It's a dog-eat-dog world, were very few folks end up making a living doing what they enjoy doing.

Bullshit. If you are lucky enough to be born in a first world country, and to be able to afford a decent education, then the only thing stopping you from making a living in a field you enjoy, is your own poor choices.

[quote name='Shippou' timestamp='1348680441' post='4984026']
It's a dog-eat-dog world, were very few folks end up making a living doing what they enjoy doing.

Bullshit. If you are lucky enough to be born in a first world country, and to be able to afford a decent education, then the only thing stopping you from making a living in a field you enjoy, is your own poor choices.
[/quote]
Which leads to this philosophy... "The Man can bring you down. But it's your choice to stay there."

If you are lucky enough to be born in a first world country, and to be able to afford a decent education, then the only thing stopping you from making a living in a field you enjoy, is your own poor choices.

Yea, I mean, it's not like we have to deal with external factors that are simply beyond our control. /src

[quote name='Shippou' timestamp='1348680441' post='4984026']
It's a dog-eat-dog world, were very few folks end up making a living doing what they enjoy doing.

Bullshit. If you are lucky enough to be born in a first world country, and to be able to afford a decent education, then the only thing stopping you from making a living in a field you enjoy, is your own poor choices.
[/quote]

Or the unemployment rate and the nation's economic situation

Or the unemployment rate and the nation's economic situation

I have a hard time feeling sorry for all my classmates who chose to major in classical literature, and are now out of work. It was pretty evident that there were no jobs in that field long before they decided on their major.

The ones who did it out of love for the subject, and actually worked towards a goal? Most of them have jobs.

Unemployment is a sad fact of reality for many people, but the affluent kids with college degrees by-and-large made their own bed to sleep in.

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought, "Oh good grief, not another lengthy post about someone's bizarre world-view". But then it turned out to be a thread with a short OP about doing things you like because you like doing them, even when you hate doing them. And that's pretty cool.

<br />Most of the people I knew in high school who went into a field 'for the money' dropped out within a few years and went into a completely different field (often real estate sales, for some reason). Some did that, then gave in and followed their passion in their 30s or 40s, and missed some good years of doing what they want. Many had no passion and just fell in to some job they're unhappy with and counting the days until they can retire on full pension.

Ah, real estate. People really bought it that the value of this one type of asset, unlike any other, will always go up. That is not investment. That's more descriptive of a Ponzi scheme, but especially into the late 90s and early millenium, people greedily drank from "Rich Dad"'s Kool-Aid. That really turned out well, didn't it?

(edit: For the record, I also know that the roots of the real estate crash go far deeper than the line of books by Robert Kiyosaki, so that's a really specific shot at him and maybe a little unfair. People like Kiyosaki are the face of that crisis, but in the higher echelons, people like Angelo Mozilo are worse. Even the application of Ayn Rand's ideology by her pupil, Alan Greenspan, has been just great for the world around us. But all in all, that says nothing of the greed that drove individual home owners to borrow way more than they could repay, buy way more house than they needed, and bankrupt their own futures and those of entire neighborhoods. That was their call.)

The ones who did it out of love for the subject, and actually worked towards a goal? Most of them have jobs.

This. A hundred times over. There's a huge lack of programmers in my country. Yet, the unpassioned (and frankly, shitty) programmers I went to school with still remain unemployed.

Unemployment is a sad fact of reality for many people, but the affluent kids with college degrees by-and-large made their own bed to sleep in.

How exactly do you define "affluent" in this context?

If you're referring to people who simply went to college, than your concept of affluence is truly bizarre.

Whatever the case may be: Shippou didn't bring up "college", or the present market value of one degree over another. He simply pointed out that "very few folks end up making a living doing what they enjoy doing", which is plainly true.

There's a huge lack of programmers in my country.

I doubt that.

There's a huge lack of *expert* programmers, which is what everyone is looking to hire.

I doubt that.

There's a huge lack of *expert* programmers, which is what everyone is looking to hire.

You are free to doubt it. Though I disagree with the term expert. They're looking for programmers that show promise- and that ties in to what Swiftcoder already has said, and what I wanted to emphasize.

Bullshit. If you are lucky enough to be born in a first world country, and to be able to afford a decent education, then the only thing stopping you from making a living in a field you enjoy, is your own poor choices.

An interesting tidbit: Sweden's a third world country.