Showing pride in your work

A while back, I was conducting an interview.  I love interviewing people because I find it fascinating what people claim they know and what the actually know.  I am pretty good at figuring that out by asking pointed questions as opposed to quizzes.  One thing that I have been looking for, but haven't seen yet, is someone showing pride in their work.  Then I saw that in a recent interview.

I like to look for obscure items on people's resumes.  People always ask about knowing Java.  If you list something, like the JSch library, I'm going to ask about it.  For those of you who don't know, JSch is a SSH client implementation written completely in Java.  I have used this library many times, but most people haven't heard of it.  During my pre-interview review, I noticed the person listed JSch.  During the interview, I asked him what he did with JSch.  He took a second, and started to smile.  I could tell he was proud of the work he did.  He started to describe a packaging system, where the end of the build process would copy the result of the build to various Linux servers.  This streamlined the testing process.

Pride in your work is a very important thing.  When you are proud of what you are working on, you work harder on it, you spend more time on it, and you put more thought into it.  You often produce better software when you are proud of what you are doing.  These are the types of things that let me know what kind of worker you are going to be.  We hired this person.