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You must have worked at the wrong sort of company then - they do exist

I think you mean enthusiastic, curious, focused, or interested. Not passionate.

Can you explain why you don’t think a SWE can be passionate about coding? I don’t think I understand your point.

Not the parent but "passionate" can come across as code for things like all-consuming interest that I will do morning, noon, night, and weekends. It's just one of those BS words used in phrases like "We only want team members with a passion for their work" that turns a lot of people off and makes them suspect that what they really want are team members who will put in 80-hour weeks.

Read the definition of passionate. People mean enthusiastic and misuse passionate. I have no idea why, they do it, other than as a completely arbitrary way to discount others whenever they want.

Well one of the DBA's I worked with at BT made his own sensory deprivation tank and used to meditate on problems.

They where also renowned for saving a huge sum of money for the company when a quarterly CSS run barfed badly - CSS was the BT billing system and the worlds largest IBM system at the time.

That's not passion. That's a reasonable, experimental approach to problem solving.

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