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Why do software engineers have to be excited about the company's product?

• chovybizzass 5y ago
  Because they are run by HR monkeys who believe that shit matters to engineers.
• foobarbazetc 5y ago
  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.
  • chakhs 5y ago
    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.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      It's not that you don't have a personality. It's that your personality would not be as easily controlled and wouldn't fit with the company culture. Edit: why downvote and flag?
  • proc0 5y ago
    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.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    "Personality is far more important." I guess you could call it that. The leaders want a company culture that is easy to control and "fanatical" employees. Edit: why downvote? This is definitely one of those leadership buzzwords that they are trying to work on. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/simon-sinek-how-to-make-your-employees-fanatical/ar-BB15J5YS https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/simon-sinek-ho...
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  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/0066620996 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.
• bussierem 5y ago
  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. :)
  • chakhs 5y ago
    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
  • drstewart 5y ago
    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.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      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.
• detaro 5y ago
  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"
  • sloaken 5y ago
    I so agree with this. It applies to MANY businesses. If they pay overtime, IMHO, then the company seems to not care as much.
• proc0 5y ago
  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.
• ted0_2021 5y ago
  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.
• bjourne 5y ago
  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.
• sloaken 5y ago
  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 :-)
• muzani 5y ago
  The product passion matters a lot more if you're doing research/design/UX. If you're more into development (implementation of the research), you don't need to care what it is With research, it's vague. Someone who does half as much work but does the right kind of work will go much further. Data isn't enough for research insight; attention matters more.
• afarrell 5y ago
  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.
• yesenadam 5y ago
  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!
  • chakhs 5y ago
    Thanks that's heart-warming. I hope I am/can be what you described
• nomorefools 5y ago
  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.
  • mtberatwork 5y ago
    > 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.
    • chakhs 5y ago
      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.
• tofukid 5y ago
  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.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    "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.
• giantg2 5y ago
  Because the company leaders want people who are motivated by ideology. This means they can potentially pay less or have you work/produce more. It also helps them create a culture that is easier for them to maintain and control.
• chakhs 5y ago
  Thanks all :) I just wanted to know what other people in software engineering think about this.
• idunno246 5y ago
  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
• dave_sid 5y ago
  Totally agree with you, that’s all I can say.
• tacostakohashi 5y ago
  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.
• gitgud 5y ago
  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.
  • chakhs 5y ago
    Yeah sorry for not giving much details, it wasn't an essay. I wouldn't work at something I consider unethical.