.Avery Blog

.NET and everything nice

It's all about the Passion, baby

There has been a number of articles recently about how to succeed in this industry. With outsourcing becoming more and more popular, large numbers of qualified developers in India who are willing to work for less, and a bad IT economy, more and more developers are in fear of their job and want to know what they can do to increase their chances of surviving and being successful in this industry. There is a simple one word answer; passion.

If you have a passion for programming and working in this industry then I promise that you will be successful. People will passion are the ones who go home at night and end up writing more code. People with passion are the people who spend their weekends writing articles and blogs. People with passion are the people who end up reading books on XML at the beach.(You know who you are).

I have always made this distinction in the people that I meet, are they a "career" developer... or are they a developer who has passion . Career developers expect their employer to educate and train them about the newest technology, developers with passion already have the beta at home and are writing applications with it in their spare time. 

If when you were reading Eric Sink's article on Career Calculus you thought to yourself, "Wow, someone put in writing what I have always thought", then you have the passion.

There was a blog post not that long about whether you would let your child go into the IT industry. I think there is a simple answer to this question, if they are looking for a career where they can make decent money and spend their night and weekends skiing then I would tell them to be a Lawyer or Accountant. But if your child has already figured out how to hack past your parental controls and wrote a VB app for your office, then I would tell him to go for it.

Unfortunately passion is not something that can be taught, does this mean that you can't be successful in this industry if you don't have passion?  Yeah, you can... but it is going to be alot harder. (But chances are if you are reading this blog at 12:00 at night you probably have it).

-James

 

Posted: Aug 29 2003, 12:06 AM by jamesavery | with 6 comment(s)

Comments

Kooba said:

It's 12:27 am :-)
# August 29, 2003 1:27 AM

Ray Jezek said:

I consider myself to be passionate about programming but I still expect my employer to participate in my career development by providing me resources for education. I don't think developers should let their employers "off the hook" by letting them not care about their professional development. How dedicated a company is to its employees should be a significant factor in your job search. Not only that, but I believe is a critical aspect to the success of the company overall. I'm not saying that they "drive" my development, but they need to facilitate it in some way. This could be as simple as giving you a budget for books, classes, etc... It doesn't have to be something huge like having a training plan outlined for your next 10 years, but they should encourage and enable their people to learn in a variety of ways.
# August 29, 2003 8:55 AM

Ray Jezek said:

I should add, I do agree completely with your distinction between those with passion and those without, and the fact that people who have the passion will be successful in this industry. It definately is a huge factor for me especially when I looking to hire someone.. I always ask the question, tell me about a non-work project you have worked on in the last few months... i've found that to be a pretty good way to find the passionate.... because when i ask the question they start to get excited and talk non-stop about what they are working on... LOL
# August 29, 2003 9:06 AM

James Avery said:

I know exactly what you mean. I agree that companies should provide training, books, etc. I just think that it is ultimately up to the developer to be responsible for his learning, like that recent post about "who is responsible for my career".

-James
# August 29, 2003 9:34 AM

Jason Bunting said:

Simply wanted to say that easily 19 out of 20 of the students I have gone through college with while working towards my BS in CS are without this "passion." They look at "computer science" as merely a choice they made for a degree, and have little interest outside of class of learning about it. And since most of them stay far away from trade publications, websites, etc., they don't realize just how outdated the information they are hearing really is, seeing as how the faculty are made up of similarly passion-lacking individuals. These students think "I know my stuff," but find out otherwise once they start looking for work. "What is a web service?! What is SOA?!"
# August 29, 2003 1:16 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Too funny! Last time I was at the beach (back in July) I was reading Bill Evjen's XML Web Services for ASP.NET. :-)
# September 4, 2003 12:49 AM
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