I knew growing up that I wanted to be a Paramedic. Both Grandfathers were part time/volunteer firefighters. My older sister became an EMT. I loved the TV show: Emergency.

I became an Army medic and continued as a civilian. This coming December will be my 38th year in emergency medicine. I’m still on the road. We’ll see how long I can last.

You know it when you go to work and it doesn’t feel like work. It doesn’t feel like an absolute drag to get out of bed.

I’m an HVAC engineer. I love my job, to me it’s like spending all day solving logic puzzles or a detective mystery. I found I was pretty good at it about 6 months into the job, when I figured out a problem the senior techs couldn’t. I enjoy being out and about instead of chained to a desk.

A job/career doesn’t have to be a passion. Just something you don’t dread everyday. My passion is in sports but somehow engineering was something I was good at, it felt satisfying fixing things. I’d never make my passion my job cause I know it would completely ruin it for me.

Ever since I played watchdogs and shadowrun, I wanted to work in cybersecurity, especially as a Red Teamer, which is literally Shadowrun - you run complex ops that have to break in, and steal stuff from largre banks without anyone but the management knowing about the test, with almost nothing being off-limits, as long as it doesn’t cause some kind of damage.

Five years later, I do work as a Red Team Lead. Hpwever, our company was just scrambling to start doing RT since thats the buzzword now, and while we did have amazing pentesters, unfortunately pentesting and Red Teaming requires vastly different skills. Ypu never need to avoid EDRs, write malware with obscure low-level winapi, or even know what kind of IoC ajd detections will a command you run create, when you are doing a pentest.

But since no one knew better, and I love learning and researching new stuff, while also having Red Teaming romabticized, my interrest in it eventually led to me getting a Lead position for the barely scrambling team.

Mind you, I was barely out of being a junipr, with only three years of part time pentesting experience. It was NOT a good idea.

I quickly found out that RT is waaay harder and requires the best of the best from cybersec and maleare development. We didnt have that. Also, turns out that I love to learn now stuff and take on a challenge, but being a Lead also means you are drowning in paperwork and discussions with client, while also everyone from the team doesn’t know what to do and turns to me about what should we do. Which I didn’t know, and barely managed to keep learning it on my own. Our conpany didnt want to give us much time for learning outside of delivery, I was only working parttime, and I was slowly realizing that we don’t have almost any of the skills we need.

We were doing kind of a good job, most of our engagement turned out pretty well, but it was atrocious.

Turns out, I’m not good at managing and planning projects, or leading people. I’m better just as a line member.

Doing your hobby / passion as work is the natural response, but it is not quite right I discovered lately.

A hobby is and needs to be undemanding and you really risk ruining the fun. instead of giving energy it takes energy.

What is much much more important is your colleagues They make and break every job

And if you want to choose careers, think about what type of person works there and the amount of communication

These things are much more important than if the work itself is fun

If you don’t want lots of intense communication and discussion about creative topics, don’t have a creative job. Like concept art or music. Have it as a hobby instead and do it for you.

I just love talking about game mechanics and player experiences in games, so my job as game designer is perfect. When I was a coder, it was fun but I didn’t get to talk to people and it ruined my hobby to be honest, I very rarely code just for myself anymore because it feels like a chore.

Also, being talented is a thing. If you are talented at something, probably try to use that. It’s a head start. If you really want to do something, you can learn it, but it is taxing and the energy can be used for more fun things if you think about it.

In the end you cannot really know how any job is before you try. The added bonus is that you get to see how different work is socially. Even in pure solitary work this matters more than you think, how it will feel to go there every day. If you are treated like a human. If you are respected etc.

When I went into university to do chemical engineering, in 1981, I had never even touched a computer. I didn’t know until I got there that you could even do computers as a career.

I graduated, and then volunteered as a teacher in Africa for 3 years. I came back to Canada, and then taught English in Japan for 3 years.

But after my first year of university, my family got a computer (a Commodore Vic 20, with 3.5 kB of memory) and I was obsessed from that woman onward.

Leaving Japan, I went back to school and did a diploma in computer science. Unlike chemical engineering, where I dutifully learned things that I was told I needed to learn, I was delighted to have the chance to learn about software, operating systems, databases, graphics, etc. The difference was astonishing, and I found it easy to maintain a GPA just under 4.0.

