Is There Any Room for the Not-Passionate Developer?

I have ideas to explore (Nothing I'd ever want to turn into a business, perish the thought), but I just... can't find the motivation to spend more hours doing what I already spend about a third of my life doing. I enjoy reading articles and the like, sure, but if I wanted to work on side projects, I'd need to take extended time away from work to "reset" and get into something.

Does this make me destined to fall behind? I'm hoping not, but given how many people talk about needing one's job to be their all-consuming passion, to be something they spend spare time and weekends on... I'm not always hopeful.

I work a 35 hour week, and if you want more out of me, pay me. I'm good enough to be worth a wage, I'm not about to undermine my own health and the hiring market to satisfy some fad about over work.

Just look at the games industry. Overwork is endemic. The only way its sustainable is by creaming off a new layer of young star-eyed programmers each cycle.

In areas that are not as glamorous, its just not possible.

I do not derive my self worth by how many hours extra that I put in at work.

I've had to intentionally recruit "boring" developers, who weren't passionate at all. They just get on and do their 9-to-5 because it's their job. Without their help, we'd have lost most of our A-players due to a lack of sufficiently interesting work.

Relatedly, there's a difference between being motivated and being disciplined. Passion and motivation are essential wherever innovation is required, but otherwise discipline is what gets the job done. Turns out, in any team larger than a handful of people, you need a mix both.

Because passion doesn't necessarily equate to skill. Passion looks like an eagerness to be immersed in a topic and invest time in that topic. Some people work out of necessity and not necessarily passion (maybe just passion to make a living, pay the bills, and support their families).

What actually matters is that you:

- follow through with your promises and claims to your team or manager/boss/founder/yourself

- you leave things better than you found them

- you're reliable

If you adequately do those things, there is plenty of room for you, passion or no passion.

As an example, if I'm in the middle of a 3 a.m. debugging session because someone slipped a bug into production and customers are complaining and the company is losing money, I find that stone-cold professional determination is more reliable than passion.

I've worked with developers who has busy lives and families. They didn't do much programming outside of work, and they mostly worked 9-5. But they were so locked-in, determined, and professional while on the clock that they kicked ass and outperformed most of their colleagues. What programming they did do outside of the office was carefully chosen to help them keep up to date with the latest and greatest.

This isn't meant to knock passionate developers; I consider myself one of them. But given the opportunity in the future, I'd gladly work with a team of hyper-productive, focused, professional developers even if they don't have the 'passion' for programming that a lot of job postings seem to be looking for.

Passion doesn't even correlate with outside events OP lists.

Little point having a side project when your employer often asks you to sign a contract giving them ownership of all code inside or outside of work. I've walked away from job offers because they wouldn't strike this.

Where's the passion coming from in the 90 of 100 programming jobs that are programming payroll, fuel pump displays, stock systems and the 1,001 other not exciting, not full stack, not web dev role? OK, there's probably someone, somewhere, who can get passionate about fuel pump programming, but...

Also consider the employer's point of view. Unless junior code-monkey is needed, and even then, I would far rather see a well rounded individual with some non-IT to the fore. With at least a fighting chance of some social skills and some other interests than discover all free time is spent at the laptop working on other stuff. It can help when understanding client needs, or bring the idea from the model engineering or some other hobby to the task at hand.

As with almost everything, balance is the key. If, as a parent, you can't read one programming book a year, or spend a couple of weekends worth of time on a bit of tinkering there's something wrong. The reason a lot of parents end up no longer developers is they probably became senior enough that they're herding cats (staff) instead of bits.

So I'll stick with DHH and heavily favour work-life balance.

But how that interest is measured is more interesting. A friend of mine just creates things for his kids, another has small hacks around the home, another is playing with his music setup and creating his own pedals, I run lots of forums and the systems for them.

It doesn't have to be a "Where's your OSS contributions?", or a "Work outside of work".

You just cannot make someone deeply interested not take an interest outside of work.

The hard bit is how to detect this fundamental curiosity, because I agree strongly with others that it isn't "What are your side projects, where are your OSS contributions?". It may surface in many more subtle ways, mostly private noodling around, wondering how things work, and could they be made better.

For an internal project over a certain size for a large enough organization you actually want people that will just do their thing, be happy, collect a pay check and carry on.

your über 10x coder won't make any difference in these environments.

There are only two reasons. You either aren't productive enough, which means you are bad at your core job, or you are taking on too much, which means you either lack the social skills to say No, the maturity to manage your time, or that you are fucking around too much at the office. Basically, anything more than 40 hours means that you are either bad at your job or at managing your job.

That said, coding outside of the office with no particular purpose in mind is a lot of fun. The whole "play" thing. It's important to keep it at the level of play, don't get too serious. Serious ruins the point of play.

The word passion to me implies an level of emotional obsession that borders on (or actually is) unhealthy.

I enjoy programming, and find it interesting. But I'm not passionate about it.

I believe there are many people like her in the industry and they are the ones who do the majority of the work.

I have a super passionate colleague. It's actually counter productive working with him because most of our energy goes into design debates and office politics and competition

In other words, I believe there's an intrinsic quality one needs to become a good programmer, but it doesn't necessarily manifest as passion.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of companies out there doing CRUD web development and there are lots of jobs that only require mediocre skills.

And it turns out that the Tech shortage is so bad that those mediocre jobs still pay very good salaries.

