Although I know that a lot of people would argue for "what's wrong with doing your day job well and …

You can make your job in general a passion/hobby/craft but that doesn't mean you have to work more than your fair share for your employer to be a competent craftsperson.

Your overall opinion might be true, but it's also unfair to competent people who treat it like their day job, and do it competently (but maybe without being amazing). There is a place for this kind of people, among which I count myself nowadays -- I used to be way nerdier, learning new programming languages and embarking on projects just because, until life got in the way, my interests shifted, etc. > I think intellectual curiosity and being a 9-5 person are inversely correlated, again in my experience. I think this is objectively false. I've seen plenty of terrible coworkers -- terrible at their jobs, that is -- who I later found to have hobbies they were passionate about. One was an excellent standup comedian in her spare time. Another did lots of sports and took them seriously. They just weren't very good at software, and they also "phoned it in". One was essentially a "used car sale…