Sunday, December 14, 2008

Passion - Do You Have It? And For What?

 When you have passion for your work, it hardly seems like work - you want to solve the problems in front of you.  You get a kick from constructing the solution in code.

The dark side of passion is that it often get used as a club to convince you to work long hours under bad conditions because doing otherwise is "unprofessional" - if you are professional, you are supposed to love the work.

Bull.  You are professional if you hate being made to ship unfinished product just because someone in Sales needed a bigger bonus this quarter, so they pulled in a deadline.  You hate working overtime to fix bugs that made it to the field because of those rushed releases.

Over on Creating Passionate Users (apparently defunct) is a post about this topic, and although it is written more for game developers, it rings true.  Passion should not be getting you to do things you don't like; it should be getting you to do things you love. 

So look around at your job, and see if you can find the passionate developers - and you will find they are not the ones who don't care about working overtime, just to be seen as "team players" - they're the ones who prefer to make their code better so that they rarely need to work overtime.








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