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by bluedino 3057 days ago
There's nothing wrong with being passionate about your job
3 comments

In a sense not, but it does make it easier to exploit you.

Just look at the game dev industry. Lots of passionate people there, and lots of companies who will exploit that. In the end, those people lose their passion.

Being passionate about work can make you very happy. But always make sure you don't get exploited because of it. You will need to set your limits.

Inherently? No, but it does come with potential for negative externalities.

If you consider that work passion to be a moral virtue and this comes through in your discussions with others, that contributes to pushing society towards a culture of being overworked.

If you try to overtly filter for passion within hiring at a company then that encourages bullshitting and reduces the efficiency of managing employees. You'll be trying to give "passion" benefits to a bunch of secret mercenaries.

If you're non-business inclined and passionate then this can lead to capturing far less of the value that you generate than you otherwise could. This is effectively charity to the business owning class. If you're working for $80k when a few extra conversations—or even just sentences—over the years could have put you at $150k, then that's effectively a yearly donation of $70k to the people in the world who need it the least. Even if you don't care for that money for yourself because you're too busy having fun working to spend it, then that's an awful lot of good you could have done for others that you're failing to do.

What's more with this one is that it also hurts your colleagues by acting as a salary anchor which again, results in a greater share of the value being generated going to the owning class.

Wanting to work all the time and being passionate aren't the same thing.
True, but that’s what people mean in an interview when they ask if you are passionate about I dunno, doing payrolls in COBOL or something