Enh. When I interviewed at ESPN the first few questions were about sports knowledge: were you a fan who understood the storylines and stats? Or did you just want a job?
If you had somehow managed to slip through the HR screening without being a sports fan then the day of interviews would root that out and you would not get an offer.
It ensured that everybody who was there lived and breathed sports and would run through walls to create a great product.
Compare to later when I worked at FOXSports.com where sports knowledge was a bonus. The product was worse and the team had to spend too much time (more than 0 minutes) explaining to a front end dev why a baseball box score had an order that stats were always displayed in because that’s the way fans expected it (true story).
I think the value of the question is that, all things being equal, do you want the person who wants to be there because they have a connection to what you do, or do you want someone who just wants a job?
I agree that most people want someone who's there for more than 'just a job', but I wonder if this depends in part on the industry.
Like, what if you're looking for someone to help write software to manage and control parking garages? What would it even look like for a person to have a connection to parking-garage management? Does prior experience working as a valet count? As personally running, or managing a team to run, or owning a parking lot count?
Are you really looking for 'a person has a passion for what we do' or just 'a person who knows the industry already', especially in industries that aren't catering to a hobby or a 'calling' (like medicine or education or...)?
I think it more "a person capable of empathising with the users". Knowing the internals of how the baseball industry operates isn't relevent here. The relevent experience is being familiar with how the viewers interact with baseball.
Having said that, it seems like this applies mostly to frontend people writing the consumer facing portions. There are plenty of jobs where your users are other people in the company, or partner companies. In those cases, understanding the bussiness tends to be far more important than understanding the user experience.
For parking garages, the relevent experience would be someone has used them a lot. Or at least someone who is familiar with driving a car.
>In those cases, understanding the bussiness tends to be far more important than understanding the user experience.
Never understood the take that internal systems need a good UX because they very much do. Having been a consumer of ass-backwards designed software components, bad UX (apis, functions, other stuff) will inevitably propagate through the product and will rear their ugly head somewhere. Not to speak about "friction" and development velocity and so on.
Why yes, implementing this feature will cost you something like 2 hours. Not implementing it will either cost someone 4 hours to do it themselves or two hours over and over again to code around the lack of it. Please don't waste other people's time.
I mean if I was interviewing with a parking garage company, I’d actually be interested because I have used parking garages and am familiar with them (severe bottlenecks after an event ends, the use of license plate scanning, the whole UX of dealing with tickets, pre-buying parking, trying to find parking garages, etc.) so yes, if you were asking me what makes me interested in a parking garage job which I originally only applied for $$$, I’d have a toooon to say.
I had no industry experience with my current job either — only experience as a user and I was just looking for a job — and basically I just spilled my thoughts about what I liked, what I hated, what I thought could improve, and so on. They actually couldn’t hire me at the time (company-wide hiring freeze) but they must have loved me enough to call me up a year later asking if I was still available and interested (and I was).
"Why do you want to work for us?" is an open-ended question. It doesn't demand passion. "I feel like I have a strong existing knowledge of the sort of work that's done here which would make this role a pleasant fit for me," is a perfectly acceptable answer, especially if you're interviewing at a company that manages parking garages. Something about the company culture is also fine. They're not always demanding that you display a deep passion for managing parking garages; it's just an opportunity to explain why you personally would fit into the company/role better than other candidates.
To be honest I think you can find people interested in anything, or get them to be interested. The problem is, having passionate employees rarely translates into revenue.
Think about it this way: if you were a teacher, and your salary depended on your students' exam results, would you spend time trying to get them interested in your subject, or would you show them the most effective methods of cramming the knowledge before the exam?
Personally I’d way rather work on that software than some social network. I like unsexy b2b and would state that right out if I was interviewing for that company.
Which I think is the point - it takes all kinds and you’re better off picking the person who wants to be there than who’s just looking for a job.
This is gatekeeping for no good reason. You can learn on the job why box scores have an order, that's like a 2 minute discussion. And at the end of the day it doesn't matter as long as they follow the design provided. And like others have said, nobody will know every sport they're building a ui for, does that also disqualify them?
Video games, Music, Fashion here are other industries where "passion" equates to we will pay you less, and over work you at the same time. There's a side to all this that is very devil wears Prada.
> You can learn on the job why box scores have an order
What if you just don't care? I'd be one, since I'd rather watch paint dry than watching baseball. Would you want to work all day five days a week on something you don't care about? I couldn't do that.
> it doesn't matter as long as they follow the design provided
I know this it the end goal of scrum, but is this where we are now? Software engineers as replaceable cogs just doing the design provided?
I could never work such a job. Change careers, if you can't be making the decision about how it's going to work.
