On Programming Languages: Why My Dad Went from Programming to Driving a Bus
This is a good object lesson for the common advice of &quot;do what you love&quot;.  If you really love working with computers, then it is really hard to resist messing with them all the time.  So you have a side effect of constantly improving your knowledge.  But if you don&#x27;t love it, but are only into programming because you can make money at it, then you won&#x27;t be driven to constantly learn (even if that learning is just a side effect of &quot;playing&quot;).  Now that doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean that you will be an expert at everything, but people who have a passion for this type of sport will be in a position to pivot when needed.<p>I&#x27;ve run into people in similar situations, they used to be a systems administrator or a developer, but are completely out of it and no longer able to write any code.  In some cases it is burn out, but I couldn&#x27;t imagine ever going so much as a week without experimenting with something that is intellectually stimulating.<p>Now it may be that the protagonist in this story really did have a passion for translating business logic rules into Cobol.  But was he really doing programming, or was it more following a set of procedures that ended up cranking out the needed code, without having to really invest a lot into the process?  Because if there was a strong passion there, I&#x27;d think it would have extended to continuously tinkering around with other technology.  (Or am I getting dangerously to the &quot;no true Scotsman&quot; fallacy?)