Today I wanted to discuss passionate vs. career programmers.

If you’ve ever worked at a tech company you know there are two kinds of people:

The kind who go to college, get their degree, apply for a job, get the job and *just* do their job. They come in at 8, go home at 5. Never buy new books to learn new languages and features. It’s just a job to them. These are career programmers.

Then there’s the guys who stay until 8, pushing hard to get their task done. Going home, writing more code. Buying new books all the time possibly to learn new languages. Just a general love for programming and the web in general. These are the passionate programmers.

A lot of companies tend to want to hire the first type of person because they feel it provides them with “security” because they will obey rules, never come in late, and can be molded to be whatever you want at a lower cost. I think that represents a problem and causes more harm than good. I personally believe one passionate programmer is worth two to three career programmers. You should always push your team to be on the cutting edge and learning. Always!

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with people who love to just write code for their job and make their company a lot of money. But at the same time, I want my fellow programmers to also push themselves to the limit. I want them to succeed in coming up with new and innovating ways to tackle a problem. As Google says, I want my fellow programmers to do the impossible. And then some. With a career programmer this is very difficult because of the lack of dedication to code as a lifestyle.

If you want a solid team that believes in your product, hire a team of passionate programmers. Let your company flourish in people who love code.

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