Comment by raghava | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raghava | Hacker News Reader

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Nobody every asks "so, how many sales gigs do you do on the sides, during weekends?" or "oh, how many teams do you lead/mentors, during the weekends?"

All this BS "weekend-extra-open-source-labour-tax" must be borne by the members opting for tech streams. The innate, simple truth is that all that "weekend extra effort" is a way to see if the person can take up more work off hours without so much of a complaint and not demand overtime pay - in the name of "passion".

Passion is overrated. There are many who play the passion card, while trying to showcase their role-playing fantasies in a very skewed way. Hiring based on such appearances is at best just a gamble. There are many such "social profiles" which are either crafted for befooling the spectators, or inane content which just about passes the "100 for effort! value, best left unsaid!" types.

> Passion is overrated

"Passionate employees" seems to be code for "compliant human robots willing to sacrifice their personal lives, health and sanity for the company's bottom line, and to work extensive overtime without compensation while we recruit their cheaper replacements."

I dunno, it doesn't always mean that (though I have encountered this kind of abuse).

Passion for what someone does is awesome, in that they'll actually notice (and speak up) when sh*t is messed up. I love working with people who care about this stuff.

It's entirely orthogonal to whether or not they have side-projects, so I would always try and get signal for this in the interview itself, rather than looking for a GitHub or whatnot (although I almost always look at someone's code when it's on their CV, which isn't all that common in data science).

> I love working with people who care about this stuff.

Yes, absolutely. However, when orgs start using that against the individual to drive down pay or eke out more from the person, is when that show starts becoming to cliched and downright exploitative.

A civil engineer who is good at what he does and loves construction will not (easily) let anyone in his team have wrong proportions of concrete and sand, cause he understands the ramifications. But that passion in him towards the trade should in no way be constitued by his employer as a notion indicating that he could work for lesser pay cause "he seems to be loving that work anyway, so that actually is a perk!" (IT IS NOT!)

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