were substantially lower. In fact, I’ve told people before that the main reason I’m a developer now is because it’s the only thing I know how to do that I know I can pay my student loans with.
Lots of people don’t have the opportunity to get into programming for fun or because they think it’s interesting. A person could reasonably go into programming when choosing a major in college never having written a line of code, and end up doing great.
Our perceptions of programmers are shaped by the PC revolution of the 1980s. A lot of people got exposed to programming because there was a PC in the house. Kids and teens so exposed tended to be the ones who went into programming as a career, just because they had a head start and because they were more familiar with it. The result is that many of the best programmers in the profession in the 90s and 00s were the ones who started as kids. But many of the mediocre and bad ones were too!
Passion and early starts are overrated. As long as a person is smart in the right way and reasonably enjoys the stuff, they can be a great programmer. (And I say this as someone who started programming at the age of 6 and did it for free for many years.)
No - I was 5 or so when I started programming - however when I chose a degree leading to a math-based degree vs studying music (which I would have done otherwise), job prospects for an easy life were very much top of mind.
There we go, it was curiosity then. I was a late bloomer and didn't program till I was 12 and that was modding Command and Conquer.
If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited.
Perhaps I should have articulated it better above.
What I meant is that many of these bootcampers don't have that curiosity or drive to have touched code before their course. Even after getting a job, I've asked them about coding outside of work etc. they're not interested.
> If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited.
This part I fully agree with.
Do not equate "boot camp" and "would rather sit at a computer than mine coal" for a lack of intellectual curiousity though. I have personally met grads _from the boot camp in question in this article_ who clearly do have it - while spending their work days writing Ruby for web apps, they were spending evenings learning C, assembler and the operating system fundamentals that their particular route into the industry meant they missed out on.
You think there aren't tons of people who do CS degrees that lack curiosity? I've helped students with their CS homework who, when I asked why they were majoring in CS when they obviously did not like it, literally said their parents picked their major. So, I'm sorry, when people on here say that getting a bachelors in CS is some indicator of "natural curiosity" aka "geekiness" I would say it is the complete opposite.
I should add I don't have a CS degree, yet I'm doing the homework for the "dedicated" "curious" "high aptitude" etc. CS grads you'll be hiring later. Ha.
Why are you asking people why they became a developer? That has nothing to do with their ability to do the job. You're in a professional environment, so ask the relevant question: do they have a learning mindset? That's really the only thing that matters.
