It seems like you have to be passionate about programming to become a successful and happy programmer. Is this true?

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No. Passion for your craft does not make you happier. In fact, you’ll probably spend most of your time pissed off about one thing or another. This is due to an ironclad rule of human nature. It’s more painful for things to be a little bit off than for them to be a lot off. You just have to learn how to work effectively and contribute to a group effort when everything’s annoying the crap out of you.

You’ll get rare moments of professional bliss when everything lines up and for a few months or years everything is running completely smoothly. You might even get seduced into believing that it can always be this way.

But no, your professional heaven will eventually break down and fall apart, and you’ll have no one to turn for solace but yourself, because you’ll very likely be the only passionate person, the only one who really cares about all this stuff, on your team, sometimes in your whole company. Everybody else will just wonder at why in the world you care so much about these things.

Competence is a key to a long career. But passion is how competent programmers get fired. When my professional heaven fell apart, I was practically begging to get fired.