I find this article confusing. I agree with some of what it's saying, but I think my framing is completely different.

> The removal of the ego from the equation has yielded much more benefits than the passionate pursuit of being a programmer.

I think identifying as a software developer isn't really tied to how ambitious you are; I believe what's actually going on here is people feel some sense of shame to be associated with what they feel the industry has become. (Undoubtedly, I'm right there with them on that.)

Truthfully, while pride and ego need to be tempered, they're just as important as anything else. After all, if you have no pride or ego whatsoever about what you do, it's hard to imagine having a work ethic. And while I am a bit nihilist with regards to life, I still find myself feeling like it matters that people give a shit.

> I'd avoid PHP and jQuery simply because of the popularly negative opinion of them, and not because of any valid technical reasons.

It's good that you stopped doing this, but there's almost a kind of implication that every card-carrying software engineer thinks this way. I don't. In fact, I was a huge PHP user before I was a huge PHP hater, mostly fueled by Wordpress, phpBB, Postnuke, etc. in addition to the widespread availability of PHP as part of the "LAMP" stack (and much cPanel hosting, and development environments like XAMPP.)

In fact, the truth is, modern PHP development has turned around quite a bit. I still think there's more to go before I'd really consider looking back, especially since the world around PHP has improved very fast (Go and Rust especially, but still Python/Django and Ruby/Rails, and of course Dotnet.)

> Rather than write a simple main() method which solves the problem, I'd "architect" code bases that adhere to the SOLID principles, with countless interfaces and factories that ensure flexibility.

Again, not sure what this has to do with passion or pride of programming. I've always been a hard critic of design patterns. My personal anecdote is that using design patterns or systems like SOLID to build software is like using TVTropes to write fiction. Of course I'm not saying that these things are useless, but overconfidence on using them as a tool to build with is something I associate more with consultants than with passionate devs.

> My passion didn't die; instead, it changed priorities. It was no longer about my identity of being a programmer, but rather about my activity of programming. My ideal for software development is to find the simplest solution to the practical problem. I focus on ensuring that I program in such way which adheres to my pillars for a great program: simplicity, maintainability and above all, value.

Maybe there's some truth in here, but I still can't help but feel this is more of a semantics thing. You can pretend you have no ego or pride, but we all do. I would love to be objective. I think objectivity as a concept is useful even if it can never be 100% attained. But at the end of the day, my body is not a cold, careless hunk of silicon, and it'd be silly to pretend that in my desire to use programming to solve problems effectively and write better code, that I am not prideful at all or that I have no ego.

I think this post is more about learning to not fall into groupthink and control pride and ego than it is about a lack of passion or a change of heart.