This is why tech bootcamps are so successful. It is not that these bootcamps are able to pop out high skilled developers in 3 months that are better than Top Tier CS grads. Thats ridiculous.

They are so successful because it turns out that you don't really have to be that great of a programmer to do CRUD web dev at your average startup. But these startups still pay insanely good salaries when compared to the median US work wage.

I am sure there is a place for people who are not passionate but I don't even want to work there. I have been programming computers for more than 30 years and it still excites me. I want to build great things and make the small things perfect. There is always a place for passion and always something interesting about everything.

Being excited and enthusiastic hasn't killed me yet.

It is not about huge hours. The world is full of dumbasses who work massive hours and write shit code.

If your passion is programming in general, chances are you have a broad experience background, which is not always perceived in a positive light by management. I recently had a meeting with a potential client who told me they would not hire me because they found it strange and implausible that someone would be able and willing to do both script language programming and also develop native modules in C.

I would say, all things being equal, non-passionate developers are very feasible career-wise and absolutely essential for many projects, because chances are they're going to be doing the brunt of the work.

Especially in a team, these players are important for follow through. I like to think of teams as RPG adventuring parties: you need people from all character classes to make it work. While all-mage or all-beserker parties can sometimes pull through, a balanced and diverse approach is a better generalized strategy. You want tanks and support characters.

The key point being that programming really requires that the programmer is deeply interested in doing it.

That is the first mindset that I will implant in any young programmer, make the computer work harder, but learn to work less yourself.

Forget about working more hours, you will get older, you will get ill, specially if you work too hard. Start working today in making the machine do your work.

As a professional you should be able to compete working 40 hours a day easily. If not you are making something wrong. You need more skills and not just learning a new language(of the week).

I will study less programming and start studying other things like art(music o painting) or psychology(how humans work) because that way you can improve interfaces and your own tools.

In fact I had this education myself, and I can do lots of things that other people can't. For me is obvious how to make it and why but for the rest of the people is very hard. I realize now that is my education in those areas that people had not studied because in theory they are useless for the technical work.

When I see programmers that only know about programming I see how fast they dig their own grave, just working too much. Maintenance goes up over time and they could barely sustain their own code. They can't progress as they are stuck with old code maintenance. The code gets too complex to understand just using text alone.

Quite interesting they only develop visual tools and test when asked and for non programmers. I see it as people not wanting to use screwdrivers because they have their nails or teeth, but technically able to do it for others.

They ignore how to make great documentation,structure the code(to constantly reduce complexity) or how to communicate graphically in order to make tools that make their life easier and life gets harder and harder for them.

I am training right now people and I teach them something as simple as using (Dear) IMGUI over their own program to visually control their own code and memory. After a month or so they start getting it on a big AHA!! moment why they were so much unproductive before.

I really, REALLY, enjoy solving problems that will make people's lives easier and while implementing the solutions will frequently get the feeling it's not the right way to code it or it's not the most elegant way, and will devote a sane amount of time trying to make it better (after making it work), which usually ends up with the application of the SOLID principles (fun fact, there are more than the 5 letters).

However, ignoring the rare events where a problem consumes me and makes me go almost a day without eating properly (relax, I drink a lot of tea/infusions and I'm not exactly thin, also not obese) just wanting to make it work and feeling energised, I too don't feel incredibly motivated to put time into coding after work.

After work I usually read about current affairs (politics, economy, science), read some pages of a book, play a game and binge watch something on a streaming service. Not the first time the solution to a problem comes to me when I'm almost falling asleep, or sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night.

Guess people are different, which doesn't mean people that aren't always demonstrating passion are incompetent or will provide worse results. Do I dare to say they will be the most consistent in the long run, though a mix of these types of people will probably be the best combination, as they will support and learn from each other?

Under this point of view, we should compare software engineering with painters, musicians, writers. Isn't it expected from this guys to "breath" their areas even when they are "not working"?

I'm not saying that I agree with that point of view. Just adding another point of view to the discussion.

* credits are not mine.

> As my Aïkido professor says, the more you practice, the better you get …

Oh, sure, because every Aikido practicioner who has practiced the same number of hours has the same ranking. (That's sarcasm, btw...)

> Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that 40h per week is the most productive work load [...] But then, how do passionate people manage to remain productive when working more than 40 hours per week ?

I don't know what studies you're quoting, but this just makes no sense. For the same work output over longer time, you will have more productivity. The trick is keeping up the pace. At the same time, there is absolutely no evidence that "passionate" programmers are more productive for the same amount of time than "non-passionate" programmers.

And yes, you need time out of the box to make out-of-the-box solutions. Archimedes' bathtub, Newton's apple, the Apple Computer's fonts, ...... you really have to get the hell out of the office once in a while.

> That is when things get tricky. Neither can you jump ship for the next cool and risky startup where you’ll do great things, nor can you find enough time moonlighting to improve your skills

I have opposite experience. Just before becoming parent, I quit my cubicle job. I started 'cool risky opensource startup', to be at home with a child.

9-5 had lot of overhead (socializing, commute, babysitter...). Now I can organize my time better, work longer and do more work, while spending more time with my kid.

"The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees' morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, New York)."

Seems like a large sample. I don't see how an employee who happens to be a developer would somehow be different.

I am pretty sure there are many accountants/writers/designers/brick layers who are passionate about their jobs, and many who aren't.