That is a success-limiting preference and I would encourage you to start preferring other things. If it helps, pretend you're just on a recon mission not actually looking for a job but trying to ascertain whether there is a you-sized hole in the project that they're running which you are legitimately interested in. Scientists love talking about their babies to anyone who will listen.
"So what are you working on this summer?"
"We're programming FPGAs to do automatic detection of human language in content going over the wire using bloom filters."
"Oh that sounds interesting. Who are you working with?"
"Dr. Foo, Dr. Bar, and 3 graduate students."
"Who is your Unicode expert?"
"We don't have one."
"Really? That's unfortunate -- you're solving it with low-level byte manipulation so if you don't have an intuition for what a bytestream of UTF-8 in Russian actually looks like that might be a bit difficult. Mind if I have a quick go at the blackboard?"
"Be my guest."
"So let's take the UTF-16 case since it's easier to understand..."
5 minutes later
"Huh, thanks for the explanation. I wish we could have you around every day."
"Do you hire undergraduate research assistants?"
"Yes."
"Then you can!"
[Lightly fictionalized from an actual research assistantship.]
In context this is one of the top ten patio11 advice quotes on this forum.
This also ties into negotiating salary, don't call yourself a programmer, et al.
(This has happened in multiple scenarios to various friends and self).
One trick that works for me is to tell myself "Let's try it and see what happens". Curiosity is a strong motivator.