As Seth Godin, author of several books I would suggest (Tribes, The Dip, The Idea Virus), lately had written in his blog, there is one big danger a company has: A jerk “who knows every technical detail” and who is the only one “who can fix that big machine”. I once made an experience with such an “I am the sytem!” - jerk who almost completely destroyed the positive, innovative culture of a whole company just because he felt insecure and threatened as the team grew and new products needed new technical approaches which blew the scope of the existing system. The fear of loosing some of his control was greater then the fun and motivation every other team member felt when we started to leave the past to build a new future. He is gone! A year ago! But there is still a lot of everyday trouble in handling the system he once “owned”. The lack of documentation and system architecture, the narrowly confined parts other team members worked on in the past and the complexity of the overall system needs a lot of effort for extending the system or reengineering single parts to allow more integration. This effort costs time and money and often leads to frustration within the team. But nevertheless the team tried to make a virtue out of necissity: Every team member became an expert of a part of a system and is responsible for the evolution and also serves as the contact person if anybody has trouble or feature wishes regarding that special part. Additionaly we developed a team statement which contains several rules for open communication, sharing of knowledge and the team based ownership of code. Priciples that never woulod work that great if the team did’t have the experience of working with the jerk.

I think that Passion is one of the vital skills a software developer should possess. Passion for technology, passion for solutions, passion for progress. Mike Peters has pointed at this tellingly precise in his blog aritcle “How to pick a GREAT Software Engineer“. He writes, that passionate developers are characterized by reading DZone or TecCrunch, testing new software, or writing code in their sparetime:

Love what you do and pass that love to everyone you deal with. Always be positive, energetic and make progress, no matter what. What do you do in your spare time? If you’re not writing code, installing a virtual machine, reading TechCrunch/Slashdot/DZone or testing out the latest version of Windows 7, you are not passionate about technology.

I completely aggree with that. Of course there are things much more important then technology (family, friends, health etc.) but I think that passion in this context just means that technology is not just a job but also a hobby, a hobby which serendipously became ones job. And as a hobby it affects the daily life, the character and thinking. Maybe I can express it that way: A triathlet, a football fan and a technologist (to use a name which expresses the passion more then the title software developer) are on beach holidays with their kids and spouses. The triathlet will go on a beach run as soon as his kids are playing in the water and his wife is relaxing in the sun. The football fan will inform himself about the results of his favorite team. And he will buy newspapers, search the internet, call friends at home or ask other tourists until he knows how the match ended. And so is the technologist. He will pleasurably read a book about an interesiting field of technology at the beach (my beach lecture last year in south africa was The Big Switch written by Nicholas Carr). Maybe he actually will have his laptop with him to check his RSS subsrictions in the evening as soon as his family fall asleep; and some will start eclipse to try a  tutorial about the new framework or SDK. Those three guys have one thing in common: While doing their stuff they feel an inner satisfaction which is motivated completely intrinsic. Friends or their partners only have little understanding and will wonder how one can be that passionate about such an apparantly unimportant thing. But this question is not really important to the triathlet, the football fan an the technologist. Especially for the technologist its just a neat sideeffect that he can make a living with his hobby. To come back to the article I mentioned above: I think that its really important to be passionate about what you do when you work as a software developer or engineer. I made experiences that there are a lot of developers who understand their occupation as nothing more as a 9 to 5 job. In a lot of cases this will be enough. A lot of projects will succeed and they will implement some beautiful systems. But at the end of the day there is no fun and little innovative potential. They will mark time without making progress for theirselfs and on the team they are working in.