Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

Kraken has recruited a significant number of Rust developers, or at least individuals keen on learning Rust, over the past few years. This presents a good opportunity for other companies that adhere to legal standards to consider hiring these developers.

In 2020, I received an interview invitation from Kraken and subsequently received invitations five times in 2022. The engineering managers I conversed with took pride in having one of the largest Rust development teams in the tech industry, in addition to a substantial number of Go developers. Due to my professional experience with both languages, they expressed considerable interest in bringing me on board. However, I faced rejection twice after accepting two of their invitations in 2022. The first time was due to my preference for utilizing basic yet stable features in Rust, as opposed to the alpha features anticipated by their interviewers. The second rejection occurred because I did not exhibit sufficient interest in their crypto business. While this aligns with their business focus, it seemed like a convenient excuse, given that I had consistently communicated my limited interest in the product, and both the technology and hiring manager appeared to be accepting of that fact.

I mean, I don't necessarily align with Apple's mission, but I still got the job there.

> This presents a good opportunity for other companies that adhere to legal standards to consider hiring these developers.

Kraken is my favorite exchange. They appear to put a lot of effort into abiding by local regulations in all countries they operate.

> I had consistently communicated my limited interest in the product, and both the technology and hiring manager appeared to be accepting of that fact

This sentence is so weird for me. Why would you want to work for a company if you seemingly don’t care about their product. And conversely, why would anyone ever hire someone for a role if the person looking to get hired doesn’t care about the product?

> This sentence is so weird for me. Why would you want to work for a company if you seemingly don’t care about their product.

For money, of course. A company’s mission doesn’t pay for my groceries or rent.

A substantial compensation package serves as a strong incentive to perform well.

> And conversely, why would anyone ever hire someone for a role if the person looking to get hired doesn’t care about the product?

That is a good question for the companies that hired me during the last decade to lead some of their projects.

I can only speculate that if a company observes a person with a proven track record of successfully leading and delivering products that significantly contribute to revenue, they would prioritize hiring that individual, even if they lack enthusiasm for the product. Of course, it’s ideal to hire someone with both experience and genuine interest, but in my experience, such individuals are the exception rather than the rule.

If companies exclusively hired people passionate about their products, they might struggle to find suitable candidates.

Please take this as constructive criticism: telling an interviewer you’re not interested in the product and you only care about collecting a paycheck comes across as arrogant and is a huge red flag. Ultimately, people hire people they want to work with. You might be in the top 0.1% rust programmers, and I would still not hire you because of that attitude.

I think there’s a wide range here: we’re talking about banking so I think a position that it’s not otherwise exciting or that you’re excited by the technology and scale is not going to be seen as “your product sucks” and shouldn’t count against you. Now, it might mean you shouldn’t be doing UX for it but there’s a ton of work where you just need to work well with the people designing the user side & understand how people use it, not be leading the concept.

Thank you for your feedback; I value constructive criticism.

I understand the importance of aligning with the vision of a product, service, or company when working with a team.

I genuinely try to do the best job I can with my skills despite lacking genuine interest in the products I have touched. I acknowledge the significance of shared enthusiasm for a product, but I wonder if there could be merit in having individuals with differing perspectives, even if they don’t personally resonate with the product. It could provide valuable contrast and potentially lead to innovative solutions.

Perhaps I might be an outlier in this regard.

“I don’t care about the product” isn’t the same as “i only care about money here.”

I couldn’t really feel any personal excitement about the product i worked on for my first 4 years out of college. It is kind of difficult to feel personal excitement about a product whose customers are all just enterprises of various sizes, and the product was for managing their internal docs/storage/admin stuff/etc. with tons of legacy stuff on top.

However, I deeply cared about the quality of the work I produced for it, about what customers said and feedback they provided (and I acted on it), and the architecture of the product/health of the codebase.

Of course, you shouldn’t tell the interviewer that you don’t care about the product. That’s just weird and feels borderline antisocial. How can you even claim you don’t care about the product, unless you closely worked with it and know enough about it to feel excited.

I think it is pretty common in general to not be super into something unless you are exposed enough to it. I can definitely say it holds true for me for music, for example. Some of my most favorite current artists were initially not even something i was into even slightly, upon the first few listens.

Most of my jobs have been deeply uninteresting at a product level. Not even the designers or product people -really- care. I suspect working on interesting projects is the exception, not the rule.

> They appear to put a lot of effort into abiding by local regulations in all countries they operate.

Aside from registering as a securities exchange/broker/dealer in the U.S., which the SEC clearly believes they are.

The only registered cryptocurrency exchange is Prometheus, and it doesn’t have any trading activity. There haven’t been any rules published by the sec regarding cryptocurrencies or crypto exchanges. Since cryptocurrencies aren’t investment contracts, it’s not possible to comply.

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