That question is a symptom of the many problems in tech hiring.
1) interviewers spend all their time looking for any reason not to hire you, rather than looking for what value you can provide. Kind of odd for an industry with a supposed talent shortage. They'll make some claim about the cost of false positives, but it's nonsense, at least in America.
2) they expect you to be passionate about sitting in front of a computer all day (because, for some reason, it's not good enough to simply be competent and reliable) but during an interview they expect you to have sales skills and to sell yourself.
I've given co-workers a bit of push-back in the past when they've wanted to give too much weight to passion-related questions when we interviewed candidates.
Not that it can't be important; it can, but the downside is that passion often evaporates when things get difficult. So I'd rather hire someone who is driven by determination and discipline, and uses passion as a nice boost when they can.
It's frustrating to work with someone who gets sulky when we have to slog through the non-fun development tasks that are part of nearly every project. Yes, those parts are no fun, but the faster we buckle down and power through them, the better off we are.
Interestingly, I've found that the best developers I've worked with were the stone cold professionals who just powered through everything, whether it was enjoyable or excruciating. They weren't a bunch of grumpy old farts, either. They were some of the most friendly, jovial people I've had the pleasure of working with over the years.
I've seen employers describe their projects/startups and then they just wait for a reaction to gauge if it's something I would consider "fun", they seem surprised when I say I'm game for pretty much anything that solves someone's problem/has active users.
I even love taking care of the un-sexy tasks that nobody else really likes/there's a fight for, especially documentation -- I've written so many internal wiki pages I'm actually kinda sorry they're all locked up behind a login screen.
Any other task that sparks the brain, for whatever reason, is just a nice bonus.
Yeah, the "passion" term is a loaded one and I regret using it. I don't require someone to be "passionate" about the product we're working on to see them as a good fit. In fact, as someone who works in medical devices, when someone came in and said they really wanted meaningful work and that's why they wanted to switch to medical devices, I'd slightly roll my eyes to myself because I saw a younger version of myself in them, knowing that they would quickly realize how far-removed they and their work are from the bed-side or OR and that feelings of making a meaningful contribution are a lot more rare than they might imagine.
Personally, I wouldn't ask the "why should I hire you" question, because it's a dumb question IMHO, but if I did and someone answered "Because I will make you more money than you'll pay me" and left it at that, I'd have some misgivings about that answer. It's tough for me articulate exactly why, but I just can't say I'd be thrilled with that answer. Someone who optimizes themselves for "make the company more money than I'm paid" doesn't really say much about what it's like to work with them. The statement doesn't do a good job of "selling yourself", IMHO.
Thank you. What's with this expectation that unless we have sweet passionate love for web portals or accounting app middleware, or whatever the product is, we won't be competent professionals?
Are you saying that you don't dream of Express middleware, and that that you don't sing songs about the joy of promises and generators?
Have you not accepted Babel into your heart?
To transpile or not to transpile, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the open-plan office to suffer
The slings and arrows of EcmaScript 5
Or to take Arms against a Sea of callbacks,
And by asyncing, end them
Just kidding, I'm with you. I think that enthusiasm and passion are most useful when layered on top of competent professionalism.
Why can't someone just be a professional who generates value?
Because fit. Because duty has limits, but passion can be exploited. In the words of Leonard Cohen: "He taught that the duty of lovers / is to tarnish the golden rule."
Because your enthusiasm is your most valuable asset. Enthused employees tend to be a lot more productive, and also drive up the morale among their peers.
Sorry, I should have said: besides your competence, your enthusiasm is your most valuable asset.
You have had your entire interview to demonstrate your competence. At this stage of the interview, if you have not yet demonstrated competence, no answer to this question is going to get you hired.
You're extracting more value by working less, freeing your time up to do other things. Those other things may well end up netting you more money over time (working on your own company, for instance.) As well, depending on where you live and work, you may also end up paying a different tax rate on holiday pay over regular pay. If so you may be able to accrue those holidays and eventually receive a lump sum payout that is in effect "cheaper" than regular pay. The difference can be significant, particularly if your income is in the upper brackets.
Tons of stuff that's now sold in blow-molded plastic was in glass or aluminum back then. Stuff that's now sold in styrene and/or plastic wrap was wrapped in waxed paper. And, of course, people made and consumed food at home way more often. So, more of the waste was in the form of of cars dumped down ravines, and less in the form of shopping bags and granola bar wrappers blowing in the wind.
