This is a completely unfair assessment. Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions about jobs. I doubt that most people choose, say, Java jobs because they're passionate about Java, or even software in general, for example.

From what I gather, most people leave the "passion" part of their work to part-time hobby work, allowing them to do both. If it then translates into money, good, but the few successes that have been put on blast have blinded people to the reality that passion != money.

> Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions about jobs.

For a lot of people, yes. Not for all. And even then, it's hard to argue that COBOL is cool or interesting. It's just paying the bills, but nothing to get hyped or write gushing articles about. And there are more interesting programming jobs that will also pay the bills, anyway.

Unless there aren't.

Either way, you're judging people simply for taking a different path than you, which is completely unfair.

I didn't mean to judge people and in fact tried not to, though perhaps clumsily. I said it's fair to not be passionate about the job. Often I haven't felt passionate about it either, or even particularly motivated. And do note I have worked in COBOL, so I understand the need. I just don't like the language and I don't want to see people selling the idea that it's "interesting" or a particularly sound business decision to learn it -- like those articles that occasionally get posted to HN.

That's not what you said, though. This is what you said:

> If that's what you aspire to, and aren't passionate about software

Those are completely different sentiments and your original "aren't passionate about software" statement is the statement I took issue with.

This is one of those things that is easy to discuss in theory, but in practice it doesn't work that way, at least not in most cases. And in my experience working with COBOL at a bank: no, the employees weren't passionate about it. In fact, the only passionate employee was an old guru who wrote assembly code for the bank's mainframe.

You could take it to an extreme, and argue that working with malfunctioning computers, using only BASICA.COM for DOS, writing accounting software and getting paid mere cents for it, requires more passion -- after all, who would want to work like this if they didn't feel passionate about it -- but of course it isn't.

It's great to work in challenging or atypical projects, maybe with tools that are not the easiest or more ergonomical, but there's a baseline of comfort below which you're probably not passionate, just masochistic.

I leave my passion for when I log off the VPN.

I love my job, and I leave work at work so it stays that way.