You just 100% nailed it.

Saying that you shouldn't hire people because they're only in it for a paycheck and not passion is just shorthand for I want you to make this your life, but not pay you to make it your life.

Subsequently, what I've seen is that most problems in the field of k-12 education in the states can be tied to this sentiment.

I've heard this distinction before, and I think it's a difference in the base quality of the place. My last three jobs all put "passion" as a major hiring criteria, but all maintained a strong work/life balance (average work week was 40 hours give or take a few, and though crunch times happened more than a few weeks a year was considered a bad thing. I conducted plenty of interviews myself and helped write interview questions so I'm pretty confident in what _we_ meant at least, even if I wasn't a hiring manager.

One of those places, however, did slide after a few years into the nastiness described (I left when the slide started, and it reportedly continued). Another

So while "Passion" CAN mean "we want huge levels of uncompensated work without complaint", that has not been the norm for mean and I think it's a mistake to assume that is what is always meant. Certainly I've been at some great places to work that I'd have avoided if I thought asking for passion was a negative.

You would be surprised about how many founders who post on HN bemoan the fact that they can’t find developers who have passion for the founder’s “vision” and only care about the money.

My usual retort is why should I care about a founder’s vision if I don’t have a substantial amount of equity in the company? They find that highly insulting.

I have zero disagreement here. I have a similar reaction when someplace tries to attract me to the "challenge". Finding hard, interesting work is EASY - I'm looking for interesting work (often but not always hard) that also pays well. ...and it'd be nice to be able to tell people who I work for and what I do without feeling defensive.

Nothing wrong with believing in the product or the company, but there is something wrong with thinking that would be enough. I don't think the entitled executive syndrome you're discussing is really the norm for companies, but yeah, I've encountered it and it's annoying.

> Another

Come on, you can't leave us hanging like this... What happened there? :)

Sorry - that was a mostly removed sentence, because it wasn't very interesting: "Another is a new job, so we will have to see how well they sustain it".

You're not entirely wrong, but that's a very bitter interpretation.

A more charitable interpretation of "passion" would be... I'm nominally a Python & Scala programmer (according to my CV), but I can also competently talk about OCaml, Haskell, Rust, instruction scheduling, tracing JIT compiler implementation, propagating type inference, TCP stack, C memory model, register allocation, hardware concurrency primitives and ring 0 privileges.

Compare that to another Python programmer that once tried to convince me that when a C++ program tries to access unallocated memory "the computer just throws an exception".

Honest question, I’m not trying to denigrate anyone who takes an interest in software development for its own sake.

But would you consider someone passionate if they said that they only care about learning a language/technology/framework that is marketable and doesn’t believe in learning for its own sake?

Unless the Python developer is actually writing C++, I don’t think he would ever need to learn the intricacies of C to be a good developer.

But take that opinion with a large grain of salt. I spent 12 years bit twiddling in C/C++, 10 in C#, and have been doing Python for a grand total of 6 months so I definitely haven’t done anything complicated with Python.

Nah obviously not. I just listed what I know. I mean looking at the list you could maybe tell that I'm mostly interested in programming language implementation (I forgot to list all my Linux and Windows sysops skills that I've gained from years of managing said systems).

The end result is, that (1) my knowledge and skills extend way beyond any of my past or present job descriptions, and (2) (this is probably even more important for employers/productivity) that I'm capable of, and curious enough to actually want to, learning quickly/deeply and solving hard problems that might not have an obvious instant-knowledge-based solution.

I think that anyone that has ever had an interest to go "beyond" (in any way) the obvious, or immediately what's necessary in his/her day job, would built such a knowledge base - but could of course be completely unrelated to mine (e.g. networking specialist, cryptography geek, hardware/embedded engineer, ...).

What you describe here has little to do with passion. It's about knowledge and interest.

Passion => interest => knowledge.

Not necessarily. (Raises hand)

Wants to stay competitive and be able to earn near the top of local market => interest => knowledge.