However, I have never worked more than 40 hours a week.
Strange that people keep harping on the 40 hours a week thing. Passion != long hours. Everyone can read into it all they want to try to eek out their own hidden meanings, but my experience has been exactly the opposite -- the passionate people are the ones who usually have the greatest flexibility and put in the least hours.
I agree, it -shouldn't- mean that. But it oftentimes seems to serve as code for that, because outside of that I can't think of any thing you can actually measure. How does 'passion' turn into actual measurable output, if we exclude measuring how much time you spend on something?
You will also note I excluded coding outside of work (sort of); that really seems like the same metric, a measurement of how much time you're spending on coding.
That's really it; 'passion' is not a job requirement for a good developer, and it's ill-defined. If you -mean- it to be someone who is good at what they do, takes responsibility, is able to strike a balance between quick coding and quality coding, etc etc, then POST that.
When you use the word "passionate", I don't know what you mean; the only metric I can think to measure it objectively is how much time you -choose- to spend writing code.
Strange that people keep harping on the 40 hours a week thing. Passion != long hours. Everyone can read into it all they want to try to eek out their own hidden meanings, but my experience has been exactly the opposite -- the passionate people are the ones who usually have the greatest flexibility and put in the least hours.