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The phrase "we want to hire passionate people" tends to re-enforce that prejudice to me. It frequently seems like marketing speak for "we want people who will write code for us outside business hours without reasonable compensation".

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Oh, yeah. The word itself is pretty close to a dealbreaker for me.

Luckily, none of the sort. We'd like to hire people who think and think independently. There's no such thing as you've mentioned here. Good point about the wording, though, haven't thought it's used like this.

I thought you tempered your use of "passionate" with specific examples that showed it wasn't exploitive or BS. It was clear you were looking for people who could write really high quality code and who had strong thoughts on what was right.

It's when you see "passionate" without any context that it becomes a turn off.

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