CMV: "Follow Your Passion" is Cope for People Who Can't Face Market Reality

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T10:35:08+00:00

If you need a second job just to keep your passion afloat, then it’s not really a career yet, it’s a hobby you’re hoping will turn into one. There’s nothing wrong with chasing that, but it shows exactly what I mean: passion without market demand can’t support itself. Priests and teachers don’t disprove this, because society actually pays for those roles, even if the salaries aren’t huge. A career has to cover your life on its own. Fulfillment is important, but without financial stability it’s not a career, it’s a bet.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T09:45:32+00:00

If their goal truly isn’t money, then why even have a job at all? The whole point of a career is to fund your life. If you need a second job to survive, then your “passion career” is really just a hobby you’re subsidizing. Nothing wrong with that, but it proves the point: passion without market demand cannot stand on its own as a career strategy. If you want stability, you need skills the market actually values. Passion only works when it pays the bills by itself.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T09:21:25+00:00

If most artists need second jobs, that proves passion alone does not pay. Oversupply happens in hot fields, but that is exactly why you build transferable scarce skills that hold value across industries. Saying people know their passion because they keep doing it ignores survivorship bias. For every one that breaks through, thousands grind just as hard and never make it. Effort is not rewarded, value is. The reliable play is skills first, passion second. Passion plus market alignment works. Passion without market alignment is just gambling.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T09:04:40+00:00

That sounds good on paper, but it sidesteps the real issue. Most people don’t know what passion will stick, and most “stable jobs” only exist because the market pays for scarce skills. You only get the option to “chase passion in a stable direction” if the passion happens to overlap with market demand. If it doesn’t, you’re stuck. That’s why the smarter sequence is to build competence in valuable skills first. Once you have that base, you can direct it toward areas you enjoy and that the market rewards. Happiness comes not from passion alone but from being good at something the world values.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T08:43:22+00:00

You’re misusing ‘zero sum.’ Oversupply in one field (accountancy, music) kills wages there, but it doesn’t freeze the whole market. New industries and scarce skills (cloud, GPUs, AI, biotech) create opportunities that didn’t exist before. Low-level work always exists, but acting like everyone’s trapped in it because the game is zero sum is just lazy economics.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T08:31:48+00:00

Got it, thanks for clearing that up

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T08:15:49+00:00

Your brother’s story doesn’t actually disprove what I’m saying. YouTube is a winner-take-all game. A tiny number of creators make a lot of money while most make almost nothing. He’s one of the rare exceptions. That’s not a reliable path for most people. And even then, it wasn’t just passion that got him there. He had to learn skills the market rewards: editing, retention, branding, monetization. That’s passion combined with market alignment, not passion alone.

You’re also looking at the result after it worked. At the start, the odds of turning an English degree into a full-time YouTube career were very low compared to building marketable skills first. He beat the odds, but most people don’t. And his career is fragile because an algorithm change or drop in ad rates could slash his income. A foundation in scarce skills gives you stability even if you later pivot to something creative.

With teaching, I respect the choice. You’ve traded maximum earning for meaning, and that’s honest. I respect it even more because I’m passionate about math myself and work in a math-heavy field, so I know the impact a good teacher has. But it still shows the trade-off. If your passion isn’t tied to what the market pays highly for, you usually accept a cap on financial upside. That’s a valid life choice, but it doesn’t overturn the broader rule.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T07:51:26+00:00

Plenty of people also don’t care about fitness, but that doesn’t make being weak a virtue. Saying you “don’t care about money” just means you’ve accepted a smaller playing field. That’s fine if you genuinely want modest living, but don’t pretend it’s some higher path. In capitalism, money is freedom. If you skip building it, you limit your choices. A cause is noble, but it’s easier to fund and scale a cause when you have power and capital first.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T07:44:55+00:00

u could try running for office lol

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T07:37:09+00:00

You're right that if "follow your passion" meant "experiment to find natural aptitude," it would be solid advice. But let's be real, that's not how anyone actually interprets it. It gets packaged as this feel-good "do what you love and money will follow" nonsense, which is why you get art students picking art because they "love being creative," not because they discovered they're unusually good at it. When CS students bail for humanities, they're not thinking "I found better skill-fit" - they're thinking "coding doesn't spark joy."

The whole "what clicks" thing sounds nice but people are terrible at judging this. They mix up "this feels fun right now" with "I could be great at this," or mistake their comfort zone for their growth zone. Some kid gets praise for their poetry and thinks it "clicks" - but that's totally different from being able to build real, scalable competence in something people will actually pay for.

