Loving What You Do
During his Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs said: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Note that he didn’t say “do what you love,” but “love what you do.”
I keep showing my age when I say things like this, but back when I was young, people in technology really loved what they were doing. The field was still young. Most people didn’t even understand the potential, and the salaries weren’t that attractive. In the early 2000s, I knew people moving to new jobs to make less money just because they received an offer from a company with more Internet bandwidth.
I started as a sysadmin, and the stereotype is true: most of us were a bit on the BOFH side, mostly because of our love for the craft and our annoyance with people using technology without a clue. So while the outside perception may have been that we didn’t like what we were doing, the reality is we loved it and were a little jealous of people touching our stuff and messing with it.
You could see the same split more clearly as open source gathered steam. People gathered on weekends for install fests to help new enthusiasts get Linux on their machines, giving their time and knowledge for free. Those people advocated for the projects. Small ones (sometimes shadow IT inside a company) helped push Linux into the real world.
I was doing freelance work around then, and I had a lot of fun deploying email servers (Sendmail, then Qmail), web servers, firewalls, corporate proxies, and other services. At times I had my full-time job and still put in another 4 to 8 hours a day, and I was having a blast. I couldn’t believe people were paying me money to do what I loved. I could have done that forever.
As I grew in my career, things kept shifting a little each time. One job meant more break-and-fix. Another meant drafting high-level plans for other people to implement. Sometimes I was 100% hands-on; other times I had to delegate. More operations, more software development. People management, project management.
I’m a highly technical individual, but even in less technical roles, I still enjoyed what I was doing; I always tried to improve myself in whatever way was needed at any given moment and carry it out well.
I don’t see that as often now. In other fields I used to watch people pick a profession because they needed something — accounting, say — and get on with it. I don’t know how many of them were stoked about the work. Technology used to feel different. A lot of it doesn’t anymore, and it shows up in strange ways.
The one my brain really can’t process is how people who should love technology reject AI.
We already lived through versions of this. When Linux stopped being a hobbyist toy and started showing up in production, a lot of people who “did computers for a living” treated it like an insult. Same with virtualization, then containers, then infrastructure as code. The pattern was the same: the people who loved the craft treated the new layer as another interesting problem. The people who treated the job as a paycheck treated it as extra work they never signed up for. AI is just the latest, louder version of that split.
What I can’t square is the hostility. Some of the same energy that used to go into helping a stranger get Slackware running on a Saturday afternoon now goes into explaining why a model that can draft a script, read a stack trace, or sketch a Terraform module is cheating, or slop, or the end of “real” engineering. If you loved the work, a tool that compresses the tedious parts should feel like that extra bandwidth offer in 2001: more time for the parts that actually require judgment. Instead, it often lands as an identity threat.
Loving what you do, in Jobs’ sense, was never about the specific tool staying the same. It was about still wanting to be good at the work after the work changed. I used to see that clearly in people who would spend a weekend helping a stranger install Linux for free. I see it less often now, and it shows up most sharply in the reaction to AI.