Passion vs. Professionalism | Hacker News Reader

Passion vs. Professionalism

gamasutra.com

95 pointsatomic_object29 comments

    Feisal: Our own prisoners, Mr. Bentley, are taken care of, 'til the British can 
    relieve us of them, according to the Code. I should like you to notice that.

    Bentley: Yes, sir. Is that the influence of Major Lawrence?

    Feisal: Why should you suppose so?

    Bentley: Well, it's just that I heard in Cairo that Major Lawrence has a horror 
    of bloodshed.

    Feisal: That is exactly so. With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it 
    is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.

         - Lawrence of Arabia

Good business is built on mutual trust, consistency, and reliability; art on exceptionalness and originality. It should be no surprise that designers and businessmen so often clash, one is playing for the middle of the normal distribution, the other longs for the fringes.

Your indentation is breaking the line wrapping. Please edit this if you see it in time; it's a nice comment that deserves proper typesetting.

A nitpick:

  Games aren't movies; we don't hand total creative authority to a single director
  and let his passion rule the project. Games are collaborative efforts, and that
  requires compromise and diplomacy.

Auteur filmmaking in commercial cinema is very much more the exception than the rule. Even where the director has free reign, it is seldom at the expense of a collaborative process except at a very high level. On the surface at least the two industries seem to have many more parallels than contrasts. Each, I'm sure, require both passion and professionalism in droves (though like the author, I think I'd make the second my preference).

This is very true.

The production of big-budget, AAA games and the production of most Hollywood movies share more in common than not. Especially these days, with AAA studios spending more money on writers, directors, and in-game voice talent.

There are maybe 3 directors in Hollywood who can command anything remotely approaching total creative control over a big studio picture. And even they don't exercise the sort of control people think they do.

Indeed. After all, a "big studio picture" is a fairly well-defined genre. That is to say, a tremendous number of choices have been made before any given project even begins. Even a director given "full control" can be relied on not to paint too far outside the lines. After all, how do you think he got full control in the first place?

Finally! This needed to be said a long time ago, especially in the game development industry. I only wonder why Ernest waited so long to say it. He's one of my favorite gamedev bloggers precisely because of his criticisms. They should make his Twinkie Denial Condition list a game industry certification ;)

Yes! I've always found it to be the case that employers that ask for 'passion' are merely interested in turning enthusiasm into dollars. Run, run, run like the plague.

This may often be the case, but it's not necessarily true. I've hired software developers for many years. I believe that passion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a highly effective developer.

Passion is certainly necessary, but when it's used as a smokescreen for how poorly you're treating the developers, calling it a requirement is flat-out wrong. I certainly see no problem with using it in recruitment spiels; it's using it during the job offer that's a problem.

I was in general agreeance with this article until the end:

>But Van Gogh was no naïve artist operating on raw talent and passion alone. If you read his letters, you discover that he was a well-educated scholar of art, much influenced by the ideas of others.

His passion kept him going when nobody would buy his works, but it was his professionalism -- his endless desire to learn more and do better, that exploited his talent to its fullest. Van Gogh's early works didn't amount to much. It was his growth as a serious, thoughtful, professional artist that turned him into what he became. _____

Hold on, how can the author draw a line between passion and being learned? Isn't it possible to be learned because you are passionate, and yet still be unprofessional? I define unprofessionalism as acting like Steve of Apple...and by that I mean either of the Steves.

I think it's obvipus to a cliche how Jobs fits in to this debate. IMO, Woz falls into the "passion" category. If, in a company, he was hired to build boards so that the company could profit and grow, and instead, he gave away his intellectual property and energy towards furthering what he saw as the home brew culture, that is an act of passion over professionalism. But it has little to do with whether he was learned in his area of expertise.

My take away since "art" does not scale: Work in smaller teams in order to produce passionate art.

This reminds me a lot of Erin Hoffman's infamous rant (http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html) about EA's abusive working conditions which resulted in three class-action lawsuits.

Given two candidates with similar skills, but one with obvious passion and the other not, I'd pick the passionate one every time.

You need both to truly succeed.

The difference between passion and professionalism is doing those parts of a project which nobody wants to but which must be done. There are some necessary tasks which just plain nobody is passionate about.

Did anyone else find this rather rambling? I lost interest after a few paragraphs because it basically read like a recapitulation of easpouse. I'm not saying it was a bad article or anything; to be honest, I'm surprised that it didn't hold my attention given the subject matter.

He lost me shortly after the sweeping statement that "'Passion' is an excuse used by employers to mistreat their employees." This simply isn't true in all cases. If I'm hiring someone, I want them to be passionate about what they're working on. Even if they work exactly 40 hours a week, it means they'll do better work than someone who just wants a job.

Lord Acton said to judge talent at its best and character at its worst. Large human organizations tend to judge both at their worst, and to be negative on unknown people for a longer time than any single rational actor would be, which is why "dues paying" periods are so ridiculously long. What this means is that the people who get ahead are people who can sustain a middling performance over a long time without even a whiff of failure, and not the creative, passionate people who take a lot of risks and can hit the high notes but occasionally screw up.

There are high-variance (passionate) and low-variance (professional) people, and various gradations in between. HV tend to swing (in work performance) between 2 and 10, while LV tend to swing between 5 and 7. If you're HV, it means you learn quickly and can do great things but it's also a statistical near-guarantee that you'll be fired at least once in your career (don't worry; in the long term, it's not as big a deal as you think it is).

Game development on AAA titles is no different. Don't go into it thinking a high level of creative talent will launch you into a position of major influence. You may or may not have creative talent, but not only do you have to prove it first, but you have to get into a position where you can prove it-- and the latter is much harder, because the only people who can get on projects where creativity is visible are those who've already put a lot into the political bank.

