[HN Gopher] I'm Not a Passionate Developer
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I'm Not a Passionate Developer
Author : s4i
Score : 36 points
Date : 2023-05-30 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (koodihommia.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (koodihommia.blogspot.com)
| Karupan wrote:
| I'm not passionate when it comes to delivering work at my paid
| job. I have opinions, but don't care if the rest of the team
| wants to go another way. I make myself heard, and move on. I
| think that's a perfectly fine way to make a living.
|
| On the other hand, I'm very passionate about my personal projects
| and how and why I work on them. But I've found that a health dose
| of "I don't care" actually keeps the wheels moving, rather than
| get stuck in an endless cycle of revisiting technical choices,
| design etc.
|
| Not being a passionate developer [?] being bad at your job.
| habitue wrote:
| From time to time this concept of "boring development" etc comes
| up. And to a point I get it: we've all been burned by people
| switching around tech to the latest thing which ends up being
| buggy, poorly supported, and the benefits are nebulous at best
| ("oh, you rewrote this from a python framework to a ruby
| framework? I ... why did you do that? Seems like a lot of work
| for no real benefit...")
|
| But I think this sometimes misses some of the real upgrades that
| exist out there:
|
| - Strong typing really gives a benefit when you're refactoring,
| and other benefits in expressiveness when you can express what
| you want the solution to look like before you write the solution.
|
| - Going from "pile of interleaved CRUD / if statements" to
| designing thoughtful abstractions for your domain can
| simultaneously reduce code complexity and reduce the number of
| bugs you encounter.
|
| I think we sometimes overfit on "well, you say you're doing this
| for code quality reasons, but really you're laundering new-and-
| shiny distractions with code quality as a justification. In the
| end nothing will be different and we'll have wasted a lot of
| time".
|
| But in reality, these things do accrete over time, and some teams
| are dramatically more effective than others due to judiciously
| picking "exciting" things to work on.
|
| I think boring / exciting is a surface characteristic that
| doesn't correlate well with the actual metric you want, which is
| effectiveness and velocity gained. It's like arguing all day
| about whether your car should be red if you want it to go fast,
| it's just completely ignoring the facts on the ground about how
| things work.
| angarg12 wrote:
| One of the happiest persons that I know is a "dispassionate"
| programmer. Let's call him AP.
|
| AP got a job as an intern in a local small company, and has
| worked in the same for over 12 years. His company is a Java shop
| that cranks out run-of-the-mill enterprisey applications.
|
| AP doesn't build microservice architectures or large scale
| services. He doesn't get to use the latest and hottest
| technologies either. In fact he hasn't learned many new techs,
| except when the odd client comes up with a new requirement. AP
| doesn't make tons of money, only slightly above the average
| national wage. Still that afford him a comfortable standard of
| living in his small, low cost of living town.
|
| AP job might sound boring, but he enjoys it. He goes to work
| every day, writes features, and get backs home. He knows and gets
| along well with everyone in the company. After so many years, he
| knows the codebase inside out and the work is easy and
| comfortable. He goes out for lunch with his colleagues and takes
| it easy most days. The company hasn't really been growing, but it
| hasn't gone bust either, sort of keeping a stead stream of work
| and revenue.
|
| AP is not a passionate developer by the American standard. For
| him, his job is a way to pay the bills and put food on the table.
| He doesn't follow tech blogs or podcast, doesn't fiddle with new
| frameworks or languages. Sometimes might get a passing interest
| in some cool new tech, but doesn't spend hours of his own time
| invested in pet projects or open source. In fact I hardly ever
| know what he is up to at work since he seldom talks about it.
|
| So what is AP passionate about? He might not tell you about his
| latest exploits in Rust, but he'll tell you all about his new
| road bike. He doesn't attend software conferences, but has run
| half and full marathons around the world. He doesn't spend 3
| hours after work coding a personal project, but having a beer and
| dinner with friends. He doesn't have a 6 figure job, but his
| income allow him to pay for his living expenses (including a
| mortgage in a new 2 bed flat) and hobbies such as travel. He
| might not work on "cool" projects and "make history", but his job
| doesn't leave him mentally exhausted, so that he can use his
| energy doing things he actually care about.
