8 ms·

I'm Not a Passionate Developer

41 points by s4i 3y ago

yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
Should we be passionate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI
louislang 3y ago
> My airplane flying friend and I derive pleasure from a clean, by-the-book (by-the-documentation tbh) solution. I'm not too keen on leaving my mark on a codebase. Executing in a deterministic and expected way, to me, is _passion_. It demonstrates a care for the craft of software development.
Xenoamorphous 3y ago
It always bothers me that everyone seems to think that non-passionate devs will be lazy and do crap work. When you go to the grocery store, some cashiers are better at their job than others, right? Probably most of them, good or bad, don’t love their jobs and are not passionate about “cashiering”, but some care about doing a good job regardless. I probably wouldn’t be considered a passionate dev, I don’t have open source projects for example. But I do care about my work and try to do it as good as I know/can. After all, even if I don’t do programming out of working hours, I still have 40 hours weekly devoted to it, so that’s plenty of time to practice. Not to mention that I’ve met incredibly passionate devs… that were passionate about their stuff, not their employer’s. I’ve caught some of them working on their open source stuff during working hours, in fact.
- punkbit 3y ago
  Finally someone puts this in a very clear and honest way!
- robotnikman 3y ago
  This right here describes me perfectly. On work I am not passionate about I still want to do a good job and be satisfied with my work in the end.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  "Passion" as a career development meme is designed to extract more work for the same pay. It's one thing if passion is a requirement for success. In software development, the bar is so low that while passion may be of huge benefit, it's by no means a strong predictor of career success. If you enjoy coding just enough that you get your job done adequately every day and don't feel burned out, that's perfectly fine. When recruiters are looking for "passionate" developers, that means they want you going above and beyond in order to guarantee they get their cut after N-months with your company. That doesn't mean you actually need to live and breathe code. Moreover, I hope nobody after age 29 actually lives and breathes code, even if they really like programming. There's a lot more to life than software. Work at a sustainable pace, maybe do a few unambitious hobby projects, and spend the rest of your time doing things with people who matter. A lot of those high-passion types are overly intellectual douchebag types who slow down the development process because someone didn't use their preferred design pattern. Do you really want to be one of them?
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    > There's a lot more to life than software. There's a lot more to a banana than the interior. Like the peel and the tree and the backbreaking labor to grow it and the Phoneutria! > Work at a sustainable pace, maybe do a few unambitious hobby projects, and spend the rest of your time doing things with people who matter. You had me at the first Sorta lost me at the second (hobby projects: good, but necessarily unambitious?) Devastatingly puzzled at the third (can I work on ambitious hobby projects with these as-yet-unidentified people?)
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    > Moreover, I hope nobody after age 29 actually lives and breathes code, even if they really like programming Why 29, that feels like a really arbitrary cutoff. Are people in their 20s not allowed work-life balance?
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      I could have said 30, but I felt like saying 29 because that's the point where some people think "oh no, my 20s are about to end."
bitwize 3y ago
A crooter once told me: "I don't get the feeling that you're passionate about these technologies." I told him that's because the "technologies" are tools for a job, and I feel passionate about a job well done.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  I'm only sorta passionate about the big picture job itself, depending on what it is. I'm very passionate about the technologies, but only if I use them personally. C? Hex yea! Databases and containers and CI pipelines? I don't really have cause to ever use those at home, so I'm like zzz.
readyplayernull 3y ago
I use a secret strategy to finish long projects: I make them boring. I write down every cool idea for the project and choose the boring ones to begin with. I know that if I can complete those, the project will become more and more interesing as I get to the fun parts. From time to time I might bring a nice idea from the backlog to regain interest, but I really try to focus on the boring ones.
- Aaronstotle 3y ago
  Will start doing this, I always have trouble doing the last boring bits.
Karupan 3y ago
I’m not passionate when it comes to delivering work at my paid job. I have opinions, but don’t care if the rest of the team wants to go another way. I make myself heard, and move on. I think that’s a perfectly fine way to make a living. On the other hand, I’m very passionate about my personal projects and how and why I work on them. But I’ve found that a health dose of “I don’t care” actually keeps the wheels moving, rather than get stuck in an endless cycle of revisiting technical choices, design etc. Not being a passionate developer ≠ being bad at your job.
habitue 3y ago
