There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates.

"Passion" doesn't matter.

What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line.

In our common usage, "passion" describes the coder who stays until 9:00PM on a Friday hacking on things. But that property doesn't tell a team anything about whether that coder is the most effective use of headcount dollars. Passionate coders stay late working on compilers for obscure languages, or rewriting ugly but working code into trendy new languages and frameworks. Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic.

Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates.

This is to say nothing of my total lack of faith in the ability of engineers to assess "passion". For any given engineer, candidates that happen to do things in their spare time that the interviewing engineer happens to enjoy or appreciate are "passionate". Meanwhile, a supremely competent professional who, given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec and then actually nail that schedule, that person is a 9-5er, because they don't have strong opinions about Node.js.

•Shudder•.

Almost every idea that engineers have about hiring is broken.

It's this line -- "given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec" -- that, I would guess, separates the types of jobs I've experienced from yours. I've never been given a spec that was worth the wiki page it was written on. In most of the jobs I've experienced, "effectiveness" (get done what you're given) and "competence" (don't cause extra work for others) are barely a minimum bar to success; to be successful, colleagues also need "insight" (look past the documented requirement to the reasons behind it) and "creativity" (design a solution that solves the documented problem and three related undocumented ones).

You're right, "passion" isn't one of the things to hire for. At best, in my experience, it's highly correlated with the breadth of experience that fuels "creativity" and "effectiveness" - at least, in the sense that it causes people to be persistent against hard and unclear problems. It's fair to ask whether this should be required for teammates or just co-founders -- but even in my most enterprise-y gigs, I've rarely seen a team that could succeed without people with passion helping drive the work.

Passion is critical. I wouldn't hire someone if I didn't think they were passionate about building good products. Other passions can tell me something interesting about them, but that's the one that counts since that's what I would be hiring them to do.

Maturity is also critical. And passion and maturity are not at all mutually exclusive.

If there are misconceptions about passion floating around the memespace, then you are certainly right to challenge them, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I once watched management totally destroy a developer's passion.

As bad as management's actions were for me, the absolute worst thing was watching the change in this guy. Before, he would constantly seek out every way to improve the customer experience and go above and beyond. He turned into a guy who literally said "I don't give a shit."

Almost every person I've ever worked and every job with has been passionate about doing their best, unless actively stopped from doing it. The one or two who didn't could not have been filtered out by any kind of interview question because they knew how to bluff their way through the process. But you can tell after working with them for a few months that they just try to do the minimum necessary to not get fired.

An attempt to recruit for passion is a bad sign. You can't recruit for good morale, either.[1] Either your company is a nice place to work or it isn't. Either your company will bring out the passion that almost all developers have or it will destroy it.

[1] Yes, there are assholes who destroy morale, just like there are total clock-punchers. Sometimes you can tell by having a normal human conversation, and a normal human conversation should of course be part of any interview.

If you are are trying to find the liars, assholes, frauds, and professional slackers, you need to realize that

1) they have you vastly outmatched in this contest unless maybe you are bringing in psychologists trained in this,

2) there is a social cost from treating your prospective candidates as if they are one of these things.

If a candidate is effective and competent, why does it matter if they're passionate?

This is a good question. I had to think about it a bit -- at the risk of not posting a reply in time for you to see it.

I think it's because building great products isn't just a matter of execution. It's also, to some extent, an art.

I have trouble imagining someone being effective and competent with absolutely no passion. I will grant, though, that there are competent people who are more passionate, and those who are less so. I think a successful organization could have a blend of people across the passion scale, but I don't think one could build a successful product business without at least a few people who are passionate about what they're doing. Maybe in other kinds of businesses you could; I don't know.

If you can, in your hiring process, get a decent prediction of effectiveness and competence, and stipulating that passion does not connote effectiveness and competence, is it smart to screen for passion?

Yes, I think it is. Given two candidates of equal competence, I'd naturally prefer the one with the greater passion for the particular kind of work the job would entail. Does that really seem strange?

Of course it gets trickier when the more competent one seems the less passionate. Then it's a question of how much to weight the two dimensions (along with whatever others one is considering). I have no magic formula here; I think it depends on the circumstances.

