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Comment by MikeTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

I agree that most people want someone who's there for more than 'just a job', but I wonder if this depends in part on the industry.

Like, what if you're looking for someone to help write software to manage and control parking garages? What would it even look like for a person to have a connection to parking-garage management? Does prior experience working as a valet count? As personally running, or managing a team to run, or owning a parking lot count?

Are you really looking for 'a person has a passion for what we do' or just 'a person who knows the industry already', especially in industries that aren't catering to a hobby or a 'calling' (like medicine or education or...)?

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I think it more "a person capable of empathising with the users". Knowing the internals of how the baseball industry operates isn't relevent here. The relevent experience is being familiar with how the viewers interact with baseball.

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.

>In those cases, understanding the bussiness tends to be far more important than understanding the user experience.

Never understood the take that internal systems need a good UX because they very much do. Having been a consumer of ass-backwards designed software components, bad UX (apis, functions, other stuff) will inevitably propagate through the product and will rear their ugly head somewhere. Not to speak about "friction" and development velocity and so on.

Why yes, implementing this feature will cost you something like 2 hours. Not implementing it will either cost someone 4 hours to do it themselves or two hours over and over again to code around the lack of it. Please don't waste other people's time.

But all good apis are the same. You don’t need to care about baseball a lot to make your baseball api usable

I mean if I was interviewing with a parking garage company, I’d actually be interested because I have used parking garages and am familiar with them (severe bottlenecks after an event ends, the use of license plate scanning, the whole UX of dealing with tickets, pre-buying parking, trying to find parking garages, etc.) so yes, if you were asking me what makes me interested in a parking garage job which I originally only applied for $$$, I’d have a toooon to say.

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).

"Why do you want to work for us?" is an open-ended question. It doesn't demand passion. "I feel like I have a strong existing knowledge of the sort of work that's done here which would make this role a pleasant fit for me," is a perfectly acceptable answer, especially if you're interviewing at a company that manages parking garages. Something about the company culture is also fine. They're not always demanding that you display a deep passion for managing parking garages; it's just an opportunity to explain why you personally would fit into the company/role better than other candidates.

To be honest I think you can find people interested in anything, or get them to be interested. The problem is, having passionate employees rarely translates into revenue.

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?

I think passion for smart automation systems or optimisation/management algorithms, strategy etc.

Personally I’d way rather work on that software than some social network. I like unsexy b2b and would state that right out if I was interviewing for that company.

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.

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