From time to time this concept of "boring development" etc comes up. And to a point I get it: we've all been burned by people switching around tech to the latest thing which ends up being buggy, poorly supported, and the benefits are nebulous at best ("oh, you rewrote this from a python framework to a ruby framework? I ... why did you do that? Seems like a lot of work for no real benefit...") But I think this sometimes misses some of the real upgrades that exist out there: - Strong typing really gives a benefit when you're refactoring, and other benefits in expressiveness when you can express what you want the solution to look like before you write the solution. - Going from "pile of interleaved CRUD / if statements" to designing thoughtful abstractions for your domain can simultaneously reduce code complexity and reduce the number of bugs you encounter. I think we sometimes overfit on "well, you say you're doing this for code quality reasons, but really you're laundering new-and-shiny distractions with code quality as a justification. In the end nothing will be different and we'll have wasted a lot of time". But in reality, these things do accrete over time, and some teams are dramatically more effective than others due to judiciously picking "exciting" things to work on. I think boring / exciting is a surface characteristic that doesn't correlate well with the actual metric you want, which is effectiveness and velocity gained. It's like arguing all day about whether your car should be red if you want it to go fast, it's just completely ignoring the facts on the ground about how things work.
sys_64738 3y ago
I'm there to get paid to live. I don't ultimately care if the code makes it into the final project as I have a life outside of work. I'm passionate for my paycheck, nothing more.
- anyfoo 3y ago
  > as I have a life outside of work. That's true, but personally I don't think that even with strict 9-to-5, I could stomach sinking so much time, energy, and attention (with more menial tasks I could listen to podcasts all along the way) into something I don't care about at all. I am very "life outside work", more than some people I know, but there's only a limited amount of waking hours, and with so many of them allocated to "working", I hope it's a little bit more meaningful to me than just paychecks. YMMV if your work arrangement is very different, especially timewise, of course.
rockemsockem 3y ago
IMO a passionate developer is one that really cares about doing a good job. That doesn't mean injecting things you think are cool just for the hell of it, it means only injecting things you think are cool because they ALSO will help the project and/or the team. IDK who these people are that are vandalizing code bases and making life more difficult that others are calling passionate, but it feels like someone heard the word used wrong and ran with it.
peruvian 3y ago
In all my jobs, I could not tell the difference between the "passionate" devs and the "9-5" devs. Both produced quality work (when they were quality people). Best dev I've worked with went home at 5 without his laptop and didn't keep up with any news unless it would solve a problem we had a work. There's nothing wrong with side projects, being passionate about development, blogging, etc. but it should never mean that person is a quality engineer.
- anyfoo 3y ago
  > In all my jobs, I could not tell the difference between the "passionate" devs and the "9-5" devs. Both produced quality work (when they were quality people). Best dev I've worked with went home at 5 without his laptop and didn't keep up with any news unless it would solve a problem we had a work. How did you know if they were "passionate" or not? I don't think being "9-5" is a good litmus test. Maybe an indicator, but far away from a certain one. For example, I can be very passionate about things, but I've also learned to timebox and not burn myself out over the years. (Or at least to recognize the signs, and take the proper steps when applicable, along with some precautions like counteracting when I work too long or hard on something.) Other than that, I don't know if people who are passionate about something necessarily let on how passionate they are, especially to any random coworker. It's much more obvious with hobbies, since you chose to sink a portion of your time into it.
  - cstrahan 3y ago
    > How did you know if they were "passionate" or not? I don't think being "9-5" is a good litmus test. The Latin root of the word passion is patior, which means to suffer or endure. And I think that’s significant: having an affinity or appreciation for a thing isn’t the same as being passionate. In the same way that I don’t see how working for (and being compensated for) 8 hours a day can be described as suffering, I don’t see how “passionate” is an appropriate descriptor for someone who only programs between the hours of 9 to 5 For their job. When someone says they have a passion for programming, I usually take that to mean that their evenings are dominated by programming time, instead of hanging with friends, other hobbies, etc. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people necessarily should be passionate about programming (nor expected to be).
Zetice 3y ago
I'm not a passionate developer either, but I am a passionate problem solver, and I happen to have an expertise in solving problems with code. That doesn't mean, however, I prefer to solve problems with code, just that it's the skill I've developed the most. My joy comes from seeing someone who had a pain no longer have that pain. I'm of the opinion that if more developers thought of themselves this way, we'd sidestep a lot of the angst and consternation around the actual development process. No longer would it be about The Best Code, instead the team would focus on The Best Solution, and the new question would be, "How can we build something that can be worked with over time?"
