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Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way. I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are

Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way. I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are passionate about something and went beyond the minimal requirements for their degree to achieve it. A passionate student could answer this question in a number of ways; he could point out an open source project that he published on Github that has users, some research that he did with a professor that got published, or even a class project that got him interested in the current position he is applying to. I mean, John Resig would talk about the projects he did as an undergraduate that lead to jQuery[1]. If you dig into the details of a candidate's answers to this question, you can find skills that they might have forgotten to put on their resume. Such as the fact that they know git or Matlab. You can ask them whether they used design patterns in their project and use that as a launching point for a short quiz on design patterns. You do lose a bit of control of the interview process when you ask an open-ended question like this. A candidate can go off on a tangent about something irrelevant to the job. That is a risk. But it could turn out that you learn more about the candidate from his answers to this question than the puzzle problems that you might have planned to give him. [1]http://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=1836557 http://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=1836557

tptacek 13y ago
There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates. "Passion" doesn't matter. What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line. In our common usage, "passion" describes the coder who stays until 9:00PM on a Friday hacking on things. But that property doesn't tell a team anything about whether that coder is the most effective use of headcount dollars. Passionate coders stay late working on compilers for obscure languages, or rewriting ugly but working code into trendy new languages and frameworks. Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic. Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates. This is to say nothing of my total lack of faith in the ability of engineers to assess "passion". For any given engineer, candidates that happen to do things in their spare time that the interviewing engineer happens to enjoy or appreciate are "passionate". Meanwhile, a supremely competent professional who, given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec and then actually nail that schedule, that person is a 9-5er, because they don't have strong opinions about Node.js. •Shudder•. Almost every idea that engineers have about hiring is broken.
- kskz 13y ago
  Completely agree. In terms of buzzwords, "passion" is the new "disruptive".
- hexagonc 13y ago
  But I'm not just talking about blind, unfocused and overly enthusiastic passion. I'm talking about the passion that drives people to go beyond the call of duty, not because it is part of the job but because it is what they like to do. Passion got me the job I have now. Although I was also more than merely competent, the passion drove me to achieve that competence in the first place. Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic. Yeah, passion is a bit of an x-factor, isn't it? By itself, it is meaningless. You may get something unexpectedly great or unexpectedly bad. But, using myself as an example again, I was able to get a project at work done well ahead of schedule because I had already been working on something related in my spare time. Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates. Inasmuch as someone is proud of a project they did and can talk enthusiastically about it, and that project is related to work currently going on at the company they are applying to, I think a passionate candidate can be better long term than another candidate that is initially more competent and more effective. If experience is the main reason that candidate A is more competent and effective than candidate B, then candidate B may eventually surpass candidate A as a better employee simply because passion drives candidate B to keep honing his skills in his free time. I think this is especially true for college graduates or other junior candidates who may not have anything else to go by but their projects.
  - hrktb 13y ago
    I'd agree with the parent...there are jobs where passion is key, like a tech evangelist for instance, or a product leader, a salesman, or a founder. But for an engineer, while of course creativity and trying to get better at the trade are important, so are not getting burned out, going through periods of shitty tasks keeping a professional attitude, make pragmatic choices when needed, without getting blinded by coolness or just curiosity. These skills can come with experience, but can also be personal traits. An employee that doesn't code the week-end but focuses on his job while on site and takes pride in being professional and reliable is a solid asset for any company. In the long term he might be a corner stone of your team, balancing the ones that are half dead because they didn't sleep at night to work on the projects they really invest themselves into.

tptacek 13y ago

There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates. "Passion" doesn't matter. What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line. In our common usage, "passion" describes the coder who stays until 9:00PM on a Friday hacking on things. But that property doesn't tell a team anything about whether that coder is the most effective use of headcount dollars. Passionate coders stay late working on compilers for obscure languages, or rewriting ugly but working code into trendy new languages and frameworks. Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic. Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates. This is to say nothing of my total lack of faith in the ability of engineers to assess "passion". For any given engineer, candidates that happen to do things in their spare time that the interviewing engineer happens to enjoy or appreciate are "passionate". Meanwhile, a supremely competent professional who, given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec and then actually nail that schedule, that person is a 9-5er, because they don't have strong opinions about Node.js. •Shudder•. Almost every idea that engineers have about hiring is broken.

kskz 13y ago
Completely agree. In terms of buzzwords, "passion" is the new "disruptive".
hexagonc 13y ago
But I'm not just talking about blind, unfocused and overly enthusiastic passion. I'm talking about the passion that drives people to go beyond the call of duty, not because it is part of the job but because it is what they like to do. Passion got me the job I have now. Although I was also more than merely competent, the passion drove me to achieve that competence in the first place. Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic. Yeah, passion is a bit of an x-factor, isn't it? By itself, it is meaningless. You may get something unexpectedly great or unexpectedly bad. But, using myself as an example again, I was able to get a project at work done well ahead of schedule because I had already been working on something related in my spare time. Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates. Inasmuch as someone is proud of a project they did and can talk enthusiastically about it, and that project is related to work currently going on at the company they are applying to, I think a passionate candidate can be better long term than another candidate that is initially more competent and more effective. If experience is the main reason that candidate A is more competent and effective than candidate B, then candidate B may eventually surpass candidate A as a better employee simply because passion drives candidate B to keep honing his skills in his free time. I think this is especially true for college graduates or other junior candidates who may not have anything else to go by but their projects.
- hrktb 13y ago
  I'd agree with the parent...there are jobs where passion is key, like a tech evangelist for instance, or a product leader, a salesman, or a founder. But for an engineer, while of course creativity and trying to get better at the trade are important, so are not getting burned out, going through periods of shitty tasks keeping a professional attitude, make pragmatic choices when needed, without getting blinded by coolness or just curiosity. These skills can come with experience, but can also be personal traits. An employee that doesn't code the week-end but focuses on his job while on site and takes pride in being professional and reliable is a solid asset for any company. In the long term he might be a corner stone of your team, balancing the ones that are half dead because they didn't sleep at night to work on the projects they really invest themselves into.