Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews

You don’t argue for 10 minutes that your way of displaying a box score is better than how literally millions of fans expect it to be.

If you changed the nouns and adjectives for this example to something else you could find your way into trouble.

Which I think is the point - it takes all kinds and you’re better off picking the person who wants to be there than who’s just looking for a job.

I had no industry experience with my current job either — only experience as a user and I was just looking for a job — and basically I just spilled my thoughts about what I liked, what I hated, what I thought could improve, and so on. They actually couldn’t hire me at the time (company-wide hiring freeze) but they must have loved me enough to call me up a year later asking if I was still available and interested (and I was).

Having said that, it seems like this applies mostly to frontend people writing the consumer facing portions. There are plenty of jobs where your users are other people in the company, or partner companies. In those cases, understanding the bussiness tends to be far more important than understanding the user experience.

For parking garages, the relevent experience would be someone has used them a lot. Or at least someone who is familiar with driving a car.

Think about it this way: if you were a teacher, and your salary depended on your students' exam results, would you spend time trying to get them interested in your subject, or would you show them the most effective methods of cramming the knowledge before the exam?

Have you been to mcmaster.com?

It’s a master class in online shopping UX. Their fastener section is a joy to browse :)

I have an intestinal issue - and as a result I'm always watching out for signs of problems in my own stool. There are obvious indicators - e.g. black tarry stool suggests a bleed in upper intestine.

One issue is that it's kind of hard to get good pictures to compare to. Google images will show you some examples, but not examples of false positives. Is your stool partially pale white because you ate a ton of marshmallows recently, or because you have an obstruction in your bile duct?

A doctor once suggested I had Crohn's Disease (luckily, didn't) and I joined the subreddit for it and was pretty horrified by what I read.

A big issue with Crohn's is understanding the relationship between what you eat and how well your digestive system preforms. This is something that tracking software could help with - I imagine taking a picture of food and of your excrement and then ML on the backend sorts everything out and makes dietary suggestions.

Users could also annotate their images with additional insights or notes like "I have condition X - this sample is a good indicator of X" and curious users could image match pictures of potentially problematic stool to the annotated repository.

My point is - plenty of people are passionate about random subjects that may seem dull to you. Plenty more people can get passionate because even a random topic likely has immense depth and nuance to it.

I find coworkers that aren't passionate are a drag to work with. I want to make something useful and good to solve a real problem. If you are just there to do the bare minimum to collect a paycheck - that's very annoying, you're more of an obstacle to work around than a teammate. You can hire people like that if you don't have better options, but hopefully there are better options!

But sure, many people will still be doing jobs that they aren't passionate about, and that's fine. Passion shouldn't be a requirement. Maybe it's a bonus, though, both for the employer and employee.

Maybe less than you think.

Video games, Music, Fashion here are other industries where "passion" equates to we will pay you less, and over work you at the same time. There's a side to all this that is very devil wears Prada.

This is a great way to be utterly replaceable in your job. "Tell me what to do" is the worst trait in an employee and puts you immediately in the "first to cut when possible" line.

> nobody will know every sport they're building a ui for, does that also disqualify them?

It makes them worse from an IC perspective, because they need hand-holding moreso than someone who gets the problem space more intuitively.

In ZIRP, it was easier to coast with what you're saying. Now, it's back to brass tacks - everyone is expected contribute and be more helpful to your boss and team in order to become more irreplaceable.

What if you just don't care? I'd be one, since I'd rather watch paint dry than watching baseball. Would you want to work all day five days a week on something you don't care about? I couldn't do that.

> it doesn't matter as long as they follow the design provided

I know this it the end goal of scrum, but is this where we are now? Software engineers as replaceable cogs just doing the design provided?

I could never work such a job. Change careers, if you can't be making the decision about how it's going to work.

A better way to go about it is to examine the preferred working style of the applicant vs the way the company operates.

Applying for companies you want to work at almost seems stupid when more than half the time they just send you an email telling you they don't think you're a good fit. It's a luxury and a privilege to work at a so called dream job. In my view, and especially in the current market, the optimal strategy is to talk to whichever recruiter is emailling you, and do no additional research until after the technical interviews are over with. It's frankly a huge waste of time to know anything about a company before you even know if they have a position for you. Having the expectation that your employees care as much about the company as you do is just ignorance.

However, when it comes to choosing between a candidate who scrambles for anything and someone who has at least some interest or knowledge of the company's business, the company will always choose the latter, and they will be right, and you would do the same in their place. If you force yourself to lie to get into the latter category, that's on you, not on them.

That doesn't match my experience. Software engineering culture is full of processes to facilitate conformity, from velocity and burn down charts, to bureaucratic decision making processes and unnecessary group meetings. Every manager I've ever had has given me the impression that they want someone to mindlessly crunch through tickets without resistance.

There are some great places to work out there, but there are plenty that are basically the movie mean girls.

There's plenty of companies where I like what they do, or the work is interesting and would thus be willing to accept less pay. There's companies I feel are making the world worse much more directly than most and I refuse to work for them at for any price.

You seem incredulous that someone would turn away an expert because they're only in it for the money. Sure, fair. But it's not really about that. If they're so... one-dimensional?... that they can't think of anything they like about the company aside from "paycheck gets sent every two weeks", that feels like a red flag to me.

Being straight forward and honest is relatively easy. Doing so in a agreeable way to your audience is a lot harder, and usually a highly sought after skill.

I think the people who lie are mainly doing it to compensate for lack of social skills, which would enable the truth in a compelling and agreeable way.

And if someone just mass-applied to literally every single job that was available, only got accepted to interview at one of them, and ended up across the interview table from me? Yeah, I'd think it would be a pretty basic expectation for them to do 20 minutes of research into the company or job description before the interview to find at least one or two things they like about it. Hell, those one or two things could even be learned during the interview process.

Doesn't have to be something earth-shattering. "I like working with $TECH_STACK that you use." "I like that I can take transit to your office and it's a short commute." "I enjoyed interacting with my interviewers and felt like we connected well and would work together well." It's not that hard!

Feels like a red flag if they can't even manage that.

At worst, you can answer about why you applied for that job and not others that are equally paid, even if they are in other industries (eg you got into programming because you like problem solving, and because of your experience you looked at the requirements and thought you would do well because of xyz).

IMO this is the sort of highly-leading semi-closed question that will get an answer which doesn’t reveal much about the candidate (most candidates will probably say ‘yes, that’s exactly the type of environment I like’ because it’s all a game).

“What about our culture appealed to you most when you applied?” is a better question - it’s asking both what appeals to them, as well as ‘are you the kind of person that is proactive enough to do research before you go into an interview, or would you go into this unprepared, and if you are unprepared do you just blag it, panic, or do you give an honest response about the sort of place you would like to work in’.

EDIT: I'd also argue that GPT4 itself can be told to actually lie, because you can tell it to substitute a true statement for a false one, then later get it to reveal the true the statement.

Mostly not even bothering to inform you that you didn't make it to the interview round.

I don't ask this question because I want to know the answer.

The questions I'm trying to answer are:

- Are you intelligent?

- Are you diligent and well prepared?

- Are you self-aware?

- Have you put any thought into what you want and why you're here?

To find out the answers, I can't just ask those directly unfortunately!

You call it lame, but i would call your POV naive.

I'm aware that I've been privileged to have options, but given that I do, I see no reason not to be honest.

i feel like if you're talking to so many companies that this would be too much work, it's probably useful to focus on tightening that funnel so more early interviews turn into offers.