Passionate people look at the garbage games typical of the industry and think, "I could do so much better!" And they're 100% correct. That also doesn't matter.

My advice (which is so cliche): forget about games, except as a hobby and possibly something to study. Play them and build independent games if you wish, but consider "game design" a non-option without one hell of a lift. Learn how to program. Programming opens up a lot of problems that are fun in their own right even if you're not working on games. A lot of programming problems are far more interesting than running 8-figure video games; trust me on this. Become a really great programmer. That will pay off regardless of whether one ever goes into the video game industry. And becoming a top-1% programmer (takes 10+ years, start now) will make entry into the game industry at a decent level (for a passionate person unwilling to pay dues for decades) possible.

I'm not sure that I'm convinced by this model. Truly great work is often a result of consistent professionalism combined with ridiculous productivity.

Consider jashkenas, for example: Over the last few years, he's written an impressive number of solid, professional libraries and released them as open source. So he was working from a high baseline, and he gave himself lots of chances at success. Sooner or later, he was bound to write something 1 or 2 standard deviations better than his personal average.

I'd say that CoffeeScript is at least a 9, but it's an outlier from a pretty large group of 7s.

I do think that's somewhat true in software, but I think games are more of a mix of art and software, and in art it's much less common to find consistent winners outside of the mediocre category--- Thomas Kinkade makes consistent nice-looking paintings, but Picasso produced a lot of crap amidst his masterpieces. I'm not sure it's possible to take risks on game design and not end up with a reasonable number of duds, even if you're solid and professional on implementation.

It is true that most game-industry positions aren't really for designers, but these days a large number do involve some amount of design, especially if you want the game to be unique in some way. For example, AI programmers are in an odd position of doing "just implementation", but implementing a system that deeply impacts what kind of gameplay and design is possible (in some cases they quite literally write the tools that the designers will use to do things like write NPC behavior).

Is disproof by counter example allowed? Blizzard is one case of a company that has consistently produced masterpiece games in all of their major ip's at least since Diablo, Starcraft I, and Warcraft 3.

Only because they scrap ones that don't work. There's a difference between consistently producing incredible work and consistently releasing incredible work. Curation is a big part of industry success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_th...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost

OK, great point.

These numbers are relative to a standard where 5.0 is the average for a professional at one's level of experience, 4 is the minimum, and 6 is about the level where people get promoted. If you're consistently 7-9, you're overqualified for what you're doing and should either get a promotion or another job. In this light, I feel comfortable assuming that in normal situations people average no higher than 6.0, although some people vary more than others.

I was high-variance when younger but I learned to become middle-variance over time. It's a necessary aspect of career maturity. So I probably swing between 4 and 8. I can hit 9 but it's not sustainable (although today's 7 was the 9 of two years ago for me) and before I find myself anywhere near 3, I do everything I can to fix the situation (possibly getting another job).

"Truly great work is often a result of consistent professionalism combined with ridiculous productivity."

I totally agree. In my experience, the HV people the grandparent post refers to are capable of lots of "professionalism" but only when they care about their projects. The difference is how productive they are when they have to work on something they aren't passionate about.

Something they aren't passionate about, or something that bores them? There's a difference. Less than 5% of projects inspire passion for me, but there's a wide middle of projects that I don't love but will enjoy moderately and do well.

Like I said, I'm "middle-variance". I swing between 4 (minimal acceptable) and 8 (max. sustainable). I can keep a 6+ going when I'm not passionate about a project but don't mind doing it, especially if I can see it leading to something better in the future.

You're oversimplifying. There is more than just one variable involved in a person's productivity. "Professional" people can be passionate as well, the difference is in how it's expressed.

Also, I'm not at all convinced that passion is the key component in how great games are made. From what I can see the best games seem to come out of a sense of professional dedication to the ultimate product and the customer. Someone who is passionate tends to pick something up and work really hard on it for a while, but release it half-baked and ultimately unfinished. Id software's recent work is an example.

Contrast this with highly professional game organizations like Valve or Blizzard where, yes, there is passion for games, but there's something else too: a highly professional dedication to polish, completion, continuous refinement of game mechanics, etc. The latter simply produces better games.

And, uh, duh that a high level of talent is not enough to launch you into a position of major influence. That should be obvious. Everyone thinks they have talent, and it's expensive to even evaluate those claims. The only practical way to discover the truth of a claim of talent is to gradually expand a person's responsibility as they prove they can handle tasks. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it's gonna be. The good news is that software unlike most industries affords you the chance to do this on your own, like, for example, that guy who did Minecraft, or any number of other successful indie game developers. They could basically write themselves a check into any game design position at a major company if they wanted to.

>Large human organizations tend to judge both at their worst, and to be negative on unknown people for a longer time than any single rational actor would be, which is why "dues paying" periods are so ridiculously long. What this means is that the people who get ahead are people who can sustain a middling performance over a long time without even a whiff of failure, and not the creative, passionate people who take a lot of risks and can hit the high notes but occasionally screw up.

The problem I think is most are based on top-down command and control and managing by fear, not passion.

Passion means wanting to do something. Professionalism means doing stuff you don't like because it's necessary. The acid test is often how the person responds to their work being flamed.

* -passionate -professional: ignore it

* -passionate +professional: respond neutrally, "agree to disagree" if the flames continue

* +passionate -professional: flame back, send ASCII dongs

* +passionate +professional: stick with it, prove beyond reasonable doubt (often by demonstration) that the flamer is wrong

All my opinion, of course, but I find the distinction useful. A good organization needs both passionate and professional people, though they need not be the same people. The trick is to put people who have only one attribute into roles where their strengths are maximized and their weaknesses minimized. Don't put the passionate amateur in front of enterprise customers, and don't put the boring pro in front of idealistic programmers.

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