We (as I group all Software Engineers together) are currently in a market that might look very good for us. Companies are desperately trying to get Software Engineers (from now on SE) , no matter the price. If you switch jobs now, you can demand almost anything you want. In the Netherlands there is a trend now to even give 2 lease cars with a job, just to get you to work for them. How weird is that? How am I gonna drive 2 cars at the same time??

Of course this sounds very good for us, but this also creates a very unhealthy situation..

For example:
If you are currently working for a company which is growing fast and you are trying to attract more co-workers, to finally get some serious software development from the ground, there is no-one to be found without offering sky high salaries. Trying to find quality co-workers is very hard. A lot of people are attracted to our kind of work, because of the good salaries, but this also means that a lot of people without the right passion are entering our market.

Passion, yes, I think that is the right word. When you have passion for your job, your job won’t stop at 05:00 PM. You will keep refreshing all of your development RSS feeds all night. You will search the internet for the latest technologies that might be interesting to use at work. And you will start about a dozen new ‘promising’ projects a month, just to see if you can master that latest technology you just read about a couple of weeks ago (and find an useful way of actually using that technology).

Without that passion, the market might look very nice (because of the cars, money and of course the hot girls we attract), but I don’t think it will be that interesting very long as, let’s say: fireman or fighter-pilot.

It might sound that I am trying to protect my own job here and partly that is true. But I am also trying to protect myself against the people I don’t want to work with. I want to have heated discussions about stuff I read about. I want to be able to spar with people that have the same ‘passion’ for the job as I have. I want colleagues that are working with me for the right reasons.

Where are those people I am looking for!!