[wpietri]

I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no life. I think that's a mistake.

That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful. I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone has a million times that. I can't even count the number of business domains I've had to learn. I can't imagine people keeping up with the pace of change in our field without finding ways to love the work.

In contrast, I've worked with people who learned enough to be employable and then just kinda stopped. I remember one guy, a great manager, who kept giving technical advice based on his Vax BASIC experience at least a decade past the point it was sensible to do so. Or programmers who had basically become fused with legacy systems, only employable until the old code was replaced. It's not impossible to make a career of out that, but it's risky.

Especially given the release cadence of modern frameworks and tools, I think continuous learning is vital. And I think keeping up (or better, keeping up and getting ahead) is much easier to do if people really enjoy the hour-to-hour details of the work.

[anyfoo]

I know exactly what you mean, people being proficient in some very specific legacy domain (Vax BASIC is a good example, another might be AS/400/IBM i by now). Often going above and beyond in their niche expertise.

Though it's hard to get a full picture. Maybe past gigs or other circumstances have given them enough financial stability that they don't strictly need to work anymore. They then continue consulting out of passion for their particular niche, or somewhat opposite because they don't have any drive to learn anything else, but still don't want to retire completely. I feel like the people I have in mind there seem to be in a more good than bad situation.

But I've also encountered the other category you're hinting at, people who are fused to a legacy system (i.e. a particular project at a particular company), not a technology in general. A few friends of mine do that, and they are much younger and much further away from feasible retirement than the aforementioned "gray beards". I sometimes do wonder about their prospects, but, again, no full insight.

[wpietri]

Definitely. If somebody is winding down their career, I totally get just sticking with the thing they know. A couple years back I decided I wanted to try my hand at building a mobile app. Starting from square one kinda sucked; suddenly being bad at something I am used to being good at was a drain. The ROI on a switch like that depends a lot on how many years you expect you can be putting the knowledge to use.

And yeah, I too worry about people who do that early on. Some things will probably last. E.g., I'd bet that Salesforce admins will still be employed 30 years from now. But the odds are not as good for most technologies in use today.

[tartoran]

I find passion and fascination leading to a drive to learn better, faster or quicker, depending on the personality. But I harvesting passion in commercial settings is quite disingenuous. Some people don't have that passion and do quite well, they are in fact very rational and calculated and that is a good thing in some ways as well as those who are more passionate about more abstract things, there is room for quite a variety of types of people and they should all be given freedom to use their own qualities and not be forced to fake qualities that they don't have or are unwilling to share with others.

[wpietri]

I think perhaps words are getting in the way. I don't think passion and reason are contradictory. I think they're complimentary. Competitive chess might be a good example. And plenty of people here are both passionate about various technical topics, but still are very rational about them.

I agree that people shouldn't fake qualities. But neither do I think everybody will be equally good at every job. E.g., I can do sales, but I just don't like it. I'll just never be as good at it as somebody who really enjoys the work.