I have been working as a programmer for more than 25 years, and although it has been stressful at times, the joy is still there. I’m not an artist by any means, but I do feel like a craftsman, and I enjoy the opportunity to continue learning everyday.

I went to university to study statistics, and I absolutely love statistics… but I was forced to learn SAS and, fucking hell, I hacked that program to shit… my presentations would have loads of pretty printing, multiple data ingest methods, proper error reporting…

So I switched into CS and liked it a lot… then I took a course on data modeling, which led to a course of Relational Algebra (essentially the abstract logical form of what you’re typing in SQL to your RDBMS) then I went on to become a developer and, while I am multiskilled and able to build UIs and backends and even embedded systems… I absolutely adore data architecture and DB performance tuning.

I really can’t understate how incredibly easy it is for me to look at a query over a system I understand and quickly identify likely bottlenecks and logical errors.

If you re-read my comment, you might notice there isn’t a single “Eureka” moment but instead are a series of them - I think that’s how most of come to be in careers we truly enjoy.

The first time I ever set foot in a machine shop I was enamored by the machines. I also don’t have to worry so much about customers or socializing. It’s quiet socially, not so much decibel-y. Things are pretty straightforward and each machine sorta has it’s own personality. You can totally tell when its being just a dick that day, but treat it right and your job is easy.

I didn’t have nightmares until becoming an aviation maintenance technician.

I end up having similar conversations with college folks (interns mostly). I usually say something along the lines of:

• If there’s something that you’re so passionate about that you’re going to do it regardless, it’s worth taking a shot at making a living at it. Things like writing, acting, and music are really hard to to make it in, but if it’s really a passion, you might as well give it a go. It’s good to have a Plan B though.
• If you aren’t super passionate about something, or you don’t have the starving artist mentality or whatever, next is to look at things you’re good at that you don’t hate, especially if there’s room to grow in them. If you’re good at math, for instance, you could consider being an accountant.
• If you don’t feel like you have any especially marketable skills, then you’re looking for something that’s more broadly available, like retail or whatever. Of you can find something that teaches a skill, that’s a plus.

Broadly, there’s a passion, there’s a career, and there’s a job. There’s nothing wrong with any of those, but people tend to be happiest in that order. I personally wasn’t super passionate about anything, but liked computers, got a CS degree, ended up as a software engineer at a rocket company, and now manage the software organization there. There were other things I enjoyed, but I figured programming was the most marketable, and that’s worked out for me.

What people tend to like or hate the most about where they work are the people and/or the boss, and that can be good or bad pretty much anywhere. Good to watch out for red and green flags when you’re looking.

I started programming as a teen. I didn’t realize I could do that as a job (weird, I know), so I looked into lucrative careers I could do so I could afford to have lots of free time to program. Then I discovered that programming was also a job.

When I realized that what I want to do and enjoy in life has nothing to do with my career.

Work is work an and if you’re lucky maybe you get a job with a good team for good company. Maybe your job is even social positive an the that’s even better but it’s still a job not a calling so perfect it’s purely subjective.

When not even my closest coworkers or boss could tell if I was working or screwing off because working on or doing research for my personal projects is indistinguishable from my work ones 😅

Well certainly not the career aptitude testing in high school, which put me in ministry (the religious kind), philosophy, or military.

I was a cashier at a bunch of places and kept ending up working in the back office, then developing ways to do the bookkeeping on the computer (this was so long ago they were using paper ledgers). I did accounting systems for years, but doing accounting now, with coworkers I like.

I would not call it a passion but an aptitude. And as my former boss says - so much better to have a job you don’t love with great coworkers, than a job you enjoy with people you don’t.

I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry and kept hitting layoffs. After the last layoff, I somehow reached a point of “F*** this” and went to a career counselor. They suggested I read " Do What You Are" by Tieger and Barron. That book helped me to figure out what was a good match for my personality, I switched careers and stayed with that job until I retired.

I learned engineering and I were going to have the occasional personality conflict about the time I realized I’m an extroverted woman. Thankfully I’m a sarcastic asshole that thinks she’s the smartest person in the room so I can often recover from it