It's this line -- "given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec" -- that, I would guess, separates the types of jobs I've experienced from

It's this line -- "given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec" -- that, I would guess, separates the types of jobs I've experienced from yours. I've never been given a spec that was worth the wiki page it was written on. In most of the jobs I've experienced, "effectiveness" (get done what you're given) and "competence" (don't cause extra work for others) are barely a minimum bar to success; to be successful, colleagues also need "insight" (look past the documented requirement to the reasons behind it) and "creativity" (design a solution that solves the documented problem and three related undocumented ones). You're right, "passion" isn't one of the things to hire for. At best, in my experience, it's highly correlated with the breadth of experience that fuels "creativity" and "effectiveness" - at least, in the sense that it causes people to be persistent against hard and unclear problems. It's fair to ask whether this should be required for teammates or just co-founders -- but even in my most enterprise-y gigs, I've rarely seen a team that could succeed without people with passion helping drive the work.