Also, from personal observation, I'm inclined to say that a significant amount of trash these days is due to the rolling trash bins and the hydraulic arms used to gather them. Many people don't bag their trash, and I always see a significant increase in 'litter' after trash day.
> now sold in blow-molded plastic was in glass or aluminum back then.
and how much "greener" is it to use aluminum, whose cost is mostly due to the energy required to separate it from its oxide, than to use plastic that is a natural (yes, it comes from the earth) byproduct of oil production?
> more of the waste was in the form of of cars dumped down ravines,
that can percolate down into the waterways and ground water, versus dump in a landfill with a 4ft clay liner specifically designed to catch contaminants.
Trash-to-energy is also a thing now. Plasma from an electric arc can (somehow) incinerate trash without harmful byproducts and actually results in a surplus of energy [1]. Not to mention methane recovery from landfills that's been a thing for over a decade [2]
The cost of relocation is the cost of relocation. That's any cost incurred by the process of relocating. In that person's case, it includes rent. Your case is different. End of story.
If anything, in tech, "anyone who doesn't know exactly what I know is an idiot" send to be the dominant attitude. And management generally sees anyone in tech as a socially stunted weirdo who is overhead rather than an investment.
We can't retreat to the comfortable confines of our algorithms and code, the real world needs us and needs us now.
Judging by the comments here, HNers have nothing to offer the real world (of politics) other than shrill shrieking about racism and bigotry. That's not going to help anything.
If you actually want to create political change, put your head back into your work and amass a fortune. Maybe in 20 years you'll have enough to make a difference.
"Should you undertake political violence in response to the age of Trump? I don’t know; what political violence, by whom, against which targets, towards what end, as part of what larger strategic campaign? If you don’t have answers to those questions then the debate is useless. Should you undertake direct action? I don’t know; what direct action, by whom, in what sites, towards what end, as part of what larger political campaign? Should you get involved in partisan politics? I don’t know; what campaigns, for what party, towards what specific political goal, as part of what larger vision of building an effective mass movement? Should you call your members of Congress? Same deal.
No more dorm room debates. No more abstraction. What is going to actually work to build a better world, right now, under these real-world conditions? What’s your plan to make real, substantive, large-scale progress? That’s the question you’re confronted with. If you can’t tie a particular act to a plausible vision of how to make real progress in the real world, then you’re wasting your time."
If the Democrats and liberally minded people want to affect true political change, then this kind of discourse needs to take hold within discussions like these. There's far too much emoting and virtue signaling going on that builds up tribal unity at the expense of alienating all others that do not go along with it.
Like it or not, a significant portion of the country is deeply afraid of Islamic terrorism. They are not assuaged by the methodology of the past 8 years. What alternative solution can the left offer that calms their fears while holding true to core ideology of the movement? Calling these people racist may energize your base and serve as catharsis, but is going to shrink the potential voting base more and more.
It deeply saddens me to see how much invective is being thrown around on a community that I prize for being able to discuss technical issues at great depth.
I find this weird. As I proceeded through Comp sci in high school, going from Pascal to C to assembler, I was always troubled by my lack of understanding, "but why does it work?" That anxiety finally disappeared in college when I learned how logic gates are constructed and went through the exercise of implementing multiply as a series of logical operations.
Similarly, I find it strange that someone would be comfortable driving a car without fairly deep knowledge of how it functions and how to repair it. I don't understand how you're not plagued with anxiety.
In the USA, heroin overdosing now takes more lives than all homocides
I'd been hearing about the heroin epidemic for years. I saw articles about needles in Golden Gate park, I saw discarded needles and black-lit[1] restrooms in Vancouver, but it didn't really have weight until I read that 30,092 people died of opioid overdoses in 2015. In the US alone. Over 30,000!
Anyway, I'm just writing this on the off chance that there are others who are still blissfully unaware.
[1] black light makes it difficult to locate a vein for shooting up.
1) interviewers spend all their time looking for any reason not to hire you, rather than looking for what value you can provide. Kind of odd for an industry with a supposed talent shortage. They'll make some claim about the cost of false positives, but it's nonsense, at least in America.
2) they expect you to be passionate about sitting in front of a computer all day (because, for some reason, it's not good enough to simply be competent and reliable) but during an interview they expect you to have sales skills and to sell yourself.