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My passion is to my family, my craft, and to my own personal projects and ventures. If you hire me for money you'll get my talent, my time, my undivided attention, my friendly demeanour, and you might mistake a display of excitement or passion here and there because a juicy problem was solved with elegance, to passion to your company but it's just the passion to my craft. Passion (and I agree - ninja and rockstar) should be removed from the hiring lexicon.

I would go even further - passion is the promise to stuff an employee's life with emotional bullshit.

Some people actually need this from work, in particular those who have very little interests outside work. That's why it works best for the young and restless.

> Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are?

We have a word that literally translates as "professional pride." Now I'm not sure it has the right vibe in English, but it captures the idea that you do high quality work and you wouldn't do a sloppy job, even if the job sucks.

For example, I would like such a plumber, because I know they will be careful not to make a mess, and they will clean up after them, and they are careful and will double check their work to make sure it's fully done and solid and not going to leak.

I don't expect them to be passionate about working with clogged pipes full of literal shit. I'm OK with them not wanting to spend 16 hours a day doing plumbing; if they only do three days a week but perform a respectful job, that is perfectly fine. In fact I'd be a little concerned if they said they're passionate about plumbing..

> What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work

Enjoying the work. That's it.

To me, passion is something much deeper and even intimate. If you devote your life to something and you'd do it even when it doesn't pay the bills, I could accept it as passion. Otherwise, it's just a job that you enjoy.

> We have a word that literally translates as "professional pride."

Where are you from and what is the word?

Finland. "Ammattiylpeys."

How do you pronounce that?

Uh, with difficulty :D For starters, English doesn't have the /y/ vowel or the geminated /tt/ sound…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOWSAJJ1xmM

I love it! :-)

Sounds like "conscientious"

I learned that when I lived 6 months in an Ashram, they called it Karma Yoga. What it usually meant in practice was easy task, wrong tools. Like clearing the entire area around the building from solid ice using a shovel, or cleaning a thousand small potatoes with a tiny brush. The kind of tasks it's very difficult to feel anything like passion for. But it's still perfectly possible to enjoy doing a good job, even without expecting anything in return.

You can call that passion, but you can't demand passion. Passion doesn't work that way. You can certainly foster this passion in your employees by giving them real buy-in, making their contributions matter, and having them benefit from the success of the project.

I'm passionate about the project I currently work for, but it's probably the first professional project ever (in 20 years) where I feel this way. And I feel this way because I was involved right from the very early start, I've got tons of context, and saw this develop from the very first prototype that I wrote to its current state. I did the job interviews for most of the rest of the team. I may only be a freelancer working for a major bank, but man do I feel a lot of ownership for this project. I love this project, but I notice not all of my team mates do. You clearly can't force or demand this kind of passion. Certainly not up-front.

I still work only 4 days a week, by the way.

I always thought it was an American thing(the asking for passion part) and a culture gap between them and "us" foreigners/Europeans. But it sounds like it's not exclusive to foreigners working with Americans.

The way I see it, I bring a lot of experience to the table as well as my passion to solve problems. But it's extremely hard to be passionate for the "vision" of the 20th company trying to revolutionize log processing(when the founders never even did their due diligence) for example. I get that the founders may have had some personal experience that led them to be passionate about a certain problem.

But when they ask me to help them in a specific topic they lack experience in and then ask me to be passionate about working the next 2 years doing mundane work I personally think it's incredibly disrespectful towards me or anyone in my position.

I used to try to explain why I thought like that, but nowadays I mostly agree with the other people here and treat it as a red flag WRT how complicated it will be to get work done around these kinds of founders.

Personal dating ad: "person wanted for passionate relationship." What's wrong with this ad is that passion is a byproduct of chemistry, so you can't "bring" it to a work environment, but sometimes you+work+team click and it happens. You could have an inherent passion for a cause, but you would still be subject to chemistry.

Passion is good, but it should never be used to overwork or underpay people. Never shit on someone else for having a good work/life balance and accuse them of not being passionate or whatever. That's a toxic work culture and honestly, given how much money is going around in software development, it shouldn't be necessary.

Pay people if you need them to work overtime. In hard cash, not vague promises. And if you've burned through your VC money already, don't try and push through on debts; cut your losses, give your employees plenty of heads-up, and pay them before your money runs out.

I mean if you don't want to hire them part-time, someone else will.

> feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are?

I guess that when you state that, you assume relevant compensation.

But often companies put that in job description when they search for „people who want to do high quality work wherever they are”, literally.

In worst cases they end up exploiting more naive or less experienced workers.

True, but you don't know which type of company it is until you talk to them or do some research right? I wouldn't want to just assume that when so many good companies use that word as well.

> I wouldn't want to just assume that when so many good companies use that word as well.

Name three.

I'm yet to see a single company expecting "passion" that would be doing something worthwhile, or even something one can actually be passionate about.

It is a bit relative to the person I would imagine. Some people might be passionate about working at Canva, some people might be passionate about working at Instagram, etc...

Depends a bit on what you enjoy doing and how you want to fill your day I guess.

There is a big difference between an employee feeling passionate about their work because of things like the team, etc and a boss telling an employee "YOU MUST BE PASSIONATE!"

That is passion, the issue is when the reason companies care about it is b/c they want to exploit it i.e. pay people less.

So, passion is a a good thing, assuming it doesn't (negatively) interfere with compensation. If you want passion, pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't want passion - you want leverage.

Passion and having a problem with 3 days is probably the red flag

I'd call it passion! But it's like mindcrime said, mostly a case of word inflation in this particular context.

So for me it's not what word I'd use instead of "passionate," but what word they're using "passionate" instead of. The most likely candidates I'd put forth: Naive, positivist, perfectionist, agreeable, friendly, excitable.

I think teams with too many "passionate" (in their use) people run into serious problems.

> What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work you do because of the mission and/or technical challenge and/or team? Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are?

As someone who has this - I have a dedication to solving what I think the business's needs are over what my management thinks the business's needs are. It's sometimes actually quite useful and sometimes not.

This is something key that I feel most employers looking for “passion” don’t get.

I have a lot of passion for the small startup business I’m working for... I have a vision for their product, the ability to execute that vision, and a strong sense of ownership and desire to put out a great, premium product.

Problem is, my vision and the owner’s vision are not the same. He likes quick fixes and focusing on the daily grind, I want to work out big, longer term things. For as much as the owner wants people to share his passion in what he’s building, I know for certain he wants that passion to be “blindly working for whatever he says is important at the moment and not being too passionate beyond that”.

That kind of passion, IMO, is unrealistic and unfair, but I suspect it’s what most employers really want.

I would call that professionalism

> "What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work you do because of the mission and/or technical challenge and/or team?"

That's passion.

> "Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are?"

That's professionalism, although one might also describe it as being passionate about behaving professionally.

I have a passion for the work I do part time. It is because of the technical challenges though. I fill the non work time with other technical challenges most of the time.

I do not think passion and part time work are at odds at all.