Thinking about your next job | Hacker News Reader

Thinking about your next job

thedahv.com

1 pointd_p3 comments

One thing I wish would change in hiring is that you are never allowed to be honest about your values if you happen to be a "work to live" type. For some people, a job is just a job. Sure, they might care about the company, the colleagues, and all else equal they want work to be meaningful. But they aren't actively emphasizing what they are passionate about as a factor in any job search.

Nonetheless, I can't tell you how often HR screeners or job ads go on about how only passionate people should apply.

I think we need to be more honest, and to allow candidates to be more honest during interviews, instead of trying to make everyone do an insincere song and dance about why they are passionate.

Yeah, I feel you. Like I wrote about, I can feel myself growing toward the middle though I like to feel like I care about my company's raison d'être. On the same token, I regret seeing good candidates get passed up because of some undefinable sine qua non (I swear I don't use so many French sayings, these just happen to work).

Here are a few thoughts I have in response:

- "passion" as a term has sort of been hijacked by Silicon Valley-esque startups, particularly in B2B spaces. This is a cynical take, but how else are you going to convince someone to take crappy pay with poor chance of equity return to work on a risky idea? - passion doesn't always have to mean cause-oriented. Can you be passionate about good engineering? About boring, reliable, predictable success? Maybe there is a value you are "passionate" about but you haven't encountered many companies also passionate about that. I write about this too. It's just useful to be open-minded about defining what it means to you, but you probably do care about how you spend your time away from home - there is also the matter of being passionate about just straight up doing great work. I used to think I wouldn't like contracting or consulting, but I've met some awesome firms in Seattle and they are full of people who like swooping in, solving hard problems and moving on to the next thing

And finally there are lots of industries where "punch in, punch out" is ok. My friends working in healthcare info systems come to mind. Government work (18F and sundry contract companies) is getting more interesting.

I am totally with you about being honest. It's a good way to discover where you don't want to work. I want to recognize though it is a privileged position to being in a position where you can survive not getting or turning down a job.

Thanks for taking time from your day to read and reply!

It has been a while since I contributed to HN! I sat down to share some thoughts and ideas that have been useful to me weighing new jobs against my career goals. Hope you find something useful!

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