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Comment by pixelperfect | Hacker News Reader

Morale must be even worse when you consider that Facebook tries to only hire people who are enthusiastic about the product. I've heard people who don't use or don't show enthusiasm about the Facebook platform are screened out before hiring as "bad culture fit."

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What's wrong about that? My golden rule in hiring is that if there is no sense of enthusiasm for the product - don't hire.

It's utterly unrealistic for (IMO) probably 75+% of development jobs. The world runs on mountains of software that isn't sexy and that very few if any people are truly enthusiastic about.

I didn't even know exactly what the product did when I applied for my current job. Then they described what it did in my interview, and I understood a bit better, but not really.

Took me a few weeks on the job to actually understand exactly what we do. When people ask me what the software I work on does, I just tell them "it's complicated".

There is so much b2b software that fills a specific niche in a specific industry that makes absolutely no sense to people outside of that space.

Your current job at facebook? Or some other company. It's not uncommon for candidates to not understand a product. Many products are complex and if you weren't a shopper for that product or a deep user, you won't get it from the scant research you might do before a job interview.

Another company, working in a fairly niche b2b space.

It's not about being enthusiastic, it's about being able to express enthusiasm as a hiring candidate. If you can't even feign enthusiasm to get hired ... move on.

imo most people fake it, so you're mainly self-filtering for people who are good actors.

A healthy criticism is more valuable than fake enthusiasm, otherwise you will get the "emperor is naked" situation. They already got it.

that's a pretty brown rule. You should try hiring professionals - people who have enthusiasm for a job well done. Most products are shit and most people know that. So when you hire product enthusiasts, you're hiring good actors.

Unfortunately, the parts of the industry I interacted with share your golden rule so many years ago I found refuge in infrastructure/backend where being enthusiastic about the product is never on the list of stuff to care about.

It spreads because devs who are willing to kiss butts to get hired are also willing to be paid less

I had a CEO who always kept a gaggle of yes-men at his heels. They were very enthusiastic about the product, even as degraded into a flaming pile of garbage and the walls crumbled around us.

> What's wrong about that

Such hiring practices is how cults start.

This rule is a little weird to me having worked at places where there were a lot of good engineers who weren't overly enthusiastic about the product (I used to do legal software at a medium sized corporation). What did you hire for that you could have that as a rule? I imagine it would work a lot better at a smaller company or a company with a product that software engineers are likely to actually use.

I love this. I think for my next job I want to work at a place where people have enthusiasm for the product. It's very important to me to not just be building something that someone else told me to build. And I think that sort of team where engineers want to contribute to the definition of the product will make itself visible through enthusiasm for the product.

I'm sure there's room for the guy who wants to just build what you tell him to do and he's great it. I just don't want to do that and I want to be surrounded by people not like that.

This enthusiastic approach isn't exclusively a facebook thing; other big companies within IT are "suffering" from it as well and it seems it's an important part of corporate culture and marketing at the same time nowadays. Putting this simply, a critical approach is also important - you can't rely only on seeing your work and company thru pink glasses all the time.

You ever visit their campus? It's a cubicle Jonestown. Truly disturbing place. It was like they kept demons in the basement and put drugs in the water supply.

This whole discussion is making me glad they just rejected me. It sounds like I would have been miserable there.

Jonestown is very apt. It's dialed back a little from what it used to be (especially outside of the Sun HQ complex), but yeah it feels like a farm of human batteries.

Anecdotal, but a friend of mine was hired without having used Facebook. He had to create an account to log in to their platform so he could sign the offer. This was in 2016.

Not to say that they don’t do some such screening, but I thought I’d add another data point.

Was he part of an acquisition?

> I've heard people who don't use or don't show enthusiasm about the Facebook platform are screened out before hiring as "bad culture fit."

Maybe just the people that don't know how to fake it?

Why would you want to work with a liar?

Never said I did. It is, however, the reality of how job seeking works in today's competitive world.

Sorry, I meant it as a rhetorical question, not a personal one.

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