thirdbIT

“Technically gifted and passionate RoR engineer wanted for one month”

As per policy, I won’t link to the offender. But what are the chances you will find a gifted and passionate engineer available RIGHT THIS SECOND to work a few hours a week for a month, at $50/hour, total payment capped at $2500?

I don’t like this whole job posting obsession with “passion,” anyway. It seems a bit much to demand not merely competence, productivity, honesty, attention to detail, professionalism, and time from employees/contractors, but also passion. It’s a bizarre conceit, I think, somewhat akin to the invention of romantic love in marriage. It’s an attempt to paper over an economic transaction under the guise of emotional attachment. It’s not enough for workers to give our time, our energy, our thoughts, and our creativity to our work — we must also give our very selves, the part of us that is able to feel passion.

I resent this attempt to colonize my emotional landscape. I don’t blame individual job-posters, of course; they’re just using the job-listing language of the day, and not thinking very much about what, actually, it means. Perhaps only freakish people who spent too much time reading cultural studies in college stop to think about the meaning of the current vogue for demanding passionate employees.

Is there evidence I haven’t seen that passionate employees are better employees? Passion does not necessarily improve one’s personal life; I don’t know why it would necessarily improve one’s professional life. On the contrary, passion would seem to most often be a disability at work. It clouds reason and judgment. It encourages overexertion followed by disappointment and ennui. It contributes to misunderstanding and strife, shortens tempers, and fosters unrealistic expectations.

Perhaps I’m just being pedantic, and what the job-listers really mean is “looking for someone who likes their work” but they must use “passionate” because of rampant adjective inflation. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want to hire people who like to do the job. But that’s not the kind of information you’ll glean until you talk with someone anyway, so there doesn’t seem to be any point in putting it as a requirement on a job listing.

I see “passionate engineer wanted” and think “unrealistic and possibly abusive employer/client”. My passion is not your business, people. Ask me to be professional, mature, conscientious, skilled, creative, honest, efficient, knowledgeable, curious, persistent, thoughtful, and engaged — I can be all these things. But don’t ask me to be passionate. It’s not a love affair, it’s a job.

thirdbIT is the “professional internet presence” of Max and Amy Newell. Or, if you will, Max and Amy’s Interweb job-pimping self-marketing, social-web 2.0 thingy. Eventually we’ll put up code, to show we know how to code. We’ll have posts showing that we read all the important technology news and have interesting things to say about it. We’ll talk about our contributions to cool open-source projects, and provide cheatsheets and other useful stuff. We’ll talk about why people would want to hire a husband-wife software development team, as opposed to just one person, or some other kind of team. We’ll have our resumes and a “contact us” form. We’ll be doing all the stuff the careers people say to do, even if we’re pretty conflicted about the whole notion of “careers” (look for a future post on this subject).

Right now, we’ve just got a blog that only I, Amy, am likely to post to with any regularity (being as I’m the loquacious one), and a name, which I’ve been nursing for a few years now, along with my dream of starting a consulting business with Max, and a tagline, which I came up with a couple weeks ago while driving back from Target. We’ve got some pictures I drew for a logo/template, which Max then took some photos of, and some alterna-cards we made from the photos, which are somewhere in the mail between the UK and here. We’ve got some ideas. We have some goals. But we don’t have much else. If we’re going to actually hand out the alterna-cards, we should put something up here.

Still, the customer (being us) is pretty happy with this iteration. We don’t know where things are going. We’re not sure this is the time to start consulting as a team; it wasn’t really our plan; there’s so much we want to learn, still; we’d like to say we’re experts at something, but our career paths have been too unconventional, too general, to say that. In a lot of ways, we like being what we are, jacks-of-all-trades, IT-wise. But we’d like to be master of one too. So it’s time for us to settle down and get great at something.

What we’ve chosen, right now, to settle down and get great with, is Ruby on Rails (future post to do on why RoR).

So that’s what the focus of this blog will be right now: our journey to getting great with RoR.