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Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Yes you can, I’ve been in tech companies where a fair few of my colleagues are not interested in tech. They want to be part of a “winning” organisation and make money.

I sure as hell wouldn’t hire someone who has no interest in what my company is doing and that level of interest would have to increase relative to the role.

What tends to happen is you get very slick operators who don’t produce anything because they don’t understand/don’t care and all they do is get information from A spin it in a way that makes them look fantastic and push it to B.

Given enough people like that in a tech org it’ll collapse.

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I used to work on email archival. Anyone who says they’re passionate about that is either lying or doped up on barbiturates.

How did you get hired for email archival? Started looking at online applications and every single one has something like "Why do you want to work for us?" and yesterday I saw "How do you add to our diversity?"

What's the problem with those questions?

Sorry, was trying to figure out how the commenter got past those filtering questions.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that in the UK it's illegal to ask a candidate "How do you add to our diversity?" because it could be seen as a thinly veiled way to, for example, discover a candidate's sexual preference - something you are outright not allowed to ask about, except in very specific circumstances[1].

(Also, it's an insufferably pretentious question, even if not actually illegal.)

[1] E.g., it might be legally acceptable for a role in a religious organisation.

I'd argue that they're stupid questions.

What do you stand to learn about the quality/fit of a candidate from the question "why do you want to work with us?"

They could give a 100% bombshell answer and yet not at all fit the role.

The latter is not a question the applicant is qualified to answer. Specifically, "how do you add to <our team>" can only be answered by someone that already knows the team. To me it signals that the recruiter is lazy and expects me, as applicant, to do his job for him.

It depends on the content of the emails.

I think there are two sides of equation. You can be passionate about the literal problem (search, AI, whatever) or the underlying problem with tech (I could imagine finding interesting problems around new indexing techniques, rapid access, etc if you wanted to really get into the nitty gritty)

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