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I'm passionate about the end product, but a lot of the work is R E A L L Y , R E A L L Y B O R I N G . That's as it should be. Shipping a product (as opposed to "writing code"), has a lot of repetitive, silly stuff. I just spent the last half-hour, making one-pixel tweaks on the presentation of table headers in my app, to accommodate the designer's wishes. He's come up with an excellent aesthetic, and the app will be great.
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  Same. I like to think of myself as a product-focused developer. I do find a lot of the dev process and writing code really enjoyable but yes, a lot of it is very boring and kind of silly. But I love the feeling of playing with a finished product.
nathants 3y ago
passion isn’t about the labor you sell, it’s about the labor you keep. nothing wrong with lacking passion, but it was never about your patron.
justincredible 3y ago
[dead]
angarg12 3y ago
One of the happiest persons that I know is a "dispassionate" programmer. Let's call him AP. AP got a job as an intern in a local small company, and has worked in the same for over 12 years. His company is a Java shop that cranks out run-of-the-mill enterprisey applications. AP doesn't build microservice architectures or large scale services. He doesn't get to use the latest and hottest technologies either. In fact he hasn't learned many new techs, except when the odd client comes up with a new requirement. AP doesn't make tons of money, only slightly above the average national wage. Still that afford him a comfortable standard of living in his small, low cost of living town. AP job might sound boring, but he enjoys it. He goes to work every day, writes features, and get backs home. He knows and gets along well with everyone in the company. After so many years, he knows the codebase inside out and the work is easy and comfortable. He goes out for lunch with his colleagues and takes it easy most days. The company hasn't really been growing, but it hasn't gone bust either, sort of keeping a stead stream of work and revenue. AP is not a passionate developer by the American standard. For him, his job is a way to pay the bills and put food on the table. He doesn't follow tech blogs or podcast, doesn't fiddle with new frameworks or languages. Sometimes might get a passing interest in some cool new tech, but doesn't spend hours of his own time invested in pet projects or open source. In fact I hardly ever know what he is up to at work since he seldom talks about it. So what is AP passionate about? He might not tell you about his latest exploits in Rust, but he'll tell you all about his new road bike. He doesn't attend software conferences, but has run half and full marathons around the world. He doesn't spend 3 hours after work coding a personal project, but having a beer and dinner with friends. He doesn't have a 6 figure job, but his income allow him to pay for his living expenses (including a mortgage in a new 2 bed flat) and hobbies such as travel. He might not work on "cool" projects and "make history", but his job doesn't leave him mentally exhausted, so that he can use his energy doing things he actually care about. If you made it this far, I want to make clear that this isn't an allegory. AP is a real childhood friend and everything I said is true. AP is not an ambitious person, and might not be "successful" for some. He is also one of the happiest people that I know. I always found a bit weird the cult of hustle that we have in the dev world. Not many other professions people would be expected to go above and beyond and feel the passion that is expected of us. I suspect that a good chunk of our profession are closer to AP that we think, but we are oblivious to it because those are the folks that don't frequent HN, write blogs, post on twitter or record podcasts.
june_twenty 3y ago
I am inherently passionate about the things I do. That doesn't mean doing over time. It means that when we're in a planning meeting I am contributing and trying to get the best outcome. When I write code, I clarify requirements and I write the code to a high standard following recommended practices. I do static analysis on the code and fix it. I test it before it goes to QA. Not for a promotion but because that is why I am there. Anything less would be mind numbingly boring.
- johnea 3y ago
  I've always felt that this word is missused in modern HR. To me, passion at work might be something like making out in the broom closet with a (willing) coworker 8-) Passion is an inherently emotinal state, not always the best basis for clearly thought out action. The idea that this is all a management ploy to get more work for the same money is already well represented here, so I won't dive into that, but that is also a significant part of why I don't like this concept in HR recruiting.
- thunky 3y ago
  > I am contributing and trying to get the best outcome So doing the job you were hired for is being passionate?
  - june_twenty 3y ago
    Based on planning sessions I've been in - yes. There's lots that will just passively sit there until called upon.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
I am not sure about passionate but being a 10x developer is definitely true. And it's not even that hard. A few techniques and a few mental shifts can get you there.
johnea 3y ago
I've always felt that this word is missused in modern HR. To me, passion at work might be something like making out in the broom closet with a (willing) coworker 8-) Passion is an inherently emotinal state, not always the best basis for clearly thought out action. The idea that this is all a management ploy to get more work for the same money is already well represented here, so I won't dive into that, but that is also a significant part of why I don't like this concept in HR recruiting.

