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1. Someone who will respond to your above-and-beyond commitment to them (in compensation, tools, respect, etc.) with above-and-beyond results?
2. Someone who will give above-and-beyond results even when given lousy tools, a poor work environment, unrealistic expectations, and mediocre compensation?
#1 is fair to ask. #2 is not.
If they're not passionate to begin with maybe they need to be motivated. Money does it for some people but it's not everything. Interest is very important too.
Then pay me enough to make it worth my while. I have my own projects that I'm passionate about and there's so many hours in the day; every minute I'm spending working on your idea is a minute I'm deferring my own visions. You want me to pour my time into your idea? I'd better get more than just enough money to live on - I want to be able to not worry about looking for work for a while after I'm done with your project, so I can spend my time working on my own stuff that matters intensely to me and me alone. If you can't give me tons of money then I'd better have a serious stake in the eventual profits, and you'd better not want me to work on it for very long.
Give someone interesting an interesting problem. Don't hire assholes (in fact, fire assholes). Create a community where genuine mistakes aren't a big deal to their employment (and avoid cover your ass) and the passion will come. Support creativity, support big ideas, support some of the random, one off ideas that come out of creative people (easter eggs, hack weeks) and it'll pay for itself.
I don't mind being paid below market but I definitely need something to make up for this. You could this (following in no particular order): (1) profit sharing (2) equity (3) a higher-than-market level of responsibility for a given experience level and (4) interesting work.
The other thing is that every time I start a new position I'm full of excitement and passion but this excitement drains out of me pretty quickly thanks to terrible decision making by the management, my discovery that I got lowballed on my offer or by others in the team being hired at levels disproportionate to their ability, or by my being forced to work on something completely different from what I promised when I was made the offer, or my discovery that the management are bunch of penny-wise pound-foolish cheapskates.
The TLDR here is that you need to be honest and extremely fair in your dealings. Always ask yourself whether you'd want to continue if you were in the employees position.
Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that you are doing the employee a favor by giving them a job. Anybody worth hiring can pretty much get an offer with a phone call or two in the current hiring market.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Passion can be driven by incentives outside of salary.
I think it's probably a required thing for every employee.
I know. But is it really true, I fail to understand how a developer can be passionate about some business and yet launch 2-5 products a year. Is that passion for the business/ industry or passion to develop skills? Most of the good programmers do it, right? Work on 4 products a year in multiple industries. Should you hire someone who is passionate about the cause or one who is passionate about code(read growth/career…
I'm an employer (and a programmer) and I view passion as a byproduct of developers being properly incentivized to do something they find fascinating.
That incentive varies from programmer to programmer. Incentives can be cash, equity, profit sharing, flexible hours, encouragement and recognition, kick-ass equipment, a steady supply of new tech toys to play with, paid time and travel to conferences, etc.
The second aspect, of course, the truly hard one, is keeping people fascinated. Everything gets boring as hell eventually. As an employer I actually find this harder than determining what incentives people respond to because I'm personally aware of how quickly programmers get bored.
It is the job of the company to impart passion, set an example and hold on to the people that get behind the company vision.
Without that vision or passion from the founders, none of the employees will have it and you are left with salary trumping everything (because there is nothing else, except maybe a small group of people you like hanging out with).
If you are passionate and convey that clearly, passion will trump salary for the right people, and those are the ones you want on your team.