Like so many things, I have mixed feelings about this.
I don’t have a problem with the word “passionate” and I could understand an employer who genuinely desires that.
Problem is, I don’t think most people actually want anything of the sort. More likely, I think they’re just following the fad of grandiose overblown adjectives and mimicking the motions of “only the best” interviewing of companies whose trajectories they’d love to emulate.
The typical 201X boilerplate sums it up nicely:
“Are you passionate about technology? Do you write beautiful code? Come help us change the world.”
I’d wager most organizations shouldn’t want much less need someone with passion in more than a handful of positions - more like competent, hard workers who will execute the vision put before them.
In my experience, unless the stars have aligned, passionate people are a horrible choice for most roles. Their passion is not some simple resource that can be redirected efficiently into whatever management cares about, it’s an intense, consuming, emotional drive with all the massive potential negatives those words suggest.
Good luck getting even average performance out that passionate someone on a project they don’t believe in and duck for cover when they deem the CTO / founder is a fool driving the organization in the wrong direction.
I don’t have a problem with the word “passionate” and I could understand an employer who genuinely desires that.
Problem is, I don’t think most people actually want anything of the sort. More likely, I think they’re just following the fad of grandiose overblown adjectives and mimicking the motions of “only the best” interviewing of companies whose trajectories they’d love to emulate.
The typical 201X boilerplate sums it up nicely:
“Are you passionate about technology? Do you write beautiful code? Come help us change the world.”
I’d wager most organizations shouldn’t want much less need someone with passion in more than a handful of positions - more like competent, hard workers who will execute the vision put before them.
In my experience, unless the stars have aligned, passionate people are a horrible choice for most roles. Their passion is not some simple resource that can be redirected efficiently into whatever management cares about, it’s an intense, consuming, emotional drive with all the massive potential negatives those words suggest.
Good luck getting even average performance out that passionate someone on a project they don’t believe in and duck for cover when they deem the CTO / founder is a fool driving the organization in the wrong direction.