41 points by s4i 3y ago

Should we be passionate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI

> My airplane flying friend and I derive pleasure from a clean, by-the-book (by-the-documentation tbh) solution. I'm not too keen on leaving my mark on a codebase. Executing in a deterministic and expected way, to me, is _passion_. It demonstrates a care for the craft of software development.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago

It always bothers me that everyone seems to think that non-passionate devs will be lazy and do crap work. When you go to the grocery store, some cashiers are better at their job than others, right? Probably most of them, good or bad, don’t love their jobs and are not passionate about “cashiering”, but some care about doing a good job regardless. I probably wouldn’t be considered a passionate dev, I don’t have open source projects for example. But I do care about my work and try to do it as good as I know/can. After all, even if I don’t do programming out of working hours, I still have 40 hours weekly devoted to it, so that’s plenty of time to practice. Not to mention that I’ve met incredibly passionate devs… that were passionate about their stuff, not their employer’s. I’ve caught some of them working on their open source stuff during working hours, in fact.

punkbit 3y ago
Finally someone puts this in a very clear and honest way!
robotnikman 3y ago
This right here describes me perfectly. On work I am not passionate about I still want to do a good job and be satisfied with my work in the end.
ravenstine 3y ago
"Passion" as a career development meme is designed to extract more work for the same pay. It's one thing if passion is a requirement for success. In software development, the bar is so low that while passion may be of huge benefit, it's by no means a strong predictor of career success. If you enjoy coding just enough that you get your job done adequately every day and don't feel burned out, that's perfectly fine. When recruiters are looking for "passionate" developers, that means they want you going above and beyond in order to guarantee they get their cut after N-months with your company. That doesn't mean you actually need to live and breathe code. Moreover, I hope nobody after age 29 actually lives and breathes code, even if they really like programming. There's a lot more to life than software. Work at a sustainable pace, maybe do a few unambitious hobby projects, and spend the rest of your time doing things with people who matter. A lot of those high-passion types are overly intellectual douchebag types who slow down the development process because someone didn't use their preferred design pattern. Do you really want to be one of them?
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  > There's a lot more to life than software. There's a lot more to a banana than the interior. Like the peel and the tree and the backbreaking labor to grow it and the Phoneutria! > Work at a sustainable pace, maybe do a few unambitious hobby projects, and spend the rest of your time doing things with people who matter. You had me at the first Sorta lost me at the second (hobby projects: good, but necessarily unambitious?) Devastatingly puzzled at the third (can I work on ambitious hobby projects with these as-yet-unidentified people?)
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  > Moreover, I hope nobody after age 29 actually lives and breathes code, even if they really like programming Why 29, that feels like a really arbitrary cutoff. Are people in their 20s not allowed work-life balance?
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    I could have said 30, but I felt like saying 29 because that's the point where some people think "oh no, my 20s are about to end."

bitwize 3y ago

A crooter once told me: "I don't get the feeling that you're passionate about these technologies." I told him that's because the "technologies" are tools for a job, and I feel passionate about a job well done.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
I'm only sorta passionate about the big picture job itself, depending on what it is. I'm very passionate about the technologies, but only if I use them personally. C? Hex yea! Databases and containers and CI pipelines? I don't really have cause to ever use those at home, so I'm like zzz.

readyplayernull 3y ago

I use a secret strategy to finish long projects: I make them boring. I write down every cool idea for the project and choose the boring ones to begin with. I know that if I can complete those, the project will become more and more interesing as I get to the fun parts. From time to time I might bring a nice idea from the backlog to regain interest, but I really try to focus on the boring ones.

Aaronstotle 3y ago
Will start doing this, I always have trouble doing the last boring bits.

Karupan 3y ago

I’m not passionate when it comes to delivering work at my paid job. I have opinions, but don’t care if the rest of the team wants to go another way. I make myself heard, and move on. I think that’s a perfectly fine way to make a living. On the other hand, I’m very passionate about my personal projects and how and why I work on them. But I’ve found that a health dose of “I don’t care” actually keeps the wheels moving, rather than get stuck in an endless cycle of revisiting technical choices, design etc. Not being a passionate developer ≠ being bad at your job.