|
| If you made it this far, I want to make clear that this isn't an
| allegory. AP is a real childhood friend and everything I said is
| true. AP is not an ambitious person, and might not be
| "successful" for some. He is also one of the happiest people that
| I know.
|
| I always found a bit weird the cult of hustle that we have in the
| dev world. Not many other professions people would be expected to
| go above and beyond and feel the passion that is expected of us.
| I suspect that a good chunk of our profession are closer to AP
| that we think, but we are oblivious to it because those are the
| folks that don't frequent HN, write blogs, post on twitter or
| record podcasts.
| Zetice wrote:
| I'm not a passionate developer either, but I _am_ a passionate
| problem solver, and I happen to have an expertise in solving
| problems with code.
|
| That doesn't mean, however, I _prefer_ to solve problems with
| code, just that it 's the skill I've developed the most. My joy
| comes from seeing someone who had a pain no longer have that
| pain.
|
| I'm of the opinion that if more developers thought of themselves
| this way, we'd sidestep a lot of the angst and consternation
| around the actual development process. No longer would it be
| about The Best Code, instead the team would focus on The Best
| Solution, and the new question would be, "How can we build
| something that can be worked with over time?"
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm passionate about the end product, but a lot of the work is
| R E A L L Y , R E A L L Y B O R I N G .
|
| That's as it should be.
|
| _Shipping_ a product (as opposed to "writing code"), has a lot
| of repetitive, silly stuff.
|
| I just spent the last half-hour, making one-pixel tweaks on the
| presentation of table headers in my app, to accommodate the
| designer's wishes. He's come up with an excellent aesthetic, and
| the app will be great.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Should we be passionate?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I'm there to get paid to live. I don't ultimately care if the
| code makes it into the final project as I have a life outside of
| work. I'm passionate for my paycheck, nothing more.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > as I have a life outside of work.
|
| That's true, but personally I don't think that even with strict
| 9-to-5, I could stomach sinking so much time, energy, and
| attention (with more menial tasks I could listen to podcasts
| all along the way) into something I don't care about at all.
|
| I am very "life outside work", more than some people I know,
| but there's only a limited amount of waking hours, and with so
| many of them allocated to "working", I hope it's a little bit
| more meaningful to me than just paychecks. YMMV if your work
| arrangement is very different, especially timewise, of course.
| june_twenty wrote:
| I am inherently passionate about the things I do. That doesn't
| mean doing over time. It means that when we're in a planning
| meeting I am contributing and trying to get the best outcome.
| When I write code, I clarify requirements and I write the code to
| a high standard following recommended practices. I do static
| analysis on the code and fix it. I test it before it goes to QA.
|
| Not for a promotion but because that is why I am there. Anything
| less would be mind numbingly boring.
| johnea wrote:
| I've always felt that this word is missused in modern HR.
|
| To me, passion at work might be something like making out in
| the broom closet with a (willing) coworker 8-)
|
| Passion is an inherently emotinal state, not always the best
| basis for clearly thought out action.
|
| The idea that this is all a management ploy to get more work
| for the same money is already well represented here, so I won't
| dive into that, but that is also a significant part of why I
| don't like this concept in HR recruiting.
| thunky wrote:
| > I am contributing and trying to get the best outcome
|
| So doing the job you were hired for is being _passionate_?
| june_twenty wrote:
| Based on planning sessions I've been in - yes. There's lots
| that will just passively sit there until called upon.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I am not sure about passionate but being a 10x developer is
| definitely true. And it's not even that hard. A few techniques
| and a few mental shifts can get you there.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| IMO a passionate developer is one that really cares about doing a
| good job. That doesn't mean injecting things you think are cool
| just for the hell of it, it means only injecting things you think
| are cool because they ALSO will help the project and/or the team.
|
| IDK who these people are that are vandalizing code bases and
| making life more difficult that others are calling passionate,
| but it feels like someone heard the word used wrong and ran with
| it.
