TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Passionate about what again?

I was looking at my resume from 2014, which I haven't really updated since then since I've been employed. One of the line items is "Passionate about Linux-as-a-platform and open source software."

But I haven't really made any open source contributions worth mentioning since 2012. And while my employer runs Linux in production, a lot of the fellow developers seem to prefer their macbooks or their mac towers to the Linux tower option (we have no Linux laptop option so I use a windows laptop to remote to my Linux tower), and there's been talk for a while now about running docker in production instead. In any case I don't work anywhere near that level in our tech stack, my life is mostly a backend Enterprise Java app hell with occasional forays into our enterprise frontend hell...

I've since learned to be more passionate about making quality software first, but I'm still pretty ambivalent when it comes to existing tire fires. That is, it's fine to make them a bit worse, try not to make them a lot worse (though that is hard to do), it's better to make them more manageable or contained (yay a few unit tests here and there..), and it's impossible to ever put them out. So I think for my resume update I'll put "Passionate about Linux-as-a-platform, open source software, and quality software first." but I know in an interview setting I'd only be able to talk about the benefits of using and contributing to open source, without having much to show on the contributing part since 2012.

So if I were an interviewer interviewing myself and I asked about that, I might be inclined to be mean that day, and wonder just how passionate someone can be when they aren't acting on their passion. The truth is that the emotion of "passion" is hard for me to attain, let alone sustain, but employers don't want to hear that so I have something that roughly equates passion with something I care about in the abstract and might occasionally yearn for if I'm not doing it in the concrete.

Anyone else like that?


Posted on 2017-11-13 by Jach

Tags: personal

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/348

Trackback URL: https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/11/passionate_about_what_again

Back to the top

Back to the first comment

Comment using the form below

(Only if you want to be notified of further responses, never displayed.)

Your Comment:

LaTeX allowed in comments, use $$\$\$...\$\$$$ to wrap inline and $$[math]...[/math]$$ to wrap blocks.