habitue 3y ago

From time to time this concept of "boring development" etc comes up. And to a point I get it: we've all been burned by people switching around tech to the latest thing which ends up being buggy, poorly supported, and the benefits are nebulous at best ("oh, you rewrote this from a python framework to a ruby framework? I ... why did you do that? Seems like a lot of work for no real benefit...") But I think this sometimes misses some of the real upgrades that exist out there: - Strong typing really gives a benefit when you're refactoring, and other benefits in expressiveness when you can express what you want the solution to look like before you write the solution. - Going from "pile of interleaved CRUD / if statements" to designing thoughtful abstractions for your domain can simultaneously reduce code complexity and reduce the number of bugs you encounter. I think we sometimes overfit on "well, you say you're doing this for code quality reasons, but really you're laundering new-and-shiny distractions with code quality as a justification. In the end nothing will be different and we'll have wasted a lot of time". But in reality, these things do accrete over time, and some teams are dramatically more effective than others due to judiciously picking "exciting" things to work on. I think boring / exciting is a surface characteristic that doesn't correlate well with the actual metric you want, which is effectiveness and velocity gained. It's like arguing all day about whether your car should be red if you want it to go fast, it's just completely ignoring the facts on the ground about how things work.

sys_64738 3y ago

I'm there to get paid to live. I don't ultimately care if the code makes it into the final project as I have a life outside of work. I'm passionate for my paycheck, nothing more.

anyfoo 3y ago
> as I have a life outside of work. That's true, but personally I don't think that even with strict 9-to-5, I could stomach sinking so much time, energy, and attention (with more menial tasks I could listen to podcasts all along the way) into something I don't care about at all. I am very "life outside work", more than some people I know, but there's only a limited amount of waking hours, and with so many of them allocated to "working", I hope it's a little bit more meaningful to me than just paychecks. YMMV if your work arrangement is very different, especially timewise, of course.

rockemsockem 3y ago

IMO a passionate developer is one that really cares about doing a good job. That doesn't mean injecting things you think are cool just for the hell of it, it means only injecting things you think are cool because they ALSO will help the project and/or the team. IDK who these people are that are vandalizing code bases and making life more difficult that others are calling passionate, but it feels like someone heard the word used wrong and ran with it.

peruvian 3y ago

In all my jobs, I could not tell the difference between the "passionate" devs and the "9-5" devs. Both produced quality work (when they were quality people). Best dev I've worked with went home at 5 without his laptop and didn't keep up with any news unless it would solve a problem we had a work. There's nothing wrong with side projects, being passionate about development, blogging, etc. but it should never mean that person is a quality engineer.

anyfoo 3y ago
> In all my jobs, I could not tell the difference between the "passionate" devs and the "9-5" devs. Both produced quality work (when they were quality people). Best dev I've worked with went home at 5 without his laptop and didn't keep up with any news unless it would solve a problem we had a work. How did you know if they were "passionate" or not? I don't think being "9-5" is a good litmus test. Maybe an indicator, but far away from a certain one. For example, I can be very passionate about things, but I've also learned to timebox and not burn myself out over the years. (Or at least to recognize the signs, and take the proper steps when applicable, along with some precautions like counteracting when I work too long or hard on something.) Other than that, I don't know if people who are passionate about something necessarily let on how passionate they are, especially to any random coworker. It's much more obvious with hobbies, since you chose to sink a portion of your time into it.
- cstrahan 3y ago
  > How did you know if they were "passionate" or not? I don't think being "9-5" is a good litmus test. The Latin root of the word passion is patior, which means to suffer or endure. And I think that’s significant: having an affinity or appreciation for a thing isn’t the same as being passionate. In the same way that I don’t see how working for (and being compensated for) 8 hours a day can be described as suffering, I don’t see how “passionate” is an appropriate descriptor for someone who only programs between the hours of 9 to 5 For their job. When someone says they have a passion for programming, I usually take that to mean that their evenings are dominated by programming time, instead of hanging with friends, other hobbies, etc. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people necessarily should be passionate about programming (nor expected to be).

Zetice 3y ago

I'm not a passionate developer either, but I am a passionate problem solver, and I happen to have an expertise in solving problems with code. That doesn't mean, however, I prefer to solve problems with code, just that it's the skill I've developed the most. My joy comes from seeing someone who had a pain no longer have that pain. I'm of the opinion that if more developers thought of themselves this way, we'd sidestep a lot of the angst and consternation around the actual development process. No longer would it be about The Best Code, instead the team would focus on The Best Solution, and the new question would be, "How can we build something that can be worked with over time?"

