Today I had an impromptu conversation with a total stranger at my local café that got me thinking. He saw that I was working on some code and asked me what I was doing. I gave him the thirty-second whirlwind tour of Ruby and briefly explained what I was working on.
He came from the .net side of things and had been doing contracting for quite awhile. Recently though, his shop closed up and he was between gigs. He hadn't been exposed to Ruby and thought it sounded kind of interesting. He was, as he put it, "a Windows-guy", but basically apologized for it saying that "everyone around here" runs Windows. Really? You mean like the four-out-of-five-laptops that are Macs in this café??!!! (Note to self: this fella doesn't seem too observant.)
So while I was trying to politely end the conversation to get back to my hacking and an IRC-meeting, he rambled on about his personal work philosophy. God knows how long he droned on, but his M.O. essentially boiled down to "Hey I don't care what I work on. Languages are all the same, why fuss over this one or that one?"
It stopped me in my tracks.
Are you kidding me?
Look, there is something laudable (in a kind of John-and-Yoko-stay-in-bed-for-peace way) about The Big World view where all the geeks get along and sing side by side at the great binary campfire. At a certain level arguing over this language vs. that language or this tool or that operating system is frivolous waste of time. Much of our "values" in these things are based merely on opinions, aesthetics and feelings. It's like mailing list arguments over whether or not the Enterprise could defeat the Galactica. Ladies and Gentleman on your left is Dork City…
But what this really told me more than anything else was that this guy was simply indifferent. You don't have to agree with my way of doing things, but when we talk about them I at least expect you to have an opinion and to be able to back that up with some reasoning. This guy's indifference stemmed from the fact that he treated this like a job.
"Passion" is a word that is overused in this biz. Every time I'm in a debrief about some candidate and the notion of "passion" comes up I started checking the room for forks to shove in my eyes. I don't care about passion for The Company or The Idea. That's rah-rah B.S. that I have no stomach or patience for. What I do want to see in a co-worker is someone who cares about what they work on and how they do it. This is your day-to-day existence. This is what you spend a lot of waking hours doing, being away from your loved ones. You damn-well better care about how you want to spend that time.
If you wanted to fail spectacularly in a job interview with me, one way to score a boat-load of demerit-points quickly is give an indifferent answer to the question, "What do you like to work on?" When people shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, I'll work on anything", it tells me that they don't care. The pay is the same, so why fuss over the details?
Now I understand that some interviewees won't give me a straight answer because they expect that I want the answer an automaton would give. There are certainly plenty of shops that just want "human capital" in much the same way generals in WWI wanted troops (see fodder, cannon). But even so, I'm not sure that's the kind of person I want on my team. Show a little back-bone for pete's sake! Do you do this job just because it pays the bills? Are you so beaten-down by the industry and your experiences that you have no hope of it ever getting better? Are you just trudging forward in your profession because you don't know what else to do?
I don't care so much whether or not we agree on tools, languages or operating systems, but I hope to God you care about how you spend your time on this earth in this profession. Don't sleepwalk through it.