What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) (2016) [pdf]

"At a high level, our informants described great software engineers as people who are passionate about their jobs."

Curious to know this group's thoughts: Do you believe that passion is NECESSARY to be a "great" software engineer?

To some degree.

Or, perhaps, consider it in reverse. If you don't have passion, if you don't care about the software, if it's just a 9-to-5 job to you, how likely are you to do great work?

I don't think you have to have an obsessive, does-nothing-but-code-and-sleep kind of passion to be great, or at least moderately great. But you have to care about your craft, about the quality of the code you produce, or you won't produce anything approaching "great".

I doubt passion is needed to execute at a "great" level once the skills are built to do so, but I think it's pretty likely that passion play an important role at building the capability

In my experience with the people that I have worked with over many years, the best software engineers were always that ones that had a personal interest in software and programming and not just "assembly-line programmers". So I do think that passion plays a large role in the difference between adequate/good and "great".

yes for sure. you can't be good at something you don't give a shit about and only there for money.

Also being a "great software engineer" doesn't get you money more than being "good at people" so ppl who are great are doing it for love .

Yes. Earlier in careers, passion can lead to more time and energy towards growth, which is a strong contributor to becoming a great engineer.

For more experienced engineers, I think about it as skill vs motivation. In theory one doesn't need motivation to do great work. In practice, I haven't seen great work from folks with high skill but low motivation.