Yeah, passion is overused recruiter-speak. Sure it's nice for cheerleading if everyone feels passionate about their job, but it's really just short-hand for being engaged and focused which is orthogonal to passion.

There is however something which I believe software engineers need: an innate desire to understand how things work, and a tenacity to debug them when they don't. If you don't have this internal drive, then you'll never get over the hump of the vast background knowledge you need to be a productive programmer in any interesting job.

Yeah, this seems like a more realistic perspective for most people. Find something you can like with tolerable downsides.

Passion is a tricky thing because even great jobs require some combination of cool, interesting things and wading through shit. A job that you're passionate about doesn't mean one that's shit-free--it just means that you get enough fulfillment out of the good parts that you're happy to tolerate the stench.

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