Programmer Passion (Slight Return)

I had had a couple of beers on top of the sort of sleep debt that’s an occupational hazard for programmers and novelists (not to mention programmers moonlighting as novelists) when I wrote “Programmer Passion Considered Harmful” last Friday night. I fully expected the management of On Coding to reject it with a note akin to, “Save this crap for your blog, schmuck.”

That obviously didn’t happen. What did happen is that I struck a chord or three with the techies who frequent Medium, as well as spawning a comment thread on Hacker News. (Being a metalhead, I hope they were power chords.) It seems I’m not the only one who’s familiar with Corporate America’s tendency to conflate a willingness to work unpaid overtime with passion for one’s work.

I’m not the only one to resent it, either, if some of the notes attached to the article and to recommendations and Twitter shares are any indication. Thanks for all the recommendations and shares, by the way.

I did notice a some common threads in some of the objections to my original post on Hacker News. Some deal with the content of the article itself, and some are aimed at me instead (I’m a New Yorker; I can take it). It might be worthwhile to address some of them here.

“The author uses the wrong definition of passion.”

Misunderstandings of this sort always crop up when writers use overloaded words. In object oriented programming languages, an overloaded method is one with the same name, but multiple implementations. I’ve come to think of English words with multiple definitions and connotations as overloaded, as well, since their meaning is context-dependent.

I thought I was explicit in explaining that I was referring to an abusive usage of the word by management types to conflate passion with having your ass in the seat all day and most of the night. I identified that kind of ‘passion’ as obsession, but continued to use ‘passion’ throughout the text for consistency’s sake because that’s the word management likes to use.

They know as well as we do what sort of connotations the word ‘obsession’ carries. They’re not stupid enough to tip their hands that easily.

“The origin of the word ‘passion’ is irrelevant.”

Unless you’re my wife or my editor, you don’t get to tell me that a word’s etymology is irrelevant. Nor do you get to tell me which meanings of a word are still relevant. I take a certain perverse delight in frustrating readers by compelling them to reach for a dictionary, and I will not be denied that pleasure by so trivial a concern as a reader’s limited vocabulary or your notion of “proper English”.

“I don’t like the author’s definition of passion.”

Unless you’re my wife, the relevance of your feelings to me is best expressed as an imaginary floating point value between fuck-all and jack shit.

“I don’t like the feminist overtones of this article.”

See above.

“The author picked the wrong profession.”

If you want to know why I became a developer, here’s the deal: I was eighteen, had finally accepted that I’d never cut it as a musician, and needed an alternative creative outlet so that I’d have a reason to not throw myself in front of a train to escape the meaningless life of an American consumer. Having read a lot of really shitty genre fiction, I figured I could do better and set out to prove it.

In the meantime, I needed a day job. I didn’t want to spend my life cleaning toilets, so I needed to do something else for a living. I wasn’t pretty enough to do gay for pay. I couldn’t afford a liberal arts degree that might only qualify me to say, “Would you like fries with that?” in an especially condescending tone while leaving me in indentured servitude due to student loan debt, and I had found out in high school that I had an aptitude for code.

So I decided that I’d make code my trade. Maybe I should have become an electrician or a plumber instead, but if you’re a middle or upper class American you know damned well that people in your social class look down on the trades. My parents sure as hell did, and they were working class. They wanted “better” for me.

In the shops I’ve worked in, being a developer hasn’t been all that different from being a janitor. Either way I’m still dealing with other people’s shit. If your experience is different, more power to you.

“I wouldn’t want to hire the author.”

Fair enough, but with that attitude you’d be lucky to get a copy of my resume. I know people like you. I’ve worked with people like you. I’ve bitten my tongue to keep from saying, “Told you so,” to people like you when your great idea puts us two weeks behind schedule. I’ve stood trembling with rage while listening to people like you scream at me like R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann in Full Metal Jacket for not being sufficiently passionate about my job.

True story: I had a boss accuse me of not giving a shit about my work, because I kept my cool and did my job when the managers are all losing their goddamn minds. Why were they panicking? Because a client sent a list of twenty “critical defects” that I already discovered, reported, and fixed that morning because they were cosmetic issues and I was ahead of schedule.

Professionalism, not Passion

I’m the quiet guy who comes in at nine, rarely stays past five-thirty, and never attends social functions after hours. I’m also the guy who meets his deadlines. I’m the guy who helps out the less-experienced developers without caring whether they’re H-1B visa holders working for half the pay an American developer would demand, because the job needs to be done and it damn well ought to be done right. I’m the guy who follows a bug all the way down into your company’s proprietary framework even if you only hired me to work on front-end code, and not only files a bug report but provides a test case and a patch. I’m the guy who looks for repetitive code and creates reusable objects other developers can use to save time and effort.

I’m the guy who will work until midnight on my goddamn birthday despite the fact that my wife took a day off from work to make me a special dinner, because something went wrong and it’s my fault.

Yes, most of the time I only put in an eight hour day. That’s all you’re paying me for, and all I’m willing to give under normal circumstances because every hour I spend working for you as a developer is an hour I can’t spend working for myself as a novelist.

But when the shit gets real, I’m there. I don’t do it because I’m “passionate” about my work. I do it because that is what professionals do.

I do the job, and then I get paid. That’s the deal. I hold up my end of the bargain, and I expect the same of my employers. You aren’t paying me for my passion, and it’s not for sale anyway. I’m a mercenary, not a whore. I won’t pretend I love my work so you can feel like a good leader who knows how to motivate your direct reports.

If you can’t deal with that, hire some more H-1Bs or wet-behind-the-ears CS grads and be damned to you.