It may not be terribly unique, at least not in my perspective. Because passionate people tend to enjoy doing what they love, even in off hours. Sane people value their off time, so I'm not saying passionate people must work non-stop.

Take a lot of craft trades. Ie, wood working, painting, music, writing, whatever. Those can often be people who just love doing the area, they love creating with their medium. I feel passionate tech people are similar.

The example of a medical professional was.. unfair. Yes, free time usage as a measuring stick for passion in some fields (like medical) is a terrible measuring stick, but I'm not legally inhibited from wood working in my free time.

Note that I'm not at all speaking about whether you should be binary about hiring (passionate people vs non-passionate). I'm simply talking about how in some crafts, crafting outside of work-time is a decent indicator to passion. Another indicator is, I feel, knowledge outside of their professional experience. I'm not a frontend programmer, but I enjoy learning and following tech trends, so I've used and can speak somewhat comfortably with frontend frameworks, my preferences in them, and etc.

Actually the medical example is a pretty good corollary with software. Getting into medical school is extremely competitive, probably harder than getting a job at a top tech company. And while grades are a major part of selection, most schools also want people who spend their free time doing biochemistry research, volunteering in hospitals, running clinical trials. Then once you become a doctor, the amount of time you spend working becomes a big part of how your colleagues judge you—if you just work the minimum to keep your license, other doctors probably won't respect your skill much. The difference is that I guess doctors don't usually practice medicine "for fun" on the side.

It’s messed up in the other direction too, though. There’s no other STEM field where you attend a six week “boot camp” and expect to get a job. Or where people with two years of experience are “senior”.

I suspect some of it is the terminology. If your job is mostly routine tasks in a lot of fields, you're usually called a technician (well, or a "genius" if you work at an Apple store). In Silicon Valley-style tech, computer scientist/programmer/developer have all been sort of munged together.

There are other areas where "engineer" is thrown around pretty liberally as well in the US. But title inflation in software is probably more pronounced than just about anywhere else.

Exactly. The standards are incredibly low. This can be a good and a bad thing.

Barriers to entry are very low which is great.

Senior is ten years +/- a year depending on what they accomplished in my opinion.

Your opinion is not the established nomenclature. Senior is widely understood to be 4 yr degree + 5 yrs experience. This means you have all the technical training plus enough professional experience to be considered fluent.

At ten years you should be absolutely expert in the areas you've worked in. This is staff or senior staff level, if you also have some business acumen, ie the ability to see beyond engineering requirements.

I don't really care what the established nomenclature is. I was stating what I consider senior and 5 years of industry experience doesn't cut it for me.

What's your experience cutoff for someone without a CS (or equivalent) undergrad degree? Or someone who has an unrelated undergraduate degree and spent 2 years getting a CS MS?

Slightly irrelevant comment, but I studied Jazz at a good conservatoire, and after years as a pro musician, I ended up spending years as a pro software engineer. There is weirdly some cross-over, and that vocational drive is actually pretty handy for start-ups and things. I do think that technology is often vocational. It can be just a job, but from where I sit working in different startups, I think I thrive most off people for whom it is a vocation.