As someone who is a passion-related IT person, I often meet a lot of IT people who surprise me with their fixation on making money. Generally it is a hard time to be young anywhere in the world with unemployment and underemployment rates being high among young people from the US to China.
In this situation the problem is more likely to be over specialization. If botany is a topic that you could somehow pick-up after university with little ease then it would be something more people would do. If there is a programming language that has too few people who know it, why not replace it with a code more easy to pick up by other programmers?
I think we are saying the same thing here. The work ethic is based on different bases for both - you would never be needlessly harming your health if you are passion driven for example.
In this situation the problem is more likely to be over specialization. If botany is a topic that you could somehow pick-up after university with little ease then it would be something more people would do. If there is a programming language that has too few people who know it, why not replace it with a code more easy to pick up by other programmers?