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Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

Picking a career purely for profit and being good enough at it without passion to compete with the passionate people shows a calculated grit and intelligence that I think you might be passing on. You might be missing the person who can make the calculated decisions without emotional investment, the person who can give you hard truths as to the viability of the business, the person who can take their personal out of decisions and act.

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Optimizing for money is a guaranteed flight risk for any employer. High attrition is something to avoid at smaller companies as it greatly effects morale

I don't agree because I think optimizing for money in the absence of alternatives is perfectly normal and a fairly good idea.

If someone has consistently chosen to favor cash over anything else, that's a different story, but if someone chose an industry or type of career with money as the deciding factor I don't think that is terribly important. People need and want money.

If I don't know what to do and have no guidance, how am I to decide? I'll look at difficulty, social benefits, moral impact and economic benefits. A 20 year old won't necessarily understand how to parse difficulty, social benefits or moral impact but will absolutely be able to understand basic economic benefits, so I think it's appropriate to use that as a method for choosing a career direction and I wouldn't object to hiring them.

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