Ask HN: Is passion a fair thing to ask for from an employee?

* If you want low performance, give me low money.

* If you want high performance, give me high money.

* If you want loyalty/passion, give me equity/profit sharing.

You can buy my performance i.e. time with money. You can buy my passion i.e. commitment with reciprocation. If you give me typical market wages without profit sharing, don't expect anything beyond typical performance without commitment.

Define "passion". Do you mean:

1. Someone who will respond to your above-and-beyond commitment to them (in compensation, tools, respect, etc.) with above-and-beyond results?

2. Someone who will give above-and-beyond results even when given lousy tools, a poor work environment, unrealistic expectations, and mediocre compensation?

#1 is fair to ask. #2 is not.

I'm not sure that passion is something to ask for as much as it is something to look for.

Even making shitty wages, I can't hide my passion for my work. When I was 15, bagging groceries and helping people load up their cars, I couldn't restrain my passion for doing things well, and that was $6 an hour. If I'm getting paid something approaching a reasonable wage while working on my true creative passions of UI/UX? Forget about it — I'm on fire.

So I think it's worthwhile to look for people who have that energy. With the caveat that such energy has value and if you can't provide full-market cash compensation you need to make up for it with a cocktail of other benefits like flexibility, autonomy, work environment, equity, great employee-selected tools and indulgence/encouragement for people's specific ambitions.

I suspect you might be from India, so let me tell about a few things that bugged me about life as software developer in Bangalore.

I don't mind being paid below market but I definitely need something to make up for this. You could this (following in no particular order): (1) profit sharing (2) equity (3) a higher-than-market level of responsibility for a given experience level and (4) interesting work.

The other thing is that every time I start a new position I'm full of excitement and passion but this excitement drains out of me pretty quickly thanks to terrible decision making by the management, my discovery that I got lowballed on my offer or by others in the team being hired at levels disproportionate to their ability, or by my being forced to work on something completely different from what I promised when I was made the offer, or my discovery that the management are bunch of penny-wise pound-foolish cheapskates.

The TLDR here is that you need to be honest and extremely fair in your dealings. Always ask yourself whether you'd want to continue if you were in the employees position.

Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that you are doing the employee a favor by giving them a job. Anybody worth hiring can pretty much get an offer with a phone call or two in the current hiring market.

I was passionate myself. Then a new non-technical VP was hired, and three of six directors were moved under the non-technical director the VP promoted. My title, and those of the others, went from director to Zweiter Beauftragter fur Administrative Fragen. Our job descriptions changed beyond recognition, for "flexibility", we were informed. My new supervisor informed me that I "solved my own problems"--a bad thing, apparently--and that I was "limited by what I know." I was required to attend unbelievably boring "change management" meetings, in which the entire department got to listen to the ephemera of Windows system administurbation and discuss the cleaning of digital bed pans. Whatever passion I had evaporated. I left a couple months later.

Being a good manager in the startup field is an extraordinary difficult thing to do.

Here's an awesome TED talk that you can watch which is a good introduction in the field - http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html - it shows that performance in creative fields can decrease when the payout is greater.

Salary is just one factor in job satisfaction, there are lots of other ways, most of them cheaper from a costs perspective, which can improve the "mood". Here's a list:

  - equity
  - 20% time (autonomy to work on self-driven projects)
  - a perceived notion of fairness (i.e. no bozos as managers,
  promotions done right on merit and payout/hierarchy that
  correlates with the actual job performance, not politics)
  - free drinks/food/catering (or at least joint cafeteria area
  for lunch bonding/discussions)
  - awesome hardware
  - high employee/manager ratio to avoid micro-management
  - a tech ladder allowing growth without becoming a manager

I think it depends on whether an employer views passion as a character trait or a byproduct. The distinction is very important.

I'm an employer (and a programmer) and I view passion as a byproduct of developers being properly incentivized to do something they find fascinating.

That incentive varies from programmer to programmer. Incentives can be cash, equity, profit sharing, flexible hours, encouragement and recognition, kick-ass equipment, a steady supply of new tech toys to play with, paid time and travel to conferences, etc.

The second aspect, of course, the truly hard one, is keeping people fascinated. Everything gets boring as hell eventually. As an employer I actually find this harder than determining what incentives people respond to because I'm personally aware of how quickly programmers get bored.

I was passionate for a previous employer, but they burned it out of me. Their inability to make decisions and leaps necessary to really be successful ate away at me. Those things affected me personally, and as an employee, that just can't happen. It's not worth it.

You can't ask for passion from an employee unless you are giving them a meaningful equity stake or paying above market rates. Quite frankly, if you dont give a good stake or a great salary, employees won't naturally feel like going the extra mile.