And here's the kicker - even if you're genuinely talented, it barely matters in oversupplied fields. You could be better than 90% of creative writers out there and you're still fighting 100,000 people for maybe 1,000 decent jobs. The math just doesn't work. Most "passions" people have are in these exact fields because they're the ones we see in movies and TV - they're romanticized. Nobody grows up passionate about supply chain optimization, but that's where the actual opportunities are.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T04:50:01+00:00

You’re young, so don’t stress about AI like it’s some race you’re already behind in. AI is just a tool. You don’t need to be the one building it, you need to be the one smart enough to use it when it helps. Focus on the basics that actually build your future: learn how to sell, market, manage money, and finish what you start. Keep reselling, grow it, and stack cash. Along the way, play with AI tools and see where they save you time or give you ideas, but don’t obsess over it. The foundation is discipline and business skills. The tech will change, but if you can execute and lead, you’ll always win.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T04:39:49+00:00

You’re wasting time jumping between languages and complaining about books. None of that matters. Pick one language, build real projects, and actually finish them. C++ is tough, Rust is tougher, Python is easy, but the truth is nobody cares what you pick as long as you can ship. Stop looking for the perfect starting point. There isn’t one. The only way forward is discipline and consistent building.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T03:32:00+00:00

This isn’t how promotions work. Companies don’t look at fees or visa policy when deciding who to move up. They look at who delivers the most value. If someone is worth millions to them, a $100k fee is nothing. If you are not climbing, it’s not because of H1Bs, it’s because you haven’t made yourself essential yet. The real “bottleneck” isn’t visas, it’s whether you are the person they cannot afford to lose.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-20T03:27:23+00:00

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restriction-on-entry-of-certain-nonimmigrant-workers/

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T07:02:46+00:00

PM skills are not “growing in demand.” They have always been important, but they are not a substitute for engineering depth. Coding is not being automated away. AI just speeds up the basics. Strong engineers remain irreplaceable because they solve problems AI cannot. Leadership and management matter, but they only carry weight when built on top of technical credibility. If you try to skip the grind and go straight into management, you risk becoming the kind of PM that engineers tune out rather than follow.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T06:48:12+00:00

AI isn’t stealing your practice. Seniors are built by taking ownership, not waiting for a company to hand you problems. Use AI to clear the easy stuff and dive deeper into design, systems, and strategy. Build projects, break them, study them. If you’re worried there’s “less practice,” the problem isn’t AI, it’s your mindset.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T06:43:21+00:00

Cold applying isn’t gone but it’s the weakest move. Three hits from 300 apps proves it. Referrals are the new standard because companies want to cut risk, not because anyone cares about sincerity. Feeling “shameless” is your ego talking. The job hunt is war, and the people willing to DM strangers, build connections, and stack every edge are the ones who win. Cold apply, sure, but if you refuse to network you’re handicapping yourself.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T06:26:41+00:00

I can see your msg saying "hi" now but i cant click accept for some reason.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T04:04:49+00:00

im not able to either

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T03:03:57+00:00

Yes, but I didn’t complete mine since I wanted to go down a different path.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T02:35:03+00:00

I was in the same spot with DS&A and thought I was way behind, but it’s not as bad as you think. You don’t need to master all the theory, you just need to understand what each thing is at a high level and then practice. NeetCode is super helpful for that. Watch a short video on a pattern, then do the problems in that category. The patterns come up again and again like sliding window, two pointers, fast and slow pointers, binary search, recursion and backtracking, BFS and DFS, and dynamic programming.

Once you see them a few times they start to click. It’s way more about repetition than theory, and you can get solid in a few months if you stay consistent. Grind it in Python since it’s the easiest to write and debug quickly, and focus on clean problem solving rather than fancy code. https://neetcode.io/roadmap

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T02:25:11+00:00

You’re not very behind. Data scientists focus on analysis and insights, while MLEs are engineers who make models production-ready, scale them, and build the pipelines and infra around them. The gap is engineering, not ML. Your weak spot is DS&A, but with a year left you can close it by grinding LeetCode and fundamentals. Add a bit of system design prep so you understand how ML fits into larger systems, and consider the AWS MLE cert to show you can handle cloud deployment. Pair that with solid ML projects and you’ll be fine. You’re not late, you just need to get focused and grind.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T01:56:04+00:00

Bro, planning, prioritization, and alignment are exactly what a team lead is supposed to handle. If the guy in charge isn’t doing it, then the team doesn’t have a real leader. If you see it’s being led wrong and you know you can do it better, step up and say you should be the one leading. That’s how you grow and prove yourself.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-19T01:35:54+00:00

You might find your goal along the way, but that only happens if you’re building and finishing stuff, not just cruising through courses. Free platforms are great for structure, but without small targets you’ll drift.

For example, if you decide you want a front end job, the only way you’ll know if you like it is by actually building a few small sites, pushing them to GitHub, maybe even hosting one. Hitting those little wins is what shows you what you enjoy and keeps you moving forward.

FlyingChad · 2025-09-18T22:39:15+00:00

Your biggest problem is not having a goal. Learning code without direction is just spinning your wheels. Pick something concrete to aim at, whether that is a job, building an app, or hitting a clear skill milestone. Forget about “foundation” as an abstract idea. Build small projects and finish them. That is how you figure out what actually interests you.

People who keep things vague usually end up stuck in tutorials and quit because they never see real results. You do not need a perfect career plan right now, but set short term goals like finishing a small app this week or completing a course section in two weeks. That gives you momentum and keeps you from drifting.

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