From your question and your comments, including some in your history, it sounds like your 'problem' is that you have a soul, and a brain, and a heart, and prefer honesty to bullshit. Don't let anyone or anything change that. Good luck to you!

Thanks that's heart-warming. I hope I am/can be what you described

You’re sort of reducing yourself to a cog in a machine, rather than a person with like… passions and emotions and likes and dislikes and, you know, stuff that makes you human.

There’s a lot more that goes into a hire than technical proficiency, because there are a thousand other people with the same skills and what not checking those boxes.

Personality is far more important.

Well this reduction would in theory open more doors, and allow you to work in more places. If this "caring" weren't enforced so much, I would feel like my options would be greatly increased and I wouldn't need to care if I'm making a wedding app or a flying drone app, etc. I'm sure at the end of the day these places just need XYZ feature done and they're all specified in a way that you don't really need to care.

I don't get how this went to me having no personality :)

I would care more about the product if it was something I believe in, maybe a job at Firefox because they care about a private internet.

Just that most of the opportunities are not something I care about, but I need to pay bills in the end.

Software engineers should be excited about their company's product because they are the only ones who can see how software can solve the customer's problem.

Business people can say AI can help business, but they don't know how AI can solve which problem in the existing process. For example, search engine was once a cranky tool in the web. It is not usable, everyone hated it. A guy should assemble a "coding" for the query to get a good result. Before it was cool, PageRank algorithm was a lab thing in the past, but until Sergey Brin and Larry Page used it for search engine, it changes how search engine works and everyone finally loves search engine because they don't need to assemble a complex query anymore, but simply throw some keywords. You name that company, Google. It beats other big names at that time, such as Yahoo, Lycos, etc.

Back to your case, I think the company wants it happen for them, like Google.

> Software engineers should be excited about their company's product because they are the only ones who can see how software can solve the customer's problem.

I disagree. It's not just the purview of software engineers to understand or see how the company's product helps the customer. Lots of roles need to come together to create a successful product. Generally speaking, the employees that signal their passion for the given company/product/mission/etc are the one's more easily leveraged for longer hours, less pay and more work. As someone else mentioned here, be professional over passionate. The company isn't as passionate about the employee as the passionate employee is about the company. I can guarantee you that.

Kinda my thoughts. The companies are not "loyal" to you generally speaking, so why should you be to them? This is not black and white though, it's a scale I believe.

It doesn't mean you should be unprofessional, it's unethical to not do the work your paid for well.

Especially in gaming in many places the model is "working on games is what these people always dreamed of, so they won't complain too much about horrible overtime and pressure"

I so agree with this. It applies to MANY businesses. If they pay overtime, IMHO, then the company seems to not care as much.

You're going to get a pretty consistent response from HN because as a generalization most employees of a startup tend to join specifically BECAUSE they care. It's a biased sample pool in general.

As someone who has been on both sides of things but leans much more on the side of the fence you're asking from, my take is: they are looking for someone who drinks the Kool aid.

From a pure efficiency standpoint, caring does matter to an extent. With your side projects, you wouldn't spend your voluntary time doing something you don't care about. That excitement translates to more happiness, productivity, and (more cynically) the decent chance you will complain less if they need you to work overtime. You're in it for the MISSION so if the MISSION needs you to work until 8 tonight then you'll be gungho.

So my extremely cynical answer here is: they often care to have leverage to use on you. Is this true everywhere? Nope. But assuming it's true can often net you a sane work life balance. I would just tell you to lie. Do some research on the product or team, maybe learn what their own corporate BS is that they spout for their mission, and parrot it back to them slightly modified during the interview. When you get the job, then you can fake a little along the way but as long as you remain a high performer people will overlook your apparent lack of "excitement" because they don't want to risk losing you.

To my employer: I swear this isn't true for me. :)

So if you had a choice between a doctor that cares about their patients and one that doesn't, which one are you going to? Just to make sure you aren't cynically trying to gain leverage over your medical provider.

I don't know, House is pretty good at his job...

On a serious note, a doctor can be professional and care about outcomes without caring about the patient. Providing care and emotionally caring are separate things, and are generally best kept separate (doctors are not supposed to practice on family). In fact, I recently met a doctor who is not very personable but has excellent patient outcomes and is highly regarded in his field.

I would prefer a doctor that does the best job.

