Passion Not Required: It's OK to Only Program for a Paycheck
exceptionnotfound.net
exceptionnotfound.net
Yes, of course passion isn't required for a paycheck. You're preaching to the choir who are already receptive to that message and nod in agreement.
The issue is that some of the others in the industry who you don't control such as founders, hiring managers, co-workers, etc do care about passion and use it as a important factor to hire you.
To answer the inevitable "pharmacists don't dispense medicine on the weekends as a fun hobby so why are programmers who don't have side-projects being discriminated against?!?" ... it's because programming (unlike pharamacy) is an activity that many genuinely enjoy doing for fun on personal time. For those, programming is similar to expressing a creative outlet like playing guitar. It's inevitable that some people prefer these types of programmers.
Hiring preferences for those with passion are not unique to computer programmers. Here's engineer Ben Krasnow (of popular channel Applied Science) explaining how a "personal portfolio" helps him stand out and get good non-programming jobs:
- deep link and watch for ~30 seconds: https://youtu.be/ihbYtxaEDSk?t=248
Another Ben K video covering the same topic but mentioning Valve & GoogleX and choosing between prospective candidates:
- deep link: https://youtu.be/4RuT2TlhbU8?t=112
So, if you're an electrical engineer getting angry at the world because employers shouldn't "expect" you to design circuits for fun on the weekend, don't be surprised if they hire Ben instead of you.
Source: I've subcontracted and hired folks in both tech and infrastructure.
> Adults demand stacks of money to build a tower to reach the carrot.
To be fair, everything I just wrote is merely a crass characterization-- just like everything you wrote.
You really need both kinds of people to make an organization run smoothly. You need people who enjoy the nose-to-the-grindstone stuff and you need people that are dreamers.
This is prejudice, nothing more. In the literal sense of the word "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience". You simply can't say what people are like in advance.
EDIT: a more appropriate definition: preconceived judgment or opinion.
Edit: Not preconceived either. This developed after almost 7 years of hiring people directly for me. People I had to then work with everyday. I dont have a hiring manager.
Otherwise, it is pretty much the textbook definition?
It's actually sad because once you've been around the block a few times with these kinds of managers, your passion starts to feel like a dimming light bulb until it's totally put out. And at that point you're only in it for the paycheck while you're mentally checked out. Just look at the videogame industry and its famous burnout stories to see what happens when you hire a bunch of passionate programmers.
It takes more risk, but you could do your own thing, or join a company that has different types of leadership that won't exploit you this way (or in a way that is mutually beneficial in it's exploitation, as it were). These have tradeoffs.
Being resentful of it (especially in a hiring context) comes across about as well as someone who goes on a date and rants about how much their ex sucks. It isn't about the company you're interviewing with (though if you see the same things you would like to avoid, then please avoid it and feel free to tell them why respectfully! In my experience it's just pissing in the wind though.) - it's more about frustration and pent up unresolved emotional baggage.
No one's perfect. Employers/employees are trying to find a match and work out a deal they can both agree with. An employer looking for 'passion' who is abusing it isn't any different than someone dating who is looking for someone to enable their alcoholism or whatever.
It sucks, but you're not going to change the alcoholic by ranting at them on your first date. You will almost certainly never change the alcoholic - and in fact, not your job. Even going as far as a public shaming tirade MIGHT help, but most people are just going to wonder why you care so much and discount you, until it's an army of folks like you.
It's about finding something that works for you. And that means taking care of yourself too.
What my prior experiences with this have done is hardened my resolve that my own personal time is indeed 100% my own time. How I choose to spend it is none of the companies' business. Though it does seem like I'm still somewhat triggered by the word "passion" - it just seems like a nice way to beat around the bush for exploitation, especially when coming from those who stand to gain the most from your passion. My attitude now is a bit more cynical in that "what's in it for me" is front and center, and if I'm not satisfied with the answer I will move on.
I'm semi-passionate, but probably not passionate enough to get a job at somewhere like Valve. That's fine. However, if the local software shop wants a passionate developer but isn't willing to provide the pay and benefits commensurate with their demands, that's a problem. Employers can't expect to hire passionate, experienced developers when they pay well under market rates and only want to offer 15 days of PTO starting out.
The opposite, that people without side projects aren't passionate, simply doesn't hold true. I've met and worked with engineers that were extremely passionate about programming but who had better things to do on the weekend than code (outdoors, sports, spending time with their kids). Their passion showed in continuously learning, often about things that were related to what they were working on, and an interest in computing. They'll make out time to learn or better use any time you set aside for that at work to improve their skills or mentor. They exclusively code from 9-5 but it's a completely different mindset than the folks who only treat is as a job or worst that actively try to stop coding.
