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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

I don't entirely agree with the article, but there are some aspects I to agree with, perhaps for different reasons.

In my experience a key differentiator is passion. Folks who are passionate about a subject will typically explore it more, and thus have a wider array of experiences and tools to draw on. This makes them able to solve problems others cannot.

It's not so much that the others couldn't ever do it, but they might simply not know enough to ask the right questions to get started or similar.

It's not a 1:1 correspondence, but it is in my view a strong signal.

That said, there are many different aspects to being a good engineer, and most are stronger in some and weaker in others. A good team has a good mix.

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Folks who are passionate about a subject will typically explore it more...

The problem with this idea is that in most orgs 'passion' equates to putting in more hours, taking problems home, etc. That implicitly biases the org against people with children, people with caring duties, people with other hobbies, and people who might be incredible engineers but who are just there for the job. That bias makes the company weaker.

I don't think the existence of bad company politics refutes the idea that passion might be a differentiating attribute among all of these groups of employees.

A dev can be passionate 20h/week and solve cursed bugs and architecture issues while another only ever does straightforward tickets 40h/week (and both can be more or less adequate, depending on the situation).

I do think it is rather passion as opposed to say, experience, seeing how some devs are drawn to the occasional tricky task early on.

Of course this "passion" could be many things. Curiosity, a higher than average frustration tolerance, an appreciation of "virtual" successes, a desire to prove oneself on an intellectual level (perhaps even in a compensative way), having the chutzpah to set own priorities on the way forward, ...

> The problem with this idea is that in most orgs 'passion' equates to putting in more hours

I meant passion in a more absolute sense, not just working more hours but being curious to explore and wanting to learn more about the field, in the "basic research" kind of sense.

While certainly there's overlap between passion and spending extra hours in the field, for example learning about other programming languages at home as a personal project in our case, it doesn't have to be in my experience.

Though in that case it likely would require the org realizing they benefit from and want to retain such passionate individuals.

"Passion" is an overused term, but it's absolutely clear that developers who love what they do are nearly an order of magnitude better than those who are punching the clock.

In a very specific sense, I tend to perform reverse-age-discrimination, because a developer who was PEEKing and POKEing segmented address space with BASIC in 1984 as a kid is always going to be preferable to an aimless Zoomer who was "inspired" by Justin Timberlake saying "A million isn't cool anymore, you know what is cool? A Billion." in The Social Network.

Enthusiasm is worth 10 IQ points

-Kevin Kelly

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