He doesn't go into much detail here but what I _imagined_ he meant was that if someone came to an interview excited about Elm but knew nothing about the company, that would be a strike against them. If someone came excited about Elm _and_ was interested in the company's product that was fine.
But this is just me filling in the blanks as I think they should be filled in. It'd be great to see him spell this out a bit more.
> If someone came excited about Elm _and_ was interested in the company's product that was fine.
We're talking about a company that makes workplace engagement surveys. I have trouble imagining anyone is actually truly excited about that product. No 5 year olds ever said that they want to grow up to write engagement surveys. They aren't saving the world.
And that's ok. Most products aren't very exciting when you get right down to it. One of the most toxic beliefs in tech companies is that everyone should be obsessed with the product.
I had a leader once who told us outright any mention that Haskell was a motivation for the job is a red flag. He explicitly didn't want people who were significantly interested in us due to our Haskell use. Turns out Haskellers tend to be drawn to Haskell companies in no small part due to Haskell, so we failed to hire basically anyone after the leader came aboard (most were all yes but a single no from the leader) and then the leader pushed us to move off Haskell citing difficulty hiring and that he had hired people in another office who didn't know or want to learn Haskell. Dirty tactics.
> I had a leader once who told us outright any mention that Haskell was a motivation for the job is a red flag.
> then the leader pushed us to move off Haskell citing difficulty hiring and that he had hired people in another office who didn't know or want to learn Haskell. Dirty tactics.
Oh definitely. There was even more bad actor nonsense too but I don't wanna say to much or else I sky demask myself. But I promptly quit and the dude went from buttering me up to to make me stay to insulting my new job in the exit interview real quick once I made it clear I had no interest in being his employee. I had never experienced someone so manipulative in a workplace before.
If my current employer hired this dude as VPE, I would immediate quit. Just an asshole.
In our interviews one of the things we look for is people who care about our mission (improving workplace cultures, basically). Its not a requirement but it is one of the factors when it comes to making a decision, particularly if we have more qualified candidates than roles.
> If someone came excited about Elm _and_ was interested in the company's product that was fine.
I'd even say if someone is excited about Elm _and_ was interested in making a great quality product (great UX, accessible, performant, maintainable etc.) that would also be a good fit.
I also mentioned above that the engineers we hired to work on features that happened to have Elm front ends would have been working on Ruby on Rails backends most of the time, and we generally expected engineers to be willing to jump into both sides of the stack, even if they specialised in one or the other. A person who is really excited about functional programming and joining only for the chance to work in functional programming languages might end up grating against working in a rails codebase. That's the sort of practical thing we were trying to avoid. (The same would be true today for candidates who are super excited about TS / React / Next.js - they're still going to be expected to occasionally jump into whatever backend stack their team is using).
Be honest though, I'd say a good 95% of jobs are literally something I could give 2 shits about or I have absolutely 0 interest in what their core offering is. I have rarely worked in a place where I was "excited" about the company or its mission.
Sometimes the tech stack itself IS the interesting part of the job or there were interesting problems to solve, but the company itself?
Sorry, I honestly don't care outside of the paycheck.
I'm not suggesting people have to care deeply about the company they work at. I'm just saying that I'd expect people to come to an interview having read the company website and job description. That's all.
But this is just me filling in the blanks as I think they should be filled in. It'd be great to see him spell this out a bit more.