There seems to be a subtext here that work sample tests give no indication of passion. I don't think that's true; when I've given people programming exercises, I think the craftsmanship of the code (is it well-modularized, well-documented, nicely indented, etc.) is indicative of their passion. Competence, to me, is more about whether the code works.

So yes, I'm using craftsmanship as a proxy for passion, so I suppose next you'll ask, why not just go for craftsmanship? The point we seem to be coming to is that passion is difficult or impossible to measure directly, so why not stick to qualities that are more measurable?

I don't think everything important is easy to measure.

I'm just feeling we are using the words in different ways. I'm not a native English speaker but for me effectiveness is a term that includes passion. You can be competent in your work but effective at deflecting it (it's painful to work with such people), I believe that if you are passionate about doing the work it will also mean your effectiveness is in the right direction.

Because the kid in the basement down the street you're competing with -- the one you don't even know exists until it's way too late -- is effective, competent, and passionate.

That response also works if you replace "passionate" with "can moonwalk".

Are you sure about that?

Passion is continuing to learn, because you realize that what you learned in school is not the end, but the beginning. Passion is continuing to learn, and having an opinion about "node.js or some other technologies" because using the right tool for the right job is important. Passion is being given a spec, and can not only reliably execute it, but can also offer ways to improve that spec, and not just be a coder without an opinion.

Thus, the only way to be effective and competent is to have a passion for what you do. Otherwise, if you limit yourself to 9 to 5, you'll be treated as such. And it works like that in many industries, and in those industries, those with a passion will routinely do better, whereas those that don't, will stick to the 9 to 5 places.

> Almost every idea that engineers have about hiring is broken.

Almost every idea anyone has about interviewing is wrong.

Interviews are a terrible way to recruit. It's amazing to me that STEM companies with money and scientists still use interviewing in recruitment processes and haven't found something else.

There is the "on the job interview" where a candidate is invited to do the actual job for a day or half day. For obvious reasons this method tends to be used for minimum wage positions, or for places where you're recruiting people who you know might interview poorly. But it seems to be a great way to recruit people.

But I'm not just talking about blind, unfocused and overly enthusiastic passion. I'm talking about the passion that drives people to go beyond the call of duty, not because it is part of the job but because it is what they like to do. Passion got me the job I have now. Although I was also more than merely competent, the passion drove me to achieve that competence in the first place.

Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic.

Yeah, passion is a bit of an x-factor, isn't it? By itself, it is meaningless. You may get something unexpectedly great or unexpectedly bad. But, using myself as an example again, I was able to get a project at work done well ahead of schedule because I had already been working on something related in my spare time.

Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates.

Inasmuch as someone is proud of a project they did and can talk enthusiastically about it, and that project is related to work currently going on at the company they are applying to, I think a passionate candidate can be better long term than another candidate that is initially more competent and more effective. If experience is the main reason that candidate A is more competent and effective than candidate B, then candidate B may eventually surpass candidate A as a better employee simply because passion drives candidate B to keep honing his skills in his free time. I think this is especially true for college graduates or other junior candidates who may not have anything else to go by but their projects.

I'd agree with the parent...there are jobs where passion is key, like a tech evangelist for instance, or a product leader, a salesman, or a founder. But for an engineer, while of course creativity and trying to get better at the trade are important, so are not getting burned out, going through periods of shitty tasks keeping a professional attitude, make pragmatic choices when needed, without getting blinded by coolness or just curiosity.

These skills can come with experience, but can also be personal traits. An employee that doesn't code the week-end but focuses on his job while on site and takes pride in being professional and reliable is a solid asset for any company. In the long term he might be a corner stone of your team, balancing the ones that are half dead because they didn't sleep at night to work on the projects they really invest themselves into.

Yeah, I can see how too much passion can burn you out. I'm borderline obsessive about some of the things I do in my spare time. The thing is that I really like doing them but taking a break from too much intellectual stimulation is probably a good thing. I'm probably not old enough to know but it may be more necessary for older workers. Probably also the reason I can handle it relatively well is because I don't have a wife and/or kids. Again, all the more reason to take advantage of passion when you find it in the younger folks!

Completely agree. In terms of buzzwords, "passion" is the new "disruptive".