The many commenters pointing out that passion and professionalism can co-exist may be right. However they aren’t answering the objection that a variety of passions co-existing side-by-side (say for writing poetry as well as programming) can actually help someone’s professional life.

Talking about all those famous programmers like Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, etc, all were able to achieve success firstly because they are passionate programmers. There must have been times when they would have focussed sorely on programming for hours on end when it was needed to solve a particular programming problem. And you tend to spend hours on something only when you are passionate about it. Maybe being passionate tends to being addicted because only when you are addicted to something can you achieve mastery in that.

After this post , i think i need to modify one of my blog post that wrote about “what it takes to be a good programmer”

Thanks

The impression I get from Soon’s post is that anything less than total dedication is insufficient for a sustained career. I don’t believe that. You can have a measured sense of gumption which produces no less effectively than someone with an excess amount. I care for what I do, but I don’t feel the need to be a gold medalist or the Tiger Woods of X. (Or the Tiger Woods of anything, given his current situation.)

At the same time, if I end up putting in my 10,000 hours and becoming a master of what I do, all the better.

Lacking that gumption is what would get a person into trouble.

I love what I do, I’m passionate about computers and programming, and my love and interest in electronics directed me towards computers and I remember the first time I switched on my first computer, a Sinclair ZX-81, and typed in the lines of my first program, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life as a career. I’m passionate about what I do, but I don’t always love it and sometimes wish I was doing something else, but that passion drives me continually to learn more, learn new skills, and always do the very best job I can, every time, even though I might not love the particular project I’m working on, I can’t do a second-rate job – the passion I have and the love for my work means that not striving to do my best is failing at my own values.

But, in the same way that the skill doesn’t necessarily equate to passion, the existence of the passion doesn’t automatically imply the skills are there to satisfy it. And that’s where the drive for learning and improving yourself come in, and where the passion really helps. If you desperately want to learn how to do something because you have the passion driving you then you will learn it, and you continue to learn more and more new things which in turn feed your passion and drive to better yourself and do a good job – no, a great job!

I have a passion for computers and programming, but I know I don’t always have the skills to do the job, so I’m driven not only by a requirement to learn but the passion to learn, and I get just as much satisfaction for myself just out of learning how to do something as I do in actually putting that knowledge into practice.

Passion is not the be all and end all, but it cannot be discarded as unimportant. It *is* a factor in why some people are better at some things than others. Skill, ability and talent combine to make someone extremely adept at a particular task, but throw passion into the mix and you give that person drive, a turbo-boost in essence, to take that skill and turn it into Jedi Mastery.

But that’s not at odds with being passionate about programming–not at all.

I’d also disagree that passion is necessarily fleeting.

My personal opinion is that both passion and professionalism is required to be a really good programmer. But of course priorities change throughout life and sometimes other things tend to get more attention.

I also appreciate the point about education. My personal take on this have been to start working without going to university. But taking courses on the side. Having worked 10 years as a programmer makes it really easy to take these courses and helps me solidify my practical experience into lasting knowledge. It also helps me in regards of critically evaluating my performance and knowing my weak spots. In turn helping me develop those points and further evolve in my professional field.

Working full time and at the same time educating myself within the same field would not have been possible without some degree of passion I think.

I agree with the 10k hours that you need to really be good at something. It’s the same with playing the piano or any other instrument. If you work on it, you’ll get good. Maybe you’re not the next Mozart, but not everyone needs to be on the top. That’s why I don’t like the sports examples: you’re always talking about the gold medal winners. We won’t have cars, won’t have great buildings and won’t have a lot of others great things if there weren’t all the people that care about what they do and that really do a good job without standing out of the crowd. I think that is a much overseen part of professional work.

For me this discussion about passion is on the same level as the discussion about rockstar programmers and the whole “programming is creative work” things. You need the bright heads and the spare moments of genius to build really great things, but after that, you need a lot of dedicated and stubborn people to work on it every day from 9 to 5.

Again, as others have said, passion may be overused in job requirements, although at least we’re now saying that instead of “rockstar” and “ninja” and things like that. But the idea that you wouldn’t want people who are passionate about coding (or any job), and that those people are not going to get the job done, etc. is ludicrous.

As someone who is married, has kids, is a serious cyclist, and is the primary developer at a startup, I am absolutely passionate about my work, but I also consider myself very professional. I consider it a key part of my job to watch the business, and make the hard choices and do the necessary work to drive the business forward and make it successful, even when some of that work may be drudgery.

I do think there are varying degrees of passion, and I think you can absolutely be professional and successful without being passionate. But I also think there are certain environments where you also need to be passionate, or where that will make you even more successful. Thus, I would suggest reconsidering the “antithesis” angle.

