Seth Godin has a short but very insightful post on the difference between a workaholic...
A workaholic lives on fear. It's fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.
... and the "passionate worker":
The passionate worker doesn't show up because she's afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it's a hobby that pays. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it's a lot more fun than watching TV.
Sure, not every business is the kind that can attract passionate people. Some jobs I'm convinced, are designed to attract people that have a special ability to "tune out" and leave their body ;).
But we in the software business are blessed. For a lot of us, anything software IS a hobby. We in the software business can arbitrarily crank up our team's passion by allowing them to introduce some of those "extras" into the product that really make it sing, but are typically hard to quantify on a feature list, brochure or spreadsheet - the ones that really make the product better for the user but aren't single handedly going to be the reason someone buys the product in the first place... (keep in mind I'm not advocating cramming your product with all sorts of extra "cool" features for the sake of it - I'm mostly talking about polishing the existing ones until they shine shine shine).
Here's a great example for a web app: cut/copy/paste of objects/records/thingies (not just plain text from one text area to another). I don't know anyone that would choose one product over another ONLY because it supported this feature, but it's one of those killer features we lost when we moved to the web and it is sorely missed! This is a very interesting problem for a developer to solve. Maybe the kind of thing that would get the team a little more jazzed than a product spec that is rife with compromise and corner-cutting?
The companies that build the cool stuff into their products (I'm thinking... Apple...) - those are the companies that people want to work for, and the products that people want to work on.
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