[sasaf5]

Also, I have seen several times someone "following their passion" and doing something that was not required by the business. The end result is a huge mess of overcomplicated things that doesn't do what was needed and no one else can fix.

Many times the business just needs a boring old solution for a tedious problem that no one would be passionate about, and it's normal to engage in that kind of grind.

I would change that advice to "do what you are passionate about, among the things that the business needs, and understand that sometimes you just can't do that".

On the other hand I have seen several devs who were just good at quickly tackling whatever was necessary at the moment and became very successful without ever showing a sign of passion for computing. For them it's just a craft and they go do some hobby after that.

[hahajk]

On the other hand, I often do non-required things just because I'm curious and they have often been boons for my team. As an example, as a proj manager at a big org I went through the steps of setting up my own tenant account in our org's AWS system so I could play around with compute nodes. A year later they had issues with the team that managed the AWS environment and couldn't create new accounts for almost a year. As a result, no one in the org could bring on new contracts requiring cloud computing. Except my team: Our contractors could be added to my tenant account and continue work. This was a huge deal when we were trying to get a few experimental projects off the ground very quickly.

Almost all of my success has been a result of doing things no one else did because I was curious about them.