[nocman]

I hear what you are saying, but in fairness to the author of the article, he did say he would like people to care about their vocation.

Also, I'd rather have a surgeon who was skilled, cared about his profession, and also was not burned out from overexertion trying to be "passionate" about his job.

I think the medical field in general (not unlike the software development field in general) often undervalues people's time outside of work. It's fair to say that some fields require more investment from those that work in them, but in every field there is a point when investing even more of your time and effort is counter-productive.

[westoncb]

> from overexertion trying to be "passionate" about his job.

This phrasing captures the issue exactly, imo. The split is between someone who is "trying" to be "passionate" about their work, versus someone for whom that's just an apt description.

It seems like the discussions around "passion" tend to ignore that distinction. I think the problem could be alternately framed in terms of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation without losing much. The passionate developer is a proxy for someone intrinsically motivated by the act of constructing software, vs. extrinsic motivation, which would be something like salary.

So if someone is trying to be "passionate" about their work, that will not convert them from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic (in most cases!), so of course it's seen as empty.

The surgeon question can be restated in these terms too: prefer a surgeon who's driven by saving lives and refining their expertise in this particular mode of doing it, or a surgeon driven by salary?

(Of course this is a simplified/extremal statement of the problem, and a false dichotomy if taken literally: basically everyone is somewhere between those two poles.)

[nocman]

One issue is indeed when people are trying to project the whole "I'm realy into this whole software development thing!" vibe. Genuine excitement about something can almost always be differentiated from this, in my experience.

But the issue I'm more concerned about is this idea that you have to live, breathe, drink, eat, sleep software development 24 hours a day, or you are a lesser developer than someone else who does. There are obviously different levels of investment people are willing and/or capable to commit to a job in this field, and yes some people are better at it than others. However, I think many in our profession are being pushed to invest too much of their lives into career-centric tasks, and as a result will end up being less effective as developers than they could be. I think this is perhaps even more dangerous than being lazy, and not keeping your skills relatively current.

Having a good balance in life is the way to avoid burnout. It is way too easy to leave your family and/or friends in the wake. There are infinitely more things to learn, and you can't do it all. These are choices I personally struggle with, as I'm sure many others here do.

It doesn't help that almost all of the job listings are asking for people "passionate about X" (where X can be almost anything related to development), or looking for "a Rockstar Y developer", or some other such buzzword-laden description. It seems to me, that there is a way to describe people who want to do high quality work, who care about their results, but at the same time have a life outside of work. However, although I see some job listings where the writers appear to be trying, a lot of them leave me thinking "no need to apply there, I just want a job doing a lot of things that I am good at and enjoy most of the time. I don't want to join a cult."