…
In any case, it seems at least some (most?) programming is more like engineering, especially as there are computer and software engineers. So perhaps we should import the intuition behind what it means to be a professional engineer into what it means for a programmer to possess professionalism.

Again, we look that up, but this time on the Professional Engineers Ontario website, which has a useful and short answer. What stands out to me is the condition that the work done has an element “wherein the safeguarding of life, health, property or the public welfare” is involved, and even more importantly:
…
Rest at:
http://blog.carsoncheng.ca/2010/02/professionalism-versus-passion.html

Thanks.

The engineer was being professional and making decisions based on best practices and what he knows best. I on the other hand have spent 4 years with the platform and I think that I know what the platform requirements will work best for the project.

So, will the new engineer’s ‘best practice’ approach be better than my ‘experienced’ approach? We have yet to find out.

I’m biased, because I’m the passionate person in this analogy, but I strongly believe that since I’m passionate about the project and I have a more intimate understanding about the issue, my design will win out over the engineer who is very good but doesn’t have the same experience with the platform as I do.

What do you think?

I believe that for 98% of the jobs out there, I’m going to want someone who has hobbies apart from the computer. Not to say that they don’t ever write code when they’re “off-the-clock”, but rather that there are other things that interest them. I really don’t care what the other things are… bee keeping, theology, cooking, auto-mechanics, creative writing, but something that utilizes other aspects of their intellect.

If you’re meeting people who lose this addiction upon seeing failure, then they were not passionate to begin with. They were fooling themselves, much like the 50% or so of the couples who seek divorce within a couple years of their marriage. They were NOT in love.

Why do we have firmware authors slogging it out when they could be working half as hard to build the next iPhone app? Pure passion. They know they could work less and make more money doing something more colorful. They are passionate about electronics and engineering, and see no other option in front of them. If it were all about being ‘rationally dispassionate’, they would wake up and follow the money, also because professionalism would easily follow them.

I agree that intelligent people have a habit of being polymaths. But, that expertise extends only to related fields, and seldom to a very few disjointed domains. Even then, it’s theoretically and quite literally possible to be passionate about more than one person/thing.

I think your argument is a bit jaded, or maybe it’s just how the English language works.

He speaks of passion like it’s the opposite of professionalism. They’re unrelated attributes.

Someone can easily be passionate AND professional or just passionate or just professional (or even neither).

Professionalism , the commitment to the learning of the tools of the field in which you work and the constant application of those tools in a responsible manner for the benefit of your customers, is a very useful behavior in many endeavors; In others endeavors, which are more on the edge, in sharp growth phase, in a very early startup phase, etc, the unbalanced, burning drive of passion is actually more important than the practice of professionalism.

The throwing three sheets to the wind but getting it working because you want to see it in the world (but probably done in a less than perfect manner) is often more important to a business in a transitory state.

Is passion better than professionalism? No. Is it worse? No. They’re used in different places to great effect though. It is true you can’d build a stable business out of passion alone? You bet your pants it is. The point of passion is to make something fantastic. It is oblique to the challenge of the professional businessman who may or may not be able to make money off this fantastic creation. I think some dispassionate, non enthusiastic, realistic people in an endeavor are great. But for many projects, ambitious passionate developers are what get it to great.

All that said. I agree it’s completely stupid to put “passionate” in a job listing. But it is most assuredly is not the antithesis of good programming. It can be a part, just as professionalism can be. They’re just some ways to have a good programmer. I’ve seen both great tick tock leave at 5pm programmers and great burn the midnight oil then burnout programmers. You’re getting overly structured with your metaphors and missing reality.

Focus on improving the bottom of the histogram and you pass out anyone focussing on the top in very short order. They may have a few 10′s more, but you don’t have 3′s and 4′s. Same thing in programming. Forget passion – focus on the process.

Regarding (a), of course there is a middle ground where passion and professionalism meet. To suggest that a professional athlete doesn’t have passion is absurd.

Regarding (b), can’t one’s passion fuel the drive to be dispassionate about analysis? I just don’t buy that dispassionate professionalism gets pro athletes out of bed in the morning. However, this descends us into definitions and semantics. I can’t argue against the post per se because the only definition of passion is that it is “fleeting and transient”. That is, the rhetorical deck is stacked from the start. (To be fair, the pro-passion posts don’t really define it well either).

I do like the opening paragraph, though, and agree that the term is over-used.

The point wasn’t about those wonderful high days that we all get, when going to work is a joy and everything’s great – it’s about all the days, good and bad. The good programmers, the mythical 20%, work through all those days. They’re not dependant on waking up in a good mood to get good work done.