"At a high level, our informants described great software engineers as people who are passionate about their jobs."
Curious to know this group's thoughts: Do you believe that passion is NECESSARY to be a "great" software engineer?
Curious to know this group's thoughts: Do you believe that passion is NECESSARY to be a "great" software engineer?
Or, perhaps, consider it in reverse. If you don't have passion, if you don't care about the software, if it's just a 9-to-5 job to you, how likely are you to do great work?
I don't think you have to have an obsessive, does-nothing-but-code-and-sleep kind of passion to be great, or at least moderately great. But you have to care about your craft, about the quality of the code you produce, or you won't produce anything approaching "great".
For more experienced engineers, I think about it as skill vs motivation. In theory one doesn't need motivation to do great work. In practice, I haven't seen great work from folks with high skill but low motivation.
Also being a "great software engineer" doesn't get you money more than being "good at people" so ppl who are great are doing it for love .