[wwww4all]

As senior engineer, I always advise people to avoid companies that put any emphasis on intangible things like passion as hiring criteria.

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.

[nikisweeting]

We don't necessarily hire for passion, but what we do care about is "will we enjoy working alongside this person for 6+ hours a day for years".

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.

[wwww4all]

It’s your company and you’ll learn the same lessons every other companies have learned in the past.

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.

[nikisweeting]

Oh I'd say in that regard we've already failed, we're not really massively profitable and not planning on getting any kind of "hockey stick" or exit. We're a slow growth services/consulting company that cares more about working on interesting fun stuff with our friends than pure profit.

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.

[tolbish]

Out of curiosity, what so intriguing about devopsy/documentation/maintenance stuff?

[nikisweeting]

I don't know but I love it! I started as a sysadmin and I like organizing and categorizing things, setting up config, writing docs, managing CI/CD systems, setting up git processes, etc. all that stuff is my jam even now that I spend most of my time managing or doing full-stack dev stuff.

[tolbish]

I could probably learn a lot from you.