On Hiring for Passion
The past couple of months my company has been growing quite rapidly. Because of this, I have been involved in many interviews and have been part of many discussions about the type of people my company wants to hire and what are signals for a good developer. One of the points that really bothers me in terms of our expectations for developers is that one should have passion.
To write this, I looked up the definition of passion.
- having, compelled by, or ruled by intense emotion or strong feeling; fervid: a passionate advocate of socialism.
- easily aroused to or influenced by sexual desire; ardently sensual.
- expressing, showing, or marked by intense or strong feeling; emotional: passionate language.
- intense or vehement, as emotions or feelings: passionate grief.
- easily moved to anger; quick-tempered; irascible.
Assuming that we’re definitely not talking about any sexual desires, passion can be tl;dr’ed as “displaying or feelings of intense emotions”. Although I do not have anything against particular displays of intense emotions (other than perhaps being uncomfortable around them in their display of happiness/sadness/anger), I do not think this is what we are actually hiring for.
I am then needing to presume that we are looking for passion for something whether it be for technology, startups or data science. However, when you think of other professions such as policemen, doctors or lawyers, you don’t immediately disqualify someone if they lack passion for particular art of that profession. In fact, a lawyer who is passionate about prosecuting can be argued to have the wrong attitude for his job as being a lawyer is not about the art of prosecuting or defending, but upholding some sort of higher ideal of justice (idealistically). However, for software development, it is increasingly common for people to be judged by how “passionate” they are about their job by the types of side projects that they work on or the amount of technology they’ve played around with. It would similarly be odd to judge how passionate a doctor is by the number of patients she’s cured or a lumberjack by the number of trees she’s cut. Therefore, it is strange to set this type of ideal in software engineering as well.
Also, the idea that a candidate must display a passion for something also poses an ontological problem: what kind of passion will be a requirement? For example, will having passion for big data technology be enough? Do they also need to have a passion for startups? Do they also need a passion for devops and also might as well have a passion for good UX design? Then obviously this poses a practical problem of how to evalutate whether they have the particular passions we’re looking for. How do we measure how interested someone is about big data? Is it by how many big data technologies they can list off the top of their heads? Is it by in depth knowledge about one specific technology they’ve worked with? Is it by the amount of time they play around with data in their free time? Then is there a threshold number, like they must have played with 3 big data technologies in the past 2 years? What are the correct numbers to have to answer these questions?
The point that I’m trying to get to here is that hiring is difficult, and that appeals to how passionate someone appears to be is intrinsically subjective. We use it as an excuse to discard people we don’t like (ie. people who don’t have similar interests to us) and as a justification for our own biases in hiring. Startups in particular are more prone to using passion as a way to find people of the right fit because one person in a small company plays a huge part in shaping the company’s culture. However it is important that we find people who we want to work with and whose values align with our own. But claiming someone lacks passion as justification for someone we don’t want to work with is lazy and doesn’t get to the core of the problem which is that the candidate has not displayed the values that we want as a company (whatever those may be).