| johnea wrote:
| I've always felt that this word is missused in modern HR.
|
| To me, passion at work might be something like making out in the
| broom closet with a (willing) coworker 8-)
|
| Passion is an inherently emotinal state, not always the best
| basis for clearly thought out action.
|
| The idea that this is all a management ploy to get more work for
| the same money is already well represented here, so I won't dive
| into that, but that is also a significant part of why I don't
| like this concept in HR recruiting.
| louislang wrote:
| > My airplane flying friend and I derive pleasure from a clean,
| by-the-book (by-the-documentation tbh) solution. I'm not too keen
| on leaving my mark on a codebase.
|
| Executing in a deterministic and expected way, to me, is
| _passion_. It demonstrates a care for the craft of software
| development.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| It always bothers me that everyone seems to think that non-
| passionate devs will be lazy and do crap work.
|
| When you go to the grocery store, some cashiers are better at
| their job than others, right? Probably most of them, good or bad,
| don't love their jobs and are not passionate about "cashiering",
| but some _care_ about doing a good job regardless.
|
| I probably wouldn't be considered a passionate dev, I don't have
| open source projects for example. But I do care about my work and
| try to do it as good as I know/can. After all, even if I don't do
| programming out of working hours, I still have 40 hours weekly
| devoted to it, so that's plenty of time to practice.
|
| Not to mention that I've met incredibly passionate devs... that
| were passionate about _their_ stuff, not their employer's. I've
| caught some of them working on their open source stuff during
| working hours, in fact.
| heldrida wrote:
| Finally someone puts this in a very clear and honest way!
| robotnikman wrote:
| This right here describes me perfectly. On work I am not
| passionate about I still want to do a good job and be satisfied
| with my work in the end.
| ravenstine wrote:
| "Passion" as a career development meme is designed to extract
| more work for the same pay.
|
| It's one thing if passion is a requirement for success. In
| software development, the bar is so low that while passion may
| be of huge benefit, it's by no means a strong predictor of
| career success. If you enjoy coding _just enough_ that you get
| your job done adequately every day and don 't feel burned out,
| that's perfectly fine.
|
| When recruiters are looking for "passionate" developers, that
| means they want you going above and beyond in order to
| guarantee they get their cut after N-months with your company.
| That doesn't mean you actually need to live and breathe code.
|
| Moreover, I hope nobody after age 29 actually lives and
| breathes code, even if they really like programming. There's a
| lot more to life than software. Work at a sustainable pace,
| maybe do a few unambitious hobby projects, and spend the rest
| of your time doing things with people who matter. A lot of
| those high-passion types are overly intellectual douchebag
| types who slow down the development process because someone
| didn't use their preferred design pattern. Do you really want
| to be one of them?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Moreover, I hope nobody after age 29 actually lives and
| breathes code, even if they really like programming
|
| Why 29, that feels like a really arbitrary cutoff.
|
| Are people in their 20s not allowed work-life balance?
| regular_trash wrote:
| To me, this comment seems to use age as a proxy for
| determining how far someone is in their "career journey".
|
| It may be more understandable for someone to get the
| experience of "living and breathing code" early on, while
| it's harder to see what might motivate a person to continue
| doing so after gathering a decade or more of experience in
| the IT profession.
| sophacles wrote:
| I read it less as a proscription against work-life balance
| and more as an excuse for those who are enthusiastic and
| young.
|
| Someone in their 20s is still new to their career, and it's
| exciting to be paid to do this thing you would be doing for
| free anyway... its totally understandable if that person
| dives into the deep-end and is totally immersed for a
| while.
|
| There's also just the exuberance of youth - one thing I
| miss most about my 20s is the ability to get excited about
| something and go head-first into it. Some combination of
| age and random other responsibilities and concerns that one
| picks up over the years makes that much harder in my middle
| age.
