Passion in the Workplace

Much has been written about hiring for passion: seeking out engineers who...

• spend as much of their time programming and interacting with computers as possible.
• identify with your company's mission and believe it lends their life a sense of purpose (John Doerr's whole missionaries-not-mercenaries thing).
• put work before everything else and regularly find themselves burning the midnight oil.

That is to say, only hiring people who substantially derive their self-identity from work and working with computers in particular, and have a tendency to view their employer's mission/purpose as their life's work.

Before rushing to enrich your GitHub with side projects and open source contributions (alongside a stellar resume), there has been just as much said about explicitly not hiring for passion, that passion-centric hiring...

• leads to massive burnout and/or hostile workplaces where everyone takes everything personally.
• excludes skillful talent that trained hard and would do good things for your company, but ultimately entered engineering for sustainable pay that would allow them to build a good life free of precarity.
• is disconnected from the reality that your silly little app startup is probably not, in fact, changing the world or solving society's greatest problems.

Reflecting on the sort of workplace I want to have—both as an employee and as a manager responsible for shaping the environment—neither of these two positions sounded particularly like what I was looking for.

Community, Belonging, Purpose

I want to work with people who still have a verve for life, who share that which makes them feel uniquely alive and human, and who have an authentic interest in other people for their own sake. People who realize that the act of coming to work means joining a community and with it adopting community values: sincerity, reciprocity, commitment, care, respect, mutual accountability, codependence, etc. These are not the sort of people you would characterize as "lacking passion." In fact, such individuals can make nearly any job, from the mundane to the magical, fulfilling. Note how I haven't really said anything about the actual work itself...that's because, frankly, it's a secondary concern; Ray Dalio captured this sentiment best:

Success is not a matter of achieving one's goals. The things we strive for are just bait...the struggle to get them with people that we care about gives us the personal evolution and the meaningful relationships that are the real rewards. [...] I instead wanted to stay in the jungle, struggling to be successful with people I cared about.

- Ray Dalio, Principles

Picking a job, then, is about so much more than picking who signs your paycheck. It's really about finding a group of people where you feel welcomed, safe, and respected...thereby able to give back to that very same community. Some may immediately take umbrage with this as sometimes you'll do whatever it takes to survive—trust me, I've been there—but ultimately you choose what attitude you bring to work and how you relate to other people. Part of the issue is one of terminology: what people describe as "passion" I think of more as "mission-driven" (an almost obsessive fixation with purpose/achievement in spite of all other factors), and its opposite is "professional" (characterized by working with integrity to realize goals and achieve mutual benefit in a more ecologically balanced sense). Professional environments can be indifferent or enthusiastic depending on how people show up.

More Than a Vocation

No matter how hard you try, work ultimately takes on a bigger role in our lives than just being a source of income. I met my best friends through work; that said, our relationship is about so much more than a mutual interest in technology (in fact, we're increasingly curmudgeonly in our views towards tech).  I want to befriend even more people, and I expect many of you feel the same way given the difficulty of forming adult friendships. But how do you expect to make connections in a workplace populated by zombies: people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive; people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk and assert cliché opinions instead of thinking; people who are shut off from the outside world and tolerate the requirement to interact with one another only because of the need to earn money for food and medicine? I don't care if the thing you're passionate for is tech, but be passionate about something—your family, your hobbies, your friends, anything—and share that spark with those around you. We have been fed a false dichotomy, you can be enthusiastic and professional at the same time.

You spend one-third of your life at work. What's the difference between mission-driven work that becomes all-consuming and filling every waking hour, versus passionless and disconnected work just to get by? Nothing. You're still wasting one-third of your life either way (either in the absence of a personal life, or the absence of a work life that contributes anything to your well-being and wholeness as a human). No matter what you do or who you do it with, take pride in your work: recognize it's innate value because you are the one doing it, spending the precious few hours you have on this Earth. You don't have to be passionate about something to do it with integrity and to make an active effort to build community wherever you are.