I agree with this. Plus, let's be real: it's nigh impossible to be passionate about half of the products out there. Really? You'd tell me honestly that you're passionate about what Zillow provides? Indeed? Not buyin it.

its a human nature to invent stories to justify ones behavior, it gives an illusion of control in ones life...

nah, most people given an _insert_whatever_amount_ per month as UBI would not come back to their job they are _so_excited_ about or _have_found_purpose_ of doing, it just needs a bit of self awareness and reflection to see that

Haha thanks. Funny enough I spent last night up to 4 am working on my company's features :) Because I was solving a problem that would alleviate my colleagues work. Even though I don't care that much about the product itself.

But yeah I always do what you suggested in interviews, I just wanted to try it this time

Games are especially bad. They are relatively underpaid and overworked because lots of new grads come out of school and want to work on games - the cynic in me would think they’re digging at how much work they can extract from you. The last straw for me at one gaming place was leaving at 7pm and someone commenting about leaving early.

I don’t think that answer was terrible, but could be tweaked a little. Go into what technical challenges you think that company would face and why it excites you, but don’t present it as a negative and I wouldn’t blink an eye at it. but at the end of the day, youre not there to solve cool problems, youre there to make money

That said, I worked on iPhone games that nobody wanted to play at the company. One day our metrics tanked and people were spending hours trying to figure out why. I just opened it and in thirty seconds the first screen related to those metrics was blank. Wanting to dog food the product, if anyone actually had used it, is very useful

Your opinion on the product does matter.

Even if you get a lot of pleasure out of puzzle solving and other technical aspects of your work, you will experience moral injury if you are working on a product that you think is harmful.

I defer to subject matter experts where I work, I am very much a specialist in the details of the system, but I know the product I work on makes some people happy and it gets mentioned on the news (in a positive way) almost every day.

That adds to the satisfaction of my work.

This book

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0...

says that a good corporate culture has a mission that is obvious to everyone who works there and that everybody can understand how what they do relates to that mission.

It might not be "I am pumped to work on this product" but it is "having a story that makes sense", which is absent in many workplaces.

I like working on products I am passionate about. It doesn't take away from the technical challenges but gives them reason. I think recruiters might fear people (even experts) might phone it in if they don't have that passion.

Agreed, most shouldn't for most technical roles at least. Every place I've worked at, I'd had to somehow convince them of this, but really I couldn't even apply any of it if I wanted to. There are designers that take care of the user experience and visuals, and then technical managers / producers, that make decisions if something is unclear. Developers tend to just develop, and have to worry about scaling the code, making it bug free, and implementing accurate specs. I believe companies just want this cohesion of some kind between employees, just to say everyone is aligned properly or something.

Software engineering as an industry generally lacks professionalism. Particularly amongst startups.

Being a professional means doing what you say you’re going to do, doing it well, and doing it honestly.

In my experience, expecting passion for the product instead of professionalism for the work has always turned out to be a badly managed company. The best companies I worked for expected professionalism, not passion.

"In my experience, expecting passion for the product instead of professionalism for the work has always turned out to be a badly managed company. "

Are there any well managed ones? It seems they all do this.

If you want to work where your passion for the product is not important, I recommend being a contractor. I have never seen a company expect the contractors to care. They are supposed ti care about the company they work for, not whom they rent you out to. Of course they might not care enough about you to rent you to only interesting jobs, just maximum profit ones :-)

Speaking for myself: if I don’t care about the mission of what I’m working on, I cannot get my brain to focus on it and I end up feeling a sense of hollowness inside.

I have ADHD, which might be part of this.

Perhaps it is a conscious or unconscious high-functioning autism filter? People with autism may not understand what the interviewer wants them to say so they give a truthful answer rather than one the interviewer wants them to produce. Personally, I don't believe "excitement" is correlated with job performance at all. The job is supposed to last 40 h/week for several years. No one can maintain an "excited" state for that long.

Well if you truly don't care about the output at all, then you don't care about the ethical nature of what you're building. So it wouldn't matter to you if it's malware, spyware, ransomware...

Personally, I think it's important to have some interest and sense of responsibility in the final product you're contributing to, not just solving technical problems.

Yeah sorry for not giving much details, it wasn't an essay. I wouldn't work at something I consider unethical.

Companies are organizations of people, and they want people with the potential to gain domain knowledge, be potential team leaders / managers, people who can interview future candidates, carry the "culture", represent the brand, etc, etc.

If they just wanted some software written, they'd hire a contractor, or outsource it to another company/country.

Thanks all :) I just wanted to know what other people in software engineering think about this.

Totally agree with you, that’s all I can say.