In my experience, most employees feel that pushing themselves won't actually accrete any value to themselves, and that really kills any sort of passion.

Good people are often passionate to begin with. If they lose their passion that's probably the fault of their employer.

If they're not passionate to begin with maybe they need to be motivated. Money does it for some people but it's not everything. Interest is very important too.

Sell me on your project, infect me with your own passion for it. (You do have a lot of belief in your project, right? It's not just something you think might work, maybe? If your idea is mediocre and you know it then this ain't gonna happen.)

Then pay me enough to make it worth my while. I have my own projects that I'm passionate about and there's so many hours in the day; every minute I'm spending working on your idea is a minute I'm deferring my own visions. You want me to pour my time into your idea? I'd better get more than just enough money to live on - I want to be able to not worry about looking for work for a while after I'm done with your project, so I can spend my time working on my own stuff that matters intensely to me and me alone. If you can't give me tons of money then I'd better have a serious stake in the eventual profits, and you'd better not want me to work on it for very long.

Passion isn't something your employees can just choose to give you once asked, but it is something you can choose to give them by providing a meaningful purpose, the opportunity to learn new things, and the freedom to do great work.

I don't think it is a fair thing to ask for, but it is certainly a fair thing for you to look for.

It is the job of the company to impart passion, set an example and hold on to the people that get behind the company vision.

Without that vision or passion from the founders, none of the employees will have it and you are left with salary trumping everything (because there is nothing else, except maybe a small group of people you like hanging out with).

If you are passionate and convey that clearly, passion will trump salary for the right people, and those are the ones you want on your team.

"can't make decent payments as salaries"

Yeah, that's a dealbreaker. I need to pay my bills. If you can't do that, sorry, but I have to keep my housing.

Passion cannot be faked. And you can't buy true passion. Even if someone offered me $10 billion a year to do something, I'd be passionate about the money and not about my job (well, unless my job is interesting). As others have said, if you can't give high base pay, give equity. Heck, give equity anyway. Ownership helps with passion.

Give someone interesting an interesting problem. Don't hire assholes (in fact, fire assholes). Create a community where genuine mistakes aren't a big deal to their employment (and avoid cover your ass) and the passion will come. Support creativity, support big ideas, support some of the random, one off ideas that come out of creative people (easter eggs, hack weeks) and it'll pay for itself.

Being from a third world country myself it is really difficult. Its even worse if your society is really corrupt. First its difficult to trade equity coz everyone is out to make an easy buck and its really hard to believe anyone however genuine they look or sound. Second, most third world countries are cash driven economies no credit cards and shit. But there is hope if you (or to) find someone who really believes in your idea. Its basicaly a hard sale. Best option is to build a very good reputation at Uni/college or your first workplace. Guaranteed, even if your idea is wack, your rep will get you the best employees/co-founders at minimal cost.

"can't make decent payments as salaries"

Conversation doesn't really need to go beyond this point. It's like asking "Should my woman cook and clean for me even though I beat her each day?" Really, the cooking and cleaning is not the issue in that conversation.

In my experience, you can grow and retain quality people with compensation, practices, and other incentives, but you won't make them passionate about their job this way.

There's passion about what you do (passionate about their field, tools), and passion about what you are doing (healthcare, education, making money). These are high energy, all-in types who live their jobs. They are also few in numbers.

You can hire and fire based on displayed passion, but I'm not sure it can be taught. They either have it or they don't.

Also, don't confuse passion with work ethic, which is (probably) equally valuable, but more of a character trait that can be applied to many different things.

Why would you want passion? The thing you should look for is interest. Passion only means that they don't have the necessary information to tell if what they are doing is reckless or not.

There is a meaningful distinction to be made between passion about programming and passion about your product. The former is probably a necessity for good programmers, while the latter might not be necessary and might be hard to maintain without granting equity and/or having a really, really cool product.

If you are hiring in a 3rd world country, be careful as the law is not with you. A competitor can buy your developer code and run away with it without you are not being able to do anything about it.

so yeah, in 3rd world country, to be passionate and motivated, money mostly talks. Sad but true

This might fit in with Dan Pink's talk on 'Drive':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Passion can be driven by incentives outside of salary.

I think it's a fair thing to look for in an employee. Who you hire is up to you.

Are you hiring an expat or a local? Which country?

If the market supports it.

I think it's probably a required thing for every employee.

In return you must offer:

1. Access to CS literature (any lit. not just titles specific to the field we're in). 2. Encouragement for improving skills. 3. A culture that promotes interaction between people. 4. Machines that are fast, build quickly. 5. Willing to pay for a personal license to dev-tools. 6. Provide a very small percentage of company time to drop the main task at hand and pick up something completely unrelated to hack on.

This should be sufficient to ensure that your employees value their jobs and would rather continue than leave.