Why Dropbox was right not to hire me

But let's face it: Most products are not interesting to the developers working on them.

I love programming. It's my life. I can get excited about -coding- anything. The actual product, though? Not so much.

In fact, the company that recently hired me asked if I was interested in their product, and I honestly answered that I wasn't, but programming was my passion. When he frowned a little (it was obviously the wrong answer), I told him that I wasn't interested in the product I was coming from, either, and I'd been there 5 years and loved it. And it was true.

Avid programmers are the kind of people who took everything apart when they were kids. How things work, and making them work, is much more interesting than what the result of that work is.

So I disagree with their assessment, if that's why they didn't hire you. Your passion for programming should have been more than enough to cover a lack of passion for the product itself.

And I'll even take it a step further: You could be an asset to the team. You are the user that got away. You used the product, and left. You can tell them how to get you to stay as a user, and you've got the technical know-how to make it happen... And you'll be excited about implementing those features.