Doing what you love for money?

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Do you think people should try to do what they love for a career? I know it sounds amazing on the surface but what happens when your hobby becomes something you're forced to do and have a quota to meet and bosses to please? Would it still be your hobby in your free time or would you grow to hate your hobby?

I make money out of painting, which is my big passion since forever, and it's both good and bad. I definitely prefer it over most "real" jobs, but it is true that it does kill the passion a little bit when turning it into a job. At least when working. I think this is mostly because I earn my money from doing commissions, which means that someone else will dictate what I paint, and there's a deadline. Sometimes a really exciting project comes along, and then it's all fun and well (not even bothered by the deadline in those cases). But often it really sucks, because I'm asked to paint something that I find boring or ugly. Then it is even tougher than working a "real" job, because painting is emotional labour, and if I don't enjoy it, it is really exhausting. But I still paint for fun in my freetime, and when I just paint for myself, the enjoyment is still as big as always.
I really hope that I can move on from commissions and start selling my own work some day. I don't mind being poor as long as I can paint all day.

So, no. I'm nowhere near starting to hate my hobby. It's just bothering sometimes when it's work.

Yeah I'm passionate about technology and interested in learning computer programming, yet I wonder if pursuing a job in a corporate environment would be a good move for me.

I think the reason to why my passion stays alive is that I still have a lot of freedom. I do have the option to turn down an assignment if I find it too awful, and I get to work from home. I don't think I'd be able to keep it alive if I was working for a studio or went to art school or something. Like, I like broccoli, but if someone made me eat it for every meal every day, I'd get tired of it really quickly.
So yeah, working for a corporation would probably kill the passion for me.
You can be a freelance programmer though. You'd have to learn it from somewhere first of course, but there are online-classes one can take

Maybe a smaller company? 30-50 employees is a good size, based on my spouse's expirience. No corporate bs, you can know everyone presonally even if your social skills aren't the best but a company that size is stable enough. The biggest issue - the projects can be boring, you don't choose what your clients are paying for.

Working with my interests has not worked well for me in the past. My interests certainly gave me the right practical skills for the programming and CAD work that I used to do, but I had severe struggles fitting them into a commercial environment. For example:

- I could never get a project in on time because I cannot resist endless iterations of "tweaks" to make the project more "perfect". My idea of doing a "good job" was always seen as "gold plating" or "gilding the lily" by managers who got frustrated by missed deadlines.

- Difficulty accepting the coding/drawing styles and techniques used by colleagues, or seemingly arbitrary style rules put in place by my employers. If ever I knew that there was a better way to do something, I would quickly lose heart in the project.

- No motivation to do projects which seemed boring or trivial. I seem to have a very great need for feeling that I'm learning something new with every project. Projects that I was interested in got the "gold plated" treatment at the expense of all the others.

- Completion anxiety. Once I have started doing something, I need to keep going until it is finished, without interruption and without any distractions from thinking about other tasks that are on my "to do" list. Switching from one project to another, or from project to conversation/meetings and back, loses me a huge amount of time while I get myself immersed in the task again. We seem to be told quite often that our "hyper-focus" can be a positive attribute for employers. My experience is that there are many kinds of work where it can cause big problems.

- Product release dates seem to mostly be set by Sales and Marketing departments, not by the product's project manager. It is common to be expected to ignore certain bugs, inefficiencies and bad user interfaces so that the release date can be met at all costs. On the following development cycle, new features will be the marketing focus again, so you won't always be allowed the time to fix the problems with the previous release. The project team will usually be able to foresee the problems that this will lead to, but management very often don't or won't. This destroys the pride that I would usually take in my work and makes it hard for me to be diplomatic with superiors. When the inevitable customer criticism arrives, you can be sure that it will be blamed on the developers, not the marketing managers!

For anyone who is interested in coding as a future career, I would give one piece of advice. As early as you can, get involved in a group project or contributing to open-source applications. You need to start developing the ability to code as part of a team as soon as you can. No matter how good your coding skills are, getting too used to working alone can leave you exposed to the same kind of problems as I've had. Even if you freelance, it's not often that you'll be working on an entire application. You'll still need to learn the art of keeping to other people's code style rules and interfaces, otherwise even technically correct work might be rejected when it is reviewed. Also, don't get hung up on which is the "best" programming language - a working knowledge of several languages will open up more chances for work than detailed knowledge of only one, and it won't always be you that gets to choose which one to use.

No.. they call it "prostitution" here & while it's technically not illegal, it's illegal for the customer to pay for said services in Canada.

I program for a living and I love it! It can take a while to find a place and a way of working that suits you but it is worth doing it. If the job is killing your passion for something you love it's likely time to look for a new one ahaha.

You can lose the obsession a bit over time, but really I think that is just because you are getting 8hrs a day + of doing it in! And the urge still does strike for you to do it on your own :3

If you are going to be spending the majority of the next 50+ years working you may as well be doing something you love!