

Why passion is not what you need in a programmer - markdennehy
http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2008/03/31/the-case-against-passion/

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jey
You're just battling a strawman here. Nobody uses "passion" to mean "ignore
everything and only care about coding". Passion means you care about your
work, and care about the outcome, as opposed to being a drone who just cares
about getting a fancier job title or "just paying the bills".

~~~
TheTarquin
Agreed. Also, none of the coders I know are passionate about _programming_.
Rather, they're passionate about making cool stuff.

As the saying goes, programming is not a what, but a how. Hackers don't get
passionate about the act of coding any more than carpenters get passionate
about driving nails.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Whoa...is this true? I thought I was like this because I'm not a hardcore
developer.

~~~
mquander
It's true for the great majority of programmers I know (good and bad), but
it's not true for me. I care a great deal about programming and I'm not
particularly interested in making cool stuff. So there are both sorts.

I'm interested in programming as a tool to give myself a clearer mental model
of language, mathematics, computation, and thought, and I'm interested in
writing and reading code that I find artistically aesthetic and elegant.

(Then again, I wouldn't call myself a 'hacker'. I think 'hacker' implies a
large degree of making-cool-stuffmanship.)

~~~
TheTarquin
Interesting. So, out of curiosity, are you just not particular about projects?
If you had to choose between two arbitrary projects to work on, on what
criteria would you base your choice?

~~~
mquander
I updated my comment to answer the obvious question of what I am interested
in. I program to fulfill my practical needs and for work, but I really am
interested mostly in learning as I do it and in producing code that is really
high-quality, beautiful code (to the degree that the problem domain, my
ability, and my personal taste allows.)

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nlwhittemore
Not to pile on, but the article also seems to somehow assume that passion and
diligent practice/training/hard work are mutually exclusive

~~~
timr
The writer doesn't 'assume' that they're mutually exclusive; he explicitly
makes that part of his argument:

 _"Passion? Has no place in the process at all. Yes, you can use it as a
motivation – but it’s worse than useless if you want to actually succeed.
Passion is fleeting, transient, momentary on the timescales that achievement
requires. For motivation, you need something deeper and more permanent – and
more, you need something that lets you be dispassionate at the same time as
remaining motivated."_

His argument is that 'passion' is detrimental to the kind of diligent practice
necessary to acquire mastery of a subject. So you can disagree with the thesis
of the essay, but you can't really claim that the author is ignoring such a
critical aspect of the argument.

~~~
raganwald
Okay then, I disagree with that critical aspect of the argument and dismiss as
laughably false the following claim: _Passion is fleeting, transient,
momentary on the timescales that achievement requires._

I offer the following thought experiment to justify my position: Pick any ten
people that everyone agrees have achieved something notable. They could be
Olympic athletes, business people, and so forth. Now approach a control group
of people who are ignorant of our argument and ask them: "Which of the
following ten people are passionate about their sport/business/vocation/what-
have-you?"

If on aggregate 25% or fewer of the ten are judged to be passionate, I will
concede the point. If 75% or more are judged to be passionate, I claim that
passion and achievement are not mutually exclusive.

~~~
timr
Fair enough, but your thought experiment boils down to a survey of people's
opinions on the definition of 'passion'. Essentially, you're arguing that the
subordinate definition of 'passion' is more valid than the top-line definition
of 'passion' (in my dictionary -- see below), and I think that's pretty
unconvincing, as arguments go.

When we refer to 'passion' colloquially, we're usually referring to something
so intense that it cannot last for long (e.g. 'passionate love'). Even if you,
personally, don't believe this is true, it's become the basis upon which
certain wankers in our industry exploit their youthful and naive employees. I
think this is the core of the essay, and it's a valid observation,
irrespective of the definition of 'passion' that you happen to prefer. So the
definitional debate is a dodge for the real issue: there are a ton of
"entrepreneurs" these days who are dressing up exploitation in a fancy suit,
calling it sexy, and describing it with words that are conventionally used for
love.

\---

Now, as promised, the definition rom my Mac-tionary:

passion (n): 1) strong and barely controllable emotion: _a man of impetuous
passion_

I grant you that the third and fourth bullets below this definition concern
'enthusiasm', but it's still quite important that the _derivation_ of the word
is from Christian theology, and ultimately from the Latin 'pati', which is 'to
suffer' (the implication being that 'passion' is a form of suffering for a
cause). I think that's intersting, in the current context.

~~~
raganwald
English is what people make of it. My blog was subtitled "passionate
programming" for six years. Never once did I think of passionate programming
as something one suffers for a few hours or days then burns out of with
disillusion.

Have I been wrong all these years?

In any event, the second part of your reply is far more interesting,
especially in conjunction with a recent HN front page page article suggesting
that founders should give employees a bigger taste of early stage liquidation
events.

For that reason, I am upmodding you.

~~~
timr
No, I don't think you were wrong. (Unless you're one of those people who used
the word to mean _"willing to work really hard to make me rich"_ , in which
case, you're both wrong _and_ evil. ;-))

I think that a lot of well-meaning people (like yourself) were using
"passionate" in the 'enthusiasm' sense. My feeling of this essay is that the
author was taking on the people who mean it in the _other_ sense. Personally,
I think they're much more common.

~~~
raganwald
Well, it's rather contextual. If you tell me so-and-so is passionate about
women, I am inclined to assume he or she has many temporary passions for many
different women. If you tell me they're passionate about women's issues, I am
inclined to think this is a matter of conscience that is likely to last a
lifetime.

