Comment by molsongolden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by molsongolden | Hacker News Reader

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This is one approach and way that people feel about work and job hunting but (anecdotally) many others, including myself, do care about things like culture fit and company vision.

Beyond a threshold salary level, these intangible things matter much more than money since I am going to be spending every single day working on these things and with these people. I want to work with skilled technicians but I also want to be in alignment with my team.

I understand the "not changing the world" mindset but motivation is still a hugely important consideration when hiring and when choosing where to work. Every job has bad days/weeks/months and it takes motivation, beyond the paycheck, to hold myself and my team together through those moments.

Similar to your million dollar situation: If you paid high performing knowledge workers a million dollars a month to do soul-crushing stressful grind work in a bad environment, those people are still going to quit after a short period of time.

> do care about things like culture fit and company vision.

And you know this from a job post in a job board/website how?

This is what I mean. A no-name company can't say 'we want people to be motivated to work with us' when 99.99% of the world have no clue what they do/how they work.

If you are Uber, or Microsoft, 37 Signals, or even Doctors Without Borders you know in general their motives/how they work (from the 2389472309 blog posts). But 5 employee start ups? Or a consulting firm that does client work for companies you never heard from? Really?

> If you paid high performing knowledge workers a million dollars a month to do soul-crushing stressful grind work in a bad environment, those people are still going to quit after a short period of time

Maybe being from different country shows my bias, but even with a lot of friends in the USA, most don't change jobs for lower paid positions. There is even a term for it: 'Golden Handcuffs'

> And you know this from a job post in a job board/website how?

I don't need to know it from a job board or website because I don't apply to companies that I'm not already familiar with. When I apply to those listings, I already know how I will answer this question, because that's why I'm applying to the company.

> Has anyone been 6, day dreaming in school, 'when I grow up, I want to help people create digital experiences their customers love.'?

No but that's a strawman and I'd be surprised if you don't recognise that.

> My interest in the role is it matches my experience

I doubt that's the only reason. You could have experience doing a billion things but you probably enjoy what you do a lot more than that, and when we break it down, there are almost certainly subsections within what you do now that you enjoy and hope that the company aligns with that. When a listing asks "why are you interested in working here", you hopefully already know and can express that.

There are a large number of ways from location, culture, processes, technical decisions, people, problem domain, etc that you can discover about a company before applying.

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