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Comment by kahnjw | Hacker News Reader

Passion: strong and barely controllable emotion.

"sufficiently non-loathsome...motivate yourself to do it" is a far cry from passionate. Tangentially related @sarahmei on twitter wrote a thread about passion in tech. IMO she nails it: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921366047122268165

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Passion comes from a Latin root meaning "to suffer". If you work in technology long enough, you will become passionate about it.

I am not sure this lady knows what it means to be passionate then. Dismissing passion as the domain of stuffy white men is to dismissing anyone with an overridingly strong interest in anything

I think you are missing her point. She isn't saying that all passionate people are affluent white males. My interpretation is that passion in a swe job description is code for affluent white male. I think she has a point, individuals who have time for passion projects, self study, or other endeavors are privileged. Many of them are white, male, and affluent.

I think the problem is that she falls in the same error as the companies she's criticizing - she conflates passion with external signals like "spending a lot of time on personal projects". At first she uses quotes around "passionate", which seems to distinguish the two, but then she fully conflates them. Inevitably, she will rile up those of us who were passioned about tech despite not having the means to dedicate ourselves to it.

Which is a shame, because her point that filtering candidates based on their dedication of personal time to tech is discriminatory is valid.

  she conflates passion with external signals like
  "spending a lot of time on personal projects"

Job interviewers fear being mislead by people telling them what they want to hear, so they will often look for provable actions and demonstrable knowledge, rather than claims.

If someone tells me they're passionate about embedded electronics, I'll ask what they've worked with - arduino? raspberry pi? esp8266? atmel? pic? mbed? - and what they've done with it.

If they haven't used any of them, or they've barely used them, are they really passionate?

Sure, but that's where her criticism is valid - there are many reasons why a person might not be able to fulfill their passion, and some groups are disproportionately affected by that filter.

This woman completely catches what my college experiences were for me. Great read. From all the data I've seen poverty level is the biggest factor that determines your future potential with race right behind, one would think that we would try to make opportunity the main goal in an advanced society. Not everyone will or wants to be financially successful but when the two things that weigh heaviest on where you end up are where you start financially and what color/gender you are that's not a sustainable or fair system.

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