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I'm passionate about the end product, but a lot of the work is R E A L L Y , R E A L L Y B O R I N G . That's as it should be. Shipping a product (as opposed to "writing code"), has a lot of repetitive, silly stuff. I just spent the last half-hour, making one-pixel tweaks on the presentation of table headers in my app, to accommodate the designer's wishes. He's come up with an excellent aesthetic, and the app will be great.

sodapopcan 3y ago
Same. I like to think of myself as a product-focused developer. I do find a lot of the dev process and writing code really enjoyable but yes, a lot of it is very boring and kind of silly. But I love the feeling of playing with a finished product.

nathants 3y ago

passion isn’t about the labor you sell, it’s about the labor you keep. nothing wrong with lacking passion, but it was never about your patron.

justincredible 3y ago

[dead]

angarg12 3y ago

One of the happiest persons that I know is a "dispassionate" programmer. Let's call him AP. AP got a job as an intern in a local small company, and has worked in the same for over 12 years. His company is a Java shop that cranks out run-of-the-mill enterprisey applications. AP doesn't build microservice architectures or large scale services. He doesn't get to use the latest and hottest technologies either. In fact he hasn't learned many new techs, except when the odd client comes up with a new requirement. AP doesn't make tons of money, only slightly above the average national wage. Still that afford him a comfortable standard of living in his small, low cost of living town. AP job might sound boring, but he enjoys it. He goes to work every day, writes features, and get backs home. He knows and gets along well with everyone in the company. After so many years, he knows the codebase inside out and the work is easy and comfortable. He goes out for lunch with his colleagues and takes it easy most days. The company hasn't really been growing, but it hasn't gone bust either, sort of keeping a stead stream of work and revenue. AP is not a passionate developer by the American standard. For him, his job is a way to pay the bills and put food on the table. He doesn't follow tech blogs or podcast, doesn't fiddle with new frameworks or languages. Sometimes might get a passing interest in some cool new tech, but doesn't spend hours of his own time invested in pet projects or open source. In fact I hardly ever know what he is up to at work since he seldom talks about it. So what is AP passionate about? He might not tell you about his latest exploits in Rust, but he'll tell you all about his new road bike. He doesn't attend software conferences, but has run half and full marathons around the world. He doesn't spend 3 hours after work coding a personal project, but having a beer and dinner with friends. He doesn't have a 6 figure job, but his income allow him to pay for his living expenses (including a mortgage in a new 2 bed flat) and hobbies such as travel. He might not work on "cool" projects and "make history", but his job doesn't leave him mentally exhausted, so that he can use his energy doing things he actually care about. If you made it this far, I want to make clear that this isn't an allegory. AP is a real childhood friend and everything I said is true. AP is not an ambitious person, and might not be "successful" for some. He is also one of the happiest people that I know. I always found a bit weird the cult of hustle that we have in the dev world. Not many other professions people would be expected to go above and beyond and feel the passion that is expected of us. I suspect that a good chunk of our profession are closer to AP that we think, but we are oblivious to it because those are the folks that don't frequent HN, write blogs, post on twitter or record podcasts.

june_twenty 3y ago

I am inherently passionate about the things I do. That doesn't mean doing over time. It means that when we're in a planning meeting I am contributing and trying to get the best outcome. When I write code, I clarify requirements and I write the code to a high standard following recommended practices. I do static analysis on the code and fix it. I test it before it goes to QA. Not for a promotion but because that is why I am there. Anything less would be mind numbingly boring.

johnea 3y ago
I've always felt that this word is missused in modern HR. To me, passion at work might be something like making out in the broom closet with a (willing) coworker 8-) Passion is an inherently emotinal state, not always the best basis for clearly thought out action. The idea that this is all a management ploy to get more work for the same money is already well represented here, so I won't dive into that, but that is also a significant part of why I don't like this concept in HR recruiting.
thunky 3y ago
> I am contributing and trying to get the best outcome So doing the job you were hired for is being passionate?
- june_twenty 3y ago
  Based on planning sessions I've been in - yes. There's lots that will just passively sit there until called upon.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

I am not sure about passionate but being a 10x developer is definitely true. And it's not even that hard. A few techniques and a few mental shifts can get you there.

johnea 3y ago

I've always felt that this word is missused in modern HR. To me, passion at work might be something like making out in the broom closet with a (willing) coworker 8-) Passion is an inherently emotinal state, not always the best basis for clearly thought out action. The idea that this is all a management ploy to get more work for the same money is already well represented here, so I won't dive into that, but that is also a significant part of why I don't like this concept in HR recruiting.