|
| Some people (like me) tend to need to learn the hard way -
| the downside of going hard at work all the time was a
| lesson I needed to experience. It's better I did it young
| than now, I'm not nearly resilient enough anymore to make
| that mistake.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Most companies can't even handle truly passionate people.
| Passionate people generally fight to deliver quality at a
| decent pace. They care too much about their work to ignore
| inefficiencies, bureaucracy, poor quality, and more. These
| companies claiming they care about 'passion'? They are the
| same ones telling you the equivalent of 'shut up and just do
| the job' the moment you care too much. Your only reward is
| double the grunt work for a 5% pay increase at best. The
| places where this isn't the case and there isn't a huge
| caveat? They are a blip on the market.
|
| If passion really was so important, they wouldn't do so much
| to turn it into a joke and make all their workers meek or
| jaded.
| kderbyma wrote:
| Maybe you should step back from the code and let people who
| do want to dig in do it??? strange you seem to not appreciate
| quality and definitely have a chip on your shoulder. sounds
| like you should maybe stay out of the code and recoup? maybe
| management is your calling? or you have the personality for
| it? many projects need people who actually care about
| improving the product performance because they realise the
| magnitude of benefits that come not just technically, but
| across the board. people tend to be happier when they get
| more done with less effort.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| > _There 's a lot more to life than software._
|
| There's a lot more to a banana than the interior. Like the
| peel and the tree and the backbreaking labor to grow it and
| the _Phoneutria_!
|
| > _Work at a sustainable pace, maybe do a few unambitious
| hobby projects, and spend the rest of your time doing things
| with people who matter._
|
| You had me at the first
|
| Sorta lost me at the second (hobby projects: good, but
| necessarily unambitious?)
|
| Devastatingly puzzled at the third (can I work on ambitious
| hobby projects with these as-yet-unidentified people?)
| bitwize wrote:
| A crooter once told me: "I don't get the feeling that you're
| passionate about these technologies." I told him that's because
| the "technologies" are tools for a job, and I feel passionate
| about a job well done.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I'm only sorta passionate about the big picture job itself,
| depending on what it is.
|
| I'm very passionate about the technologies, but only if I use
| them personally. C? Hex yea! Databases and containers and CI
| pipelines? I don't really have cause to ever use those at home,
| so I'm like zzz.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| I use a secret strategy to finish long projects: I make them
| boring. I write down every cool idea for the project and choose
| the boring ones to begin with. I know that if I can complete
| those, the project will become more and more interesing as I get
| to the fun parts. From time to time I might bring a nice idea
| from the backlog to regain interest, but I really try to focus on
| the boring ones.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Will start doing this, I always have trouble doing the last
| boring bits.
| peruvian wrote:
| In all my jobs, I could not tell the difference between the
| "passionate" devs and the "9-5" devs. Both produced quality work
| (when they were quality people). Best dev I've worked with went
| home at 5 without his laptop and didn't keep up with any news
| unless it would solve a problem we had a work.
|
| There's nothing wrong with side projects, being passionate about
| development, blogging, etc. but it should never mean that person
| is a quality engineer.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > In all my jobs, I could not tell the difference between the
| "passionate" devs and the "9-5" devs. Both produced quality
| work (when they were quality people). Best dev I've worked with
| went home at 5 without his laptop and didn't keep up with any
| news unless it would solve a problem we had a work.
|
| How did you know if they were "passionate" or not? I don't
| think being "9-5" is a good litmus test. Maybe an indicator,
| but far away from a certain one.
|
| For example, I can be very passionate about things, but I've
| also learned to timebox and not burn myself out over the years.
| (Or at least to recognize the signs, and take the proper steps
| when applicable, along with some precautions like counteracting
| when I work too long or hard on something.)
|
| Other than that, I don't know if people who are passionate
| about something necessarily let on how passionate they are,
| especially to any random coworker. It's much more obvious with
| hobbies, since you chose to sink a portion of your time into
| it.
| nathants wrote:
| passion isn't about the labor you sell, it's about the labor you
| keep.
|
| nothing wrong with lacking passion, but it was never about your
| patron.
| justincredible wrote:
| [dead]
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