That's definitely true in the general case. Having passion means wanting to do the best overall thing because you care about the thing going well. The best overall thing is working hard to prevent long hours which lead to burnouts. If you have managers and senior leaders who share the engineers passion, this problem is self-correcting.
Source: I frequently lecture our (junior esp) new hires about working too many hours. Especially during incidents. Yes this is exciting. Now go sleep and see your family. Come back when you are rested and ready to play at full speed.
I also have uncomfortable talks with people who frequently say "meh, close enough" about whether they actually want to be here. My team performs at a consistently high level.
It's kind of mutinous, but it's not like there's anything to be gained from loyalty to management who aren't loyal to employees.
It goes both ways. The current equilibrium, at least in the US, is that (SW/IT) engineers leave after ~2 years, and it's causing quite a bit of friction. But it's hard to move out of the equilibrium.
I don't think it's so much an equilibrium so much as a battle, denoted by "friction," but I'm sure it would come down to each saying the other one defected first. I think we can figure out where the disloyalty started, calculated from the first principles of capitalism.
Passion, imo, is an attitude - and is reflected in quality of work and teamwork. I do think it is often used to trick people into getting less than they deserve, but doesn't have to be the case.
When I say I want to work with passionate people, I don't mean people who are willing to work 80 hours a week for 10 dollars an hour because they love coding or want to solve world hunger. I mean I want to work with people who give their best, put the user/experience first, and are genuinely motivated to do good work. This doesn't mean you have to fake smile, or get taken advantage of, it just means you have bring some positivity to the table.
This is the issue with signalling passion - it causes people to drive their expectations of you higher. You have a higher chance of not living up to someone's standard.
Yes. Makes me think of Zappos, the shoe store. They're big on demanding employee enthusiasm.[1] But in the end, they're just a shoe store.
Well, first make sure there actually is some "mission" there to "believe in". In 99.9% of the cases people work on perhaps technically exciting but impactwise boring industry projects, whose main mission is to make money. Requiring passion is a euphemism for being over-workable. That you'll work outside working hours, you can be called during vacation etc, because of course this job is the mission of your life, right? Otherwise, you're not passionate...
In practice, these "passionate" people are often young and naive or just really ambitious and work their ass off to build their resume and will be on their way soon enough.
A good engineer contributes high value and knows this. And therefore will make the company pay up, and will not take any bullshit. And being that good, they will be picking where to work and you as the company compete to get them. In these cases the interview is about the engineer judging the company and looking for exactly things like the requirement to "believe in the mission" or whether the conversation is on a professional, adult level.