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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

But if you don't have passion? I really don't want to work with you. Life's too short to spend 40 hours a week doing stuff you are apathetic about or with other people who are just going to drag you down.

I don't understand this mindset. If someone is competent at their job and, ideally, personable company, what's the problem working with them just because they aren't Passionate(TM) about whatever you're doing? Do you think the people who build the roads, or repair the power grid after a storm, or stack the shelves at your local store are passionate about their work?

I think sometimes people who enjoy programming and also get paid very well to work as a programmer forget just how lucky they are. Most people don't love their jobs.

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In my experience, competent but unpassionate programmers will do a good job of implementing a flawed spec and be happy about it, because it's management's problem and they get paid the same either way; competent and passionate programmers won't be happy unless the flaws are fixed and they get to make a good product.

Both approaches can work, but it's not good to mix the two personality types within a team as their goals are mutually exclusive.

But a flawed spec is management's problem, and it is management's job to make a call on whether you ship despite any known flaws. A competent (in the professional sense) programmer will follow management's lead even if they personally don't like the decision or aren't happy with the results.

Being passionate about your work does not give you the right to be in charge, in programming or any other field. Yes, good programmers want to make a good product, but as the saying goes, sometimes the best is the enemy of the good. Shipping a product with fewer bugs six months after the money to pay for it runs out... usually doesn't happen, because the money ran out.

Flawed spec? Oh, please. My first job didn't even have a spec. It had two reams of paper worth of MicroFocus COBOL listings and a directive to implement that code's functionality for Windows using Visual Basic 6.

It also had a VB6 codebase that half a dozen contractors had hacked into the sort of unholy mess that even H. P. Lovecraft knew better than to try to write about.

This is no joke, people: every variable was global.

Being competent does though (well I guess its down to the individual workplace).

I certainly take over from my incompetent team leader, because his solutions are not well thought through. They will work fine for a week or two then need constant debugging and tweaking. I have the experience and knowledge to see better solutions. That extra knowledge doesn't come by itself. I constantly try to improve my ability. I read articles about programming techniques and tools.

Yes, competence is what matters.

The problem as you describe it seems to be that your managers did not hire a competent senior developer as the team leader, nor have they fixed their error since.

It is also possible -- I can't tell from just your previous post -- that you are relatively inexperienced and place a lot of weight on the modern/trendy programming techniques and tools you read about, while your team leader is more experienced and sees through the hype.

> I think sometimes people who enjoy programming and also get paid very well to work as a programmer forget just how lucky they are. Most people don't love their jobs.

I forget this all the time, except when I'm programming. I really do love to code, but when I'm away from the computer and I don't feel like coding, I'm actually typically really depressed. At some points in my life, I was lucky to be able to say that I was still alive. Just because someone can get super excited about math and computers doesn't mean that their life is perfect and full of luck either.

It comes from the fact that there are many, many jobs for programmers out there. If you don't actually enjoy your job, then it's at least work having a look out there to see if there is something you'd enjoy more.

Like the person you quoted said, life is too short to spend 40 hours a week doing something you really don't care about.

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