The later are probably the people that you really want to filter out of any hiring pipeline, and I've met my share. Learning a new codebase is to be avoided, reading code is a waste of time and so on. A lot of them try to get in management as soon as they can, and you can imagine the results.
The original article says "Programming is not a calling. It is not a way of life." and I'm willing to believe that to be true for most people.
But for me, building cool stuff IS my way of life. And for most of my friends, too. If I ask in our group chat "what did you do on the weekend", I'll get replies like "I wrote for my book", "I tailored XY", "I built VFX in Unity", "I did an online game jam", "I 3d-printed Z".
Every one of my friends and everyone in my close programming group has his/her own stories about the time when they could only barely finish a really cool hobby project. In line with that, cool stuff that people built is one of our Slack channels at work. If we would ever hire someone who's not passionate about coding or engineering, I'm not sure they would be able to fit in.
Plus, being genuinely interested in the engineering work that other people are doing can open a lot of doors for you.
Passion also matters if you don't demonstrate the skills required for the role but get hired anyway. Being hired as a PFY, or unpaid high school/college internships, or "boss's son/daughter cleans the office" type jobs, especially since some of these roles aren't standing hires, but are "created" for the right candidate.
I think that the value a "paychecks are ok" sort of piece is two-fold. (1) For people who think that they have to pretend to be passionate because their employer cares, we want you to know that other kinds of jobs exist. There are trade-offs; maybe you'll be working in ad-tech, or some other boring cog of business logic, but they exist. (2) For young people (especially minorities) who think that "programming is not for them" because they're not thinking about it 24/7, we say, "there are places here where you can belong".
The folks I've met who are most passionate about designing circuits for fun on the weekend are the 9-to-5, spend-time-with-the-kids types. You don't have time to design circuits on the weekend if you're doing 80-hour work weeks. Don't believe recruiting sites that say "we hire people with passion" when they really mean "we want unpaid overtime", ugh.
I'd argue that they're aiming for the idiots who are selectively hiring for someone's passion for software development.
So long as these people exist, these essays have value. If only one person is convinced that maybe, just maybe, selecting for passion is a bad idea when hiring, the essay has done its job admirably.
I left for teaching English, and I see the same thing. Every advert wants someone passionate, and then once they are in oh we need this covered, this extra work 'think of the children' style, and the same burn out occurs.
I'm passionate about one particular sub-sect of software, but I've learnt my lesson. I most certainly won't get a job doing it. I'll continue to tinker in my free time, and keep it for myself.
You're allowed to be passionate about something during work hours, and then different things after work.
For most engineers, competition are non existent. Just simply keeping up with tech stack and delivering solutions is enough to place in top 1% of engineers.
Yes, 1x engineers are just as valuable and rare as 10x or 100x engineers. Because vast majority of engineers, including engineers in FAANG companies, are negative producers.
Simply being in it for paycheck and being 1x engineers will have long lucrative career.
Can confirm from 2 decades of experience as a dev. It's not rare to find negative ROI devs. I used to be one even.
As a matter of fact, current team is still fixing tech debt left by 2 previous devs.
It's infuriating because most of the tech debt is related to lazyness, not lack of competence. They had all the time in the world, all attention whenever necessary, PRs reviews from senior devs and still decided to cut corners most of the times. Some got past Pull Request reviews and we are left to deal with the mess.
On the other hand some devs that are not very technically experienced but are proactive and have positive personality makes great additions despite not knowing much.
It's okay to treat your job as a job. Save your passion for your personal interests.
If you're passionate about programming that's awesome, but use it for code you can do yourself. Nobody can cancel your personal project because business priorities change.
It makes it so much easier if you can internalize that your coding at work does not represent your worth as a person. In many cases the coding you do at work is going to be significantly different than the code you do for yourself.
Is it realistic to expect a parent in their 40s have the same level of passion as a single engineer in their 20s? If not, passion can become a shorthand for age-discrimination.
Does passion, as mentioned below, mean late nights fueled by monster drinks? If so, does it become a shorthand for 'people with disabilities need not apply'? ( I have a condition where "lack of sleep" means "more likely to have a seizure" )
Does passion preclude people with religious obligations?
If the only people with passion are young health atheists with no family or time commitments then passion is discriminatory, and it valuable to have a discussion about what effect that has on our industry and our society.
This lets me drop to a more effective conversation and focus on playbook and what needs to happen.
Once you can get past the need for inspiration, it becomes more real and honest about what people need to do.
I'm guessing the issues with someone who's saying they want better work environment, better team, more interesting work, etc is that it's going to hard to make them perfectly happy and there's no work or team that's ideal?
