I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it.

For most people it's a job, and that's ok.

> I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it

That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.

Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.

While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.

But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.

What sorts of places do you hang out in, or how old are you?

People who did programming for the love of programming was extremely common in the sortof hacker subculture that existed from 1990-2010is or so.

Hello! I hope you have an extra finger, because now you've met another. The money certainly doesn't hurt, but I love what I do.

I don't have enough fingers.

We hang out in different crowds.

> I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it.

You may need to find a place with a better culture.

even people I know who are supposedly in it for the love of programming inevitably care about the amount of money.

I wonder if carpenters, plumbers and electricians, etc have the same kind of love for their jobs in comparable ratios. I certainly don't ask when I hire one.

I mean I got into it because I loved it as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And I still loved it in college. Turning it into a job quickly crushed any love I had though.