Until you've worked at a job where you're genuinely excited to get up every morning and hack, it's very hard to empathize with this sentiment. Doubly so because employers compelling enough to make employees passionate about their jobs often exploit this and have extremely substandard working conditions (exhibit A: academia). Despite that, once you've been genuinely passionate about a job, it's very hard to see the world any other way.

> get up every morning and hack, it's very hard to empathize with this sentiment

Even if you have experienced the joy, it might not always be rewarded & the disillusionment burnout is always a risk.

The most bitter folks I've worked with are the ones who started with a lot of passion, but got turned around.

Not to mention that this Passion comes in many flavours.

I would not put a label on my experience, but "autistic joy" is a good comparison to what drives passion in my work - for my partner it comes from the final unveil and other eyes landing on their work.

I only realized this when reading Andre Agassi's book and being stuck in close proximity during the pandemic (and to "bear witness" to provide joy).

Exhibit B: video games.

Montreal (or any other video game hub) is a great place to start a software business. There are tons of highly qualified, underpaid and overworked software engineers to poach from the video game firms.

> Doubly so because employers compelling enough to make employees passionate about their jobs often exploit this and have extremely substandard working conditions

Another way to say this is the Law of Supply and Demand. It's no surprise at all that there are a greater number of people interested in a fun job, which reduces the pay offered. Conversely, dirty unpleasant jobs have fewer people interested, so the pay is greater.

It's hard to see here who is exploiting who.

My dad was a professor in his later years. He once had a conversation with a secretary (back before computers replaced them) who complained:

"garbage men get paid more than me!"

My dad replied "why don't you quit and become a garbage collector?"

She angrily replied "but that's a filthy disgusting job!"

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your broader sentiment, but before Google I can’t think of many employers that provide the kind of open-ended projects and fringe benefits (Olympic-class gyms, rec centers, libraries, intellectually-enriched social environments, access to world-class research/engineering/media facilities, access to LexisNexis, etc.) that one gets working at a research university.

Empathize with what? Many people have experience with having free time and thus know what it’s like to do things that they like doing. Replace all of this job-passion with the fantasy of winning enough millions in the lottery to retire and yeah, there you go. People already fantasize about that.

But the above doesn’t involve making a profit for an employer. I don’t know if that was supposed to be part of the empathizing.