I remember working at an Optical Networking startup in Ottawa, where my boss, in particular, was extremely passionate, and believed deeply in the company, and consequently worked weekends and 18 - 20 hour days regularly. The company never got a customer, and went bankrupt. My boss got laid off with everyone else.
What is the lesson there? To give up passion and go through life jaded and without colour?
I also killed myself working for Ottawa start ups that failed. I decided that I should take more responsibility for a company's success and pushed myself to learn the business of software. Now I have some successful startups in my track record.
If your team lets you down that does not mean you should let yourself down.
As somebody who hires quite a few people I can say with certainty that looking for passionate people does not mean what the author is interpreting it to be. Companies generally want people who take pride in their work, believe in aggressively working towards their goal, know how to overcome hurdles, do what it takes and so on. It does not mean that they have to put insane number of hours to do this. It just means that they know how to strike a balance i.e. when the situation demands they go above and beyond.
From my personal experience - all these passionate ads more often than not after hiring saddle the dev with TPS reports and excel sheets than unleashing "creative" juices. If the companies are truly exploiting lets not pretend we are working in gulags. Get out and save your self. I think we are getting too literal here.