What we often forget about 'passion' is that it can also manifest as toxic ego. I have to work exceptionally hard to control the toxic ego within myself, and money is the focusing thing.
Do I want to manifest as a creative artist now, OR do I want to retire early?
I have biased for retiring early and gaining perspective such that my future art is at the next level. For instance, my future art is finishing my silly language: http://www.adama-lang.org/
Instead of chasing down donations and trying to build a sustainable open source company, I'll just collect my 3.5% from my portfolio and have fun. I'll dance in the field.
My passion is writing but it's not something I can do full time. Having a day job pays the bills and provides the structure I need to be productive outside of work.
I'm still excellent at my job and helpful to my coworkers but they aren't my life. Jobs, and the relationships with them, end.
edit: To be clear, I actually do have passion for my work, but that does not mean I want to be doing it for 60 or 80 hours a week. In fact overworking and turning the rest of my life upside down is a good way to lose that passion.
Maybe others have heard "you must be willing to put your work family first" or "you can use your vacation time, but do you really need to?" I have not heard either of these in my career. No where (large company, small company, private company, publicly trade company, company founded the previous year or a company founded 125 years previously) had anyone said or implied expectations other than my actual family should come first. Every where I worked, ensuring that we took sufficient vacation time was encouraged (although I have worked with people that misunderstand that vacation time means that you don't work, and that checking email is working).
More subtly, However, is how companies handle "crunch time," (again, this has been a thing in pretty much every company I've worked at regardless of size, age, or industry). No one is saying "this is more important than your family," but they will say "we need to get this done by X date." The managers I have respected understand that there are sacrifices to do this and do something to make it up (e.g., give bonus vacation days). But on our end, we have a paycheck because our company takes in revenue - our job is to do the things that ensure we continue to ensure revenue, we can't just say "I wrote the program, I'm out."
However, there is something to keeping your management accountable that this is a career for us, not a charity. If you want us to stick around, you have to pay us. If you want to build a team that people want to work on, we need passionate people but we also need people representing a diversity of skills, interests, race, gender, ways of thinking, etc. Many of the people I've enjoyed working with are certainly passionate about programming, but they had passions outside of work and coding. They have hobbies that include reading fiction, running, building stuff with Arduinos, or doing community service. They spend time with their families and friends.
I also agree with the article as it rejects the "this is how to be a real programmer" mentality. It's easy for that to introduce bias about who a group hires, promotes and works to retain (or the people we as a software engineering community tend to attract). There are lots of ways to be a "real" programmer (whatever that's supposed to mean).
>(although I have worked with people that misunderstand that vacation time means that you don't work, and that checking email is working) I may be misunderstanding you here. Seems like checking your email (presumably for emergency situations needing attention) is work. It should not be a requirement while on vacation (like a multi-day type, not one day/half day off). And if the person taking vacation is so vital that they need to check email that should be an explicit conversation with team/leadership. It's not something we all implicitly expect a person to do.
Also you're thinking from the perspective of the customer, not from the perspective of the people who have to work with that surgeon every day. As a colleague of that surgeon, you'll probably enjoy working with someone who shows up to work enthusiastic about being there more than someone who shows up to work grumpy every day.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/30/22257950/go-read-this-sof...
Most hiring managers seem to be looking for candidates that can take a feature, ticket, or idea and just make it happen. Which often requires someone with decently mature experience and a variety of skills. They then use Passion as a strong indicator for this kind of success.
Passion can also be used as an indicator for people who are willing to work more than what they are paid for or a way to ask do you have responsibilities, limitations, disabilities that prevent you from writing code on the weekends and/or evenings?
I think it's safe to say, that if passion is being used as a gating question or primary metric for hiring decisions it's likely that it won't work to meet a company’s hiring needs.
If Passion is used as part of a constellation of data to help inform and build out a broader understanding of a potential candidate, it's likely to have minimal negative consequences and might even be helpful.
I would rather work alongside someone who has some enthusiasm for something in life than someone who has none. In fact it would make me not want to go to work if no one there has any excitement for anything. Hiring decisions are not purely company-profit driven, how much people enjoy their work environment directly affects burnout, work/life satisfaction, and desire to improve/grow.
However if we get a more competent candidate who likes gardening more than programming, we'll absolutely choose them over the pure passion person because they'll do the job better. They just have to show that competence in some other way, e.g. via the interviews or past job accomplishments.
On the other hand, I can't imagine someone with tons of OSS contributions who _isn't_ passionate about programming at some level.
Because excitement in any form is contagious, and I'd rather work alongside someone who is excited about something than someone who is not.
As an employee, I will burn out much faster in an environment where no one wants to be there than an environment where people share their curiosities and passions, even if they are not immediately work related.
