In so, SO many job descriptions and About Us company pages, you’ll see these words: talented and passionate.
“Our team is the most talented group of people…”
“We’re looking for someone passionate about…”
Both of these terms are overused and lazy. But the real reason their presence is irritating for me is that they’re both wrong.
In his book Talent Is Overrated, Geoff Colvin lays out the explanation far better than I can. What we typically call talent is actually skill. Any time we say something like “they’re a talented artist” or “they’re a talented programmer”, what we’re likely describing is the visible result of an enormous amount of repetitive practice, training, and coaching. Nobody is born an artist. No one just sits down at a computer and discovers they’re good at programming. The proficiency they display belies dedication to a craft. Magician Penn Jillette is quoted as saying, “The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.” It’s not magic. And neither is it talent.
When we say talent we’re undervaluing the hard work that went into getting good at something. I greatly prefer saying skilled.
The second term that gets my hackles up is passionate. This gets overused in job descriptions all over the place, but most frequently in the videogame industry. Everybody has to be passionate. Well here’s the deal. Author Kim Scott put it really well in the title of this recent post: Not everyone who works for you loves their job and that’s OK. It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to be emotionally attached to the work they do.
For me, though, it goes deeper. And again, this comes from my history with game development. Almost every time you see “passionate” in a job description in this industry, it’s code for “we will happily exploit anyone who’s bad at setting personal boundaries.” The reason the games industry is so happy to talk about passion is because it lets shoddy leaders get away with overworking people. “Everyone here is passionate about making games!” is why it’s OK to shrug off accusations of a workplace that drives people so hard that they wind up getting hospitalized.
Here’s my transcription of an interview with Amy Hennig, a former creative director at Naughty Dog. This is a game company that’s pretty much the poster child for “passionate”. In her own words…
[Ms. Hennig] “I worked there 10.5 years. I probably on average…I don’t know if I ever worked less than 80 hours a week…I pretty much worked 7 days a week, at least 12 hours a day.”
[Ms. Hennig] “Obviously in a leadership role you try to do even more.”
[Soren Johnson] “Is that lifestyle worth it for these games?”
<pause>
[Ms. Hennig] “That’s the question isn’t it?”
<pause>
[Ms. Hennig] “I don’t think so. But would I change anything, meaning I hadn’t made those games now?…No.”
https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/amy-hennig-part-2
Later on in the interview she talks about kids growing up without seeing their mom or dad due to overwork. Commenting on those who were divorced as a result of development or who had to get “checked in somewhere” after shipping an Uncharted game, Ms. Hennig went on to say, “None of this is worth that.”
There’s your passion. People requiring clinical attention for their burnout.
I understand why we treasure passion. All things being equal, wouldn’t you rather have someone working on your team who’s clearly invested in the work? The reality is that it’s unwise to expect everyone to be thusly engaged all the time, and we certainly shouldn’t gatekeep our hiring based on emotion.
Maybe the best we can do is say we love to see folks energized by the work they do. That’s a little more verbose than “passionate”, but has the added value of not implying we’ll exploit anyone.