But just to be clear, if I was thinking passionate about making money in the
business of software, I'd say that :-)

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mgrouchy
I don't understand how passion for programming/software dev/hacking in general
means that its your only focus in the workplace or a signal that you should be
taken advantage of.

I'm passionate about programming because I am passionate about making stuff.
I'm not very handy(carpentry, etc), so in this case a computer, editor and
programming language scratches that itch.

Contrary to the post I think that this is a fairly good indicator of how I am
in the workplace and why I work for a (what a believe to be)cool startup. It
gives me an opportunity to scratch this itch at work so when I am there it has
my full effort/attention.

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tomlin
This article is nonsense.

Passion generates ideas. Ideas have the potential to make life (and
programming technique) more intuitive all around.

Get a new job. Don't hand out your single perspective gripes in the form of
fact.

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wglb
I think this is way off the mark. Professional (and I do believe pg has a good
essay on this) suggests standard approaches to problems and suits and such.
Passion about programming is what drives a programmer to solve that last bit
of the problem at 2 am. These are the people that you want on your team.

On the other hand, if you are building an enterprise software organization,
you are more likely to look for a suit and tie than passion in a programmer.

To answer the question _What does it take to be a good programmer?_ I would
say that first the passion or drive required to work on a problem that seems
impossible in an environment where 50% of the time 80% of the stuff is broken.

~~~
markkanof
Also, if you are building an enterprise software organization, your primary
concern might be something different than having a team that builds the best
software possible. The goal may be to get the bare minimum done for minimal
cost. So passion may be necessary to build truly great software, but not all
organizations that build software are necessarily trying to build great
software. I suppose that speaks to the passion or lack thereof in management.

~~~
dasil003
Incidentally if greatness can be measured in bugs per line of code (which
seems a reasonable, if not complete metric) then NASA writes some of the
greatest software of all time, and I suspect they aren't often up at 2am
hacking away on it willy nilly.

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synnik
I saw the large, red, bolded sentences centered between paragraphs, and my
mind just filtered them out, assuming it was an ad.

It took me a minute to figure out that the bold red text was actually relevant
content.

------
isleyaardvark
It seems like the majority of posts I've read about "passion" in programming
are aimed at discouraging people from becoming programmers. Or to put it
another way: encourage people whose motivation for becoming programmers is
mainly to get a well-paying job to pursue a different vocation.

The article might've been more interesting if the author had discussed it in
terms of discipline being more important than passion.

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antirez
no passion -> no fun -> no superb code.

Many good things spreads from playing. You can do good things with N
professional programmers, but they'll not think out of the box, they'll not be
imaginative. You'll be good but not outstanding.

And when I talk about superb code I'm not talking about the code itself, but
from the point of view of users.

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zb
The response linked in the comments from the author of the original blog post
he's complaining about sums it up pretty nicely:

[http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2008/04/passion-
doe...](http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2008/04/passion-does-not-
mean-total.html)

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afterburner
There is more than one way to skin a cat. (There is more than one way to be
motivated about work.) Why do some assume their way is the best way, or only
way? It works for you; great, thanks for sharing. Now don't diss other
peoples' motivating factors.

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danw
Surely passion can be the motivation for all that training and effort?

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lucifer
"[W]hen you get prostate cancer and the oncologist puts you into the IMRT
machine to zap an area close to your gonads with a dozen different beams of
radiation, you’ll probably find yourself hopeful that a professional wrote the
controller’s software rather than someone who was always chasing the next hot
thing in computing (and maybe never worrying about stupid dull things like
documentation, specifications, tests, code reviews, quality control or that
sort of old-fogie stuff)"

+1

I think it may be helpful to extract a couple of more layers from the analysis
model.

Clearly software "engineering" has been confronting the expected (required!)
transition from an art and craft discipline to a full blown industrial
discipline, and in my reading, the OP is really (only) addressing the required
mindset and the necessary changes in self-perception of the practitioners.

Equally clearly, we are still confronting the transition and frankly are
stumped by some very (very!) fundamental issues that need to be resolved
before software "engineering" can be industrialized to meet the industrial
scale demand for software. (Consider: data persistence and logical process
impedance mismatch; concurrency; etc.)

So, in my view, to argue uniformly against "passion" (we all know what it
means: software geek born to code ;) based on a completely fanciful projection
of the process of software development to the analytical test bed of a
_established_ , _industrialized_ , nearly-scientific, discipline, such as any
sort of applied physics (MechE, EE, whatever), chemistry, etc. is inherently
flawed.

Yes, you don't need (nor want!) "Fuck you" starlets with attitude in your
engineering department. But that is precisely the type of personality that is
going to be constructively useful _on the road to industrialization of
software development_. Because it is the "passionate" geeks that typically
produce breakthroughs, and that is what we need as of now.

Once we have solved the conceptual problem of how to produce software as an
industrial product, then would be a more appropriate time to focus on the
ideal psychology of a "worker" in the software engineering industries.

------
Daniel_Newby
SEMANTIC FAIL.

From a dictionary:

Boundless enthusiasm: _His skills as a player don't quite match his passion
for the game._

The object of such enthusiasm: _Soccer is her passion._

~~~
steamer25
Yep, semantics. The author is focussed on the transient connotation that
'passion' can (but doesn't necessarily) imply. Substitute 'intrinsic
motivation' or 'disciplined enthusiasm' and we're all in agreement.