Those are often correlated but they don't have to be.
It’s highly subjective and leads to in group thinking and monoculture dependencies. Passion is usually fleeting.
My advice is to demonstrate perseverance. Show the drive for professional solutions, analytics on metrics to discern what works and doesn’t work.
I would rather work alongside someone who comes to work gushing about a new succulent they potted over the weekend, and who is ready to work to earn more to buy more plants but doesn't necessarily love coding, than someone who shows up grumpy and has no enthusiasm of any kind to share.
Certainly hiring a only "passionate 10x coders" will ruin your business because they'll spend the whole time reimplementing databases for fun instead of doing the work. But excitement of any kind is contagious, and it helps everyone's mental health to work in an environment where there is excitement/curiosity of some kind, even (especially) non-work-related.
People are usually passionate about fun, interesting things. People are not passionate about boring, tedious things. Customers pay big bucks to have people do the boring, tedious things correctly.
Who is going to sanitize inputs to prevent basic sql injection hacks? Who is going to write basic unit tests to get at least 50% code coverage? Who is going to code review for basic functionality and quality standards?
Most companies ignore all the tech debt, and hope they exit before the debt comes due. Most companies fail.
Good luck.
I love doing the tedious devopsy/documentation/maintenance stuff that other people don't enjoy, so a lot of that stuff falls on my shoulders or gets spread around evenly so the people who don't enjoy it aren't stuck with it full-time.
When I leave, that stuff will get passed on to others, but we've built a culture around caring about tech debt and long-term health, and splitting that workload between interesting fun things and not-so-fun things, so I have faith that it won't collapse.
The passionate ones are those who work on their own stuff. Either by figuring out how to monetize their passion projects, or working for Big Tech where you can get paid to continue your research. The passionate ones who don't future out how to work on their own projects are probably poor hires, since clearly they are missing some critical component to success in the industry.
I would argue that this particular attitude is probably going to stagnate your career.
> You can still be a quality developer even if:
> You don't tweet, or read blogs, or spend your free time learning new frameworks and languages.
The march of technology never stops. Either you:
- get lucky and work in a sub-field that doesn't have much change year-to-year, so you can stay there indefinitely.
- get lucky and work a job that offers enough flexibility that upskilling at work is possible.
- don't get lucky and have to upskill in your free time.
- slowly lose employment prospects.
Those first and last points are kind of related. I've seen people work at a company for years, then those years turn to decades, and they realize that they have no marketable skills outside of their current role because they never needed to grow.
Plus, if you don't stay abreast of technology trends, then the people you work with who do keep up will be the ones deciding the future technology of your company and you won't be in a position to gauge how good of a fit it will be or what your personal opinions of it are.
I do as much upskilling at work as possible, but there's just not enough time in the day to do billable work, while staying relevant. Especially since products aren't simple anymore. Most new products you'll be introduced to as a dev are complicated enough to warrant some training time before using.
but caching is:
I'm trying to eat better and improve the quality of my sleep. I'm exercising regularly. I've recently started practicing guitar again because I want to be a better player.
If you had similar goals, would you describe yourself as passionate about your diet? About your sleep? Passionate about working out or playing guitar?
I have been passionate about programming for about a 15 years. Unfortunately, my love of programming has been largely unrequited; I still genuinely suck at it. I know people who has been programming for half this time, who tell me that they don't particularly enjoy it, but are light years ahead of me.
And yet I keep at it because other things I tried aren't nearly as fun.
Successful people do things because they need to get it done to move forward. It’s part of process and must be accomplished.
Fleeting emotions like passion doesn’t lead to success.
Determination, drive, perseverance, and any process that make one work towards achievement usually leads to success.
However, it's hard to be a be a problem solver without some passion for the sort of problems you are facing. That doesn't mean that you must spend time outside of work on it, just care about it what you are doing while on the job. One can be very passionate about their job, but enforce limits on the job so it doesn't encroach on their other passions in life (like family).
Provided that I was fresh out of college back then, it took me a more than a year to realize that I was being exploited. Now I'm not a passionate worker but I'm not lazy as well. I show up, do the best I can do, and when my shift is over I'm out.
I make almost 6 times what I made 3 years ago, my new employer is extremely content with me and I have all the time energy to do what I'm really passionate about.
How much salary would you give up for passion?
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-07-20
There are lots of amazing, passionate YouTube, tik tok performers. Only very few make any money.
Someone offering a salary reduction for passion clearly isn't going to provide motivation any more than a suitor who just asks about how much money you or your parents make and how much is willed to you would love you.
But "work on a small team without the bueracracy on something neat but we can't pay AAA salary" does pull experienced employees from the big guys who want a change of pace.