My explanation: The people making the hiring decisions have two problems: (1) Ignorance about software, programming, and the associated technology and (2) res

My explanation: The people making the hiring decisions have two problems: (1) Ignorance about software, programming, and the associated technology and (2) resentment for the compensation level of good software developers. So, who are these hiring people? People from CEO to HR to middle managers who know less about the work than the candidate employees do. This fact is like a chicken bone stuck in their throat because it is totally against the 100 year old norm, back to Henry Ford's factory, of an hierarchical organization where the supervisor knew more and the subordinate knew less and was there to add routine labor to the goals of the supervisor. So, with the resentment of (2), the hiring people expect and very much want any candidates to know basically everything, including absurd details no one should bother to remember. Or the candidate needed five years of experience with Java when the language had been out for only three years and likely only James Gosling had that much experience with Java. Or the hiring people want five years of experience with MySQL and experience with DB/2 and SQL Server don't count. Or they want C# and Visual Basic .NET (different from C# essentially only in syntactic sugar) doesn't count. Or they want C Python and Algol, Fortran, PL/I, C, and assembler for several processors don't count. And with the ignorance of (1), the hiring people don't know what's important and what's trivial. So, for > When did working at your shit company have to be my passion instead of my job? the hiring people, lacking any better criteria for not making a hiring mistake, basically want the candidate to grab their ankles and swear everlasting, life long fealty and commitment to their six month project. Moreover, such interview questions are obviously a really bad joke for someone with a lot of significant software experience and/or a good college degree in computing; that is, the hiring people, based on near total ignorance and incompetence, are trying to give oral exams in computer science, to someone obviously long since highly qualified. Any competent professional or worker of any kind needs to keep in mind that it's super tough to build a good career working for ignorant, resentful people. So, try not to do that. Keep in mind that only a tiny fraction of jobs provide a stable career with compensation sufficient for a three bedroom, two bath house, wife, kids, college for the kids, and retirement for the parents. Broadly the solution for someone in computing is just to see the bright side -- how much hard/software can be had for $2000 -- and use that to start and run a successful business. A good example is the Canadian romantic matchmaking service Plenty of Fish, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just via Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. Other fields of high specialization have seen and responded to much the same problem: So, they have a profession with, maybe government licensing, legal liability, professional peer-review, meaningful, challenging certification, code of ethics, etc. And, e.g., as I understand, the legal profession says that in a business, a working lawyer can report only to another lawyer, never to a generalist, line manager. Really, old-line businesses, or any business with old-line attitudes, can be just terrified of software developers and work hard trying to minimize the power of the developers, e.g., use divide and conquer by making sure no one programmer is essential and, instead, the organization has various cases of back-ups. But the ignorance (1) and resentment (2) go a long way to explain the nonsense. Finally many VCs like to see technical CEOs -- good.