Have you seen that EarthLink commercial, you know, the one where they tell you that geeks get the job done? Well, Charles Nutter is a geek - plain and simple. His recent post, On Coding, is definitely worth a read. While I’m not nearly the night owl he is (well, when I do stay up late, I certainly don’t wake up at 7 am!) I certainly identify with a lot of what he’s saying. Charles is dead on when he talks about passion and while I think it’s good to have more developers with customer affinity, I want those with some zeal, dang-it!
In the late ’90s, a lot of people entered this profession - if you could spell Oracle, you were golden. While I certainly appreciated this attitude during the period I was looking for that all important first job, it was quite a shock when I started working with folks for whom software was just a job. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people have to eat, breathe, sleep this stuff (I really appreciate being able to carry on a conversation about, you know, sports or something) but to really excel at this stuff, it has to be more than a passing fancy. Yes, coders are mocked and software is incredibly artistic. And yes, companies that “get it” do extremely well. The sad thing though - few places seem to really want the passionate among us…wonder why that is.
