Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Passion

High tech companies keep advertising to hire people who have a passion for whatever business the company is in. “Do you have a passion for medical record-keeping?” “We’re looking for people who are passionate about real estate inventory systems.” “Do e-commerce web analytics get your juices flowing?”

I’ve worked in technology for a quite a few years. I’ve done a number of interesting projects I’m proud of. But passion? To me, passion is the pulse-racing, palms-sweaty, pupils-dilated kind of thing. It’s an intense, almost overpowering emotional state. It’s the kind of thing you can really only feel for another person. Or a pet. Or dessert.

But can someone be passionate about dinking around with HTML elements? Is there such a thing as a JavaScript boner? Are we creating the next evolutionary step in intelligent beings by getting some weird kind of gratification from twiddling code?

More importantly, would you want to work with such a person?

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