> And at the end of the day it doesn't matter as long as they follow the design provided
This is a great way to be utterly replaceable in your job. "Tell me what to do" is the worst trait in an employee and puts you immediately in the "first to cut when possible" line.
> nobody will know every sport they're building a ui for, does that also disqualify them?
It makes them worse from an IC perspective, because they need hand-holding moreso than someone who gets the problem space more intuitively.
In ZIRP, it was easier to coast with what you're saying. Now, it's back to brass tacks - everyone is expected contribute and be more helpful to your boss and team in order to become more irreplaceable.
i think this whole thread is a false dichotomy. I'm not a sports fan myself, but I would absolutely sit down and learn the rules/stats/whatever ahead of an interview. i also wouldn't put up with shitty hours and rude bosses.
Your point doesn't quite follow from the example. If the dev is interested in sports unrelated to baseball (tennis, soccer, etc) they'd need the scoring explained regardless.
The broader point is if you care about sports you understand the passion and that there’s often “a way” of doing things in a sport, you learn it, and you move on.
You don’t argue for 10 minutes that your way of displaying a box score is better than how literally millions of fans expect it to be.
Yes, exactly, and the game Slay the Spire is a strong example. Primarily made by a two-person team. The designer is super passionate about the game (and card games in general). The programmer doesn’t even like card games!
But it works great (it is such a successful game that it spawned a new genre) because both are really good at what they do!
so couldn't you answer that? "I'm very passionate about building useful things, and I can see how your product BLAH can be applied to valuable areas like ..."
I guess it’s a sense of why do I need a PASSION for it. I’ll do it , but my passion more so lies in say not starving to death while enjoying my hobbies rather than caring more than I need to about YOUR product
>I guess it’s a sense of why do I need a PASSION for it
I think at the end of the day, an employee with passion is always better than one without, if everything else is held even. I think this is a tough pill for a lot of people who arent/dont want to be passionate about their work to swallow. It impacts every attribute an employer cares about.
I do work for an esports company. Something a lot of devs are passionate about. In the end after a downsizing they kept the most competent developers even when they cared zilch about esports. Because your passion doesn’t make you write good code. Just makes you happy while writing bad code
Well this is a very confusing argument. If you hire someone who cares about their work, who has passion for it, you're going to need to be prepared to talk things through with them when they think they've worked out a better way of doing things. If you wanted them to just code up what they are told to, you would have been better avoiding all that passion in the first place.
I assume that you've run into this with people before, or you wouldn't be calling it out as a worry.
But I would hope that I'm humble enough to admit (at least to myself) when I don't know much about a particular topic, and would accept at face value, without argument, when someone says to me, "thanks for trying to find an improvement here, but this is just how this data is displayed, and millions of fans expect to be able to read it this way, and will get confused if we do something different".
I'm not passionate about commodity futures trading. I don't care about it at all. But when I work on software which traders will use, I understand that there are specific conventions about how the numbers are displayed and that they need to be understood and used.
>You don’t argue for 10 minutes that your way of displaying a box score is better
most people working in any particular industry understand that there is a particular way things are done for customers in that industry.
on edit: actually thinking about this I recall I was working on a live streaming sports station and I should display some scores (not baseball) I hate watching sports and yet I still chased down several people to find out if there was a well known way that scores should be sorted and displayed because I expected different sports might have different idiosyncrasies and I should provide a generic templating system for displaying the score (these folks evidently didn't care as much as ESPN because there was nothing special I should do)
I don't get it. If the box needs the stats in a particular order, don't you just put that in the task ticket for it? Like how is this requirement being communicated where someone wants to argue about it? If the ticket says "do this" and it's not done then you just fail QA and send it back.
I'm very thankful that not all developers work in a code factory where explicit requirements get spit out on their desk at the end of the process. If you're involved in the definition you get to prevent the "team <upstream> is so clueless" issues, and actually learn about what you're building beyond code implementation.
I don't think that's what's going on here, though. Developers often don't design UI, anyway. They're given a UI spec or mock-up from a UI/UX designer, and build it to spec. That's not a "code factory", that's just being a professional about it (and many software developers are terrible at UI design and should grow some humility and accept that).
Regardless, a quick "we need this score box to be laid out exactly this way, because this is the standard in this particular fandom, and our fans will expect to read it this way" should be sufficient. A developer who doesn't accept that, and argues, needs to mature and learn some social and professional skills.
Even more desirable is a dev who you can simply ask to make a score box and they deliver some think that meets or exceeds your expectations without further information.
It's something that would be assumed without being explicitly stated. I'd have no idea how the stats are supposed to be displayed for a cricket match but I'm a fan of other sports so I'd know there's a correct way and would likely ask a cricket fan coworker how to do it. Or research it myself if nobody's a cricket fan. With baseball box scores, I'd know the right way to do it without having to ask.
Wow. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this workplace you describe.
I mean, yeah, you've described it well. I can understand how it works. But I just can't imagine working as a developer where the first introduction to a "task" is this finely specified. Like, this dev won't have been involved in the feature at all before seeing it in a card in some task manager app?
Yikes.
Are you saying that you've worked in places like this? Just doing these tiny little tasks, blind, to an app that you have no context on. And you did this for more than, say, a week before quitting? And that week wasn't your first week of your first job out of school?
How would you QA something like this across all possible sports? Or test it? How was the feature even developed or requested though if the specification isn't written to explain what it is? Are the frontend designers developing the specification? The developers? What about the backend engineers who need to implement APIs?
What if there's a couple of different factions in a fandom for some particular sport that disagree on the ordering?
Imagine doing this for any other industry and expecting coherent results. An effective developer given a vague tasking will do a bit of quick research and come up with an idea, but they could also be entirely wrong compared to the business objectives. Or the task could relate solely to internal business processes, in which case there is no consensus it's whatever the internal culture of the business does.
I think that's a fairly uncharitable explanation of the GP's point.
Even if the developer is involved in the UI design (which at many shops is -- IMO wisely -- not the case), it takes all of 7 seconds to give context on why a box score needs to be displayed in a particular way.
I don't know anything about how ESPN's business operates, but I am incredibly skeptical of companies that push hard to find people passionate about whatever the company is doing. All too often that equates with working people longer hours for lower pay, preying on their love for the subject at hand to get them to accept a raw deal. Game dev is I guess the canonical example of this.
I get it, though: an employee who doesn't need an explainer about common things in the sports world is going to get up to speed faster and be more productive than someone who needs some (or a lot of) hand-holding. (And I say this as the guy who'd come up to you and ask, "ummm what's a baseball box score?")
> I think the value of the question is that, all things being equal...
But are things often all equal? I wonder if the universe of "people who love sports and are great developers" is really large enough to fill all the job slots. If you were down to two candidates, and one didn't know much about sports but seemed to be a fantastic developer, and the other was a super sports fan and seemed like they'd get the job done, but maybe not with much excellence, who would you hire? Obviously that's a contrived situation, but hopefully you get the point I'm trying to make.
Consider the statement: "You should be excited about building a website for (x) ." where x is one of the following:
A. Fecal sample collection.
B. Hardware fasteners.
C. Debt Collection.
D. US Tax Code parsing
E. HR regulatory compliance
I believe the reality is that most jobs are boring. Even if you're working in a business you're deeply motivated by, there's lots of ho-hum positions that need to be filled.
You've picked a funny first example. I've actually wanted to work on software related to fecal sample collection and am passionate about it.
I have an intestinal issue - and as a result I'm always watching out for signs of problems in my own stool. There are obvious indicators - e.g. black tarry stool suggests a bleed in upper intestine.
One issue is that it's kind of hard to get good pictures to compare to. Google images will show you some examples, but not examples of false positives. Is your stool partially pale white because you ate a ton of marshmallows recently, or because you have an obstruction in your bile duct?
A doctor once suggested I had Crohn's Disease (luckily, didn't) and I joined the subreddit for it and was pretty horrified by what I read.
A big issue with Crohn's is understanding the relationship between what you eat and how well your digestive system preforms. This is something that tracking software could help with - I imagine taking a picture of food and of your excrement and then ML on the backend sorts everything out and makes dietary suggestions.
Users could also annotate their images with additional insights or notes like "I have condition X - this sample is a good indicator of X" and curious users could image match pictures of potentially problematic stool to the annotated repository.
My point is - plenty of people are passionate about random subjects that may seem dull to you. Plenty more people can get passionate because even a random topic likely has immense depth and nuance to it.
I find coworkers that aren't passionate are a drag to work with. I want to make something useful and good to solve a real problem. If you are just there to do the bare minimum to collect a paycheck - that's very annoying, you're more of an obstacle to work around than a teammate. You can hire people like that if you don't have better options, but hopefully there are better options!
Awesome. Welcome to your first "Fecal Sample Corp." interview.
Are you passionate about programming on the IBM AS400 platform? Our parent company never upgraded their infrastructure for the past 40 years, as it was deemed too risky.
some screw types are fun. I like allen which is pretty positive engagement, and can even take ball-headed drivers. Torx is pretty positive too. I don't like slotted that much (driver doesn't self-center and tends to slide out the side). In the middle is phillips (and/or pozidrive / jis). Easy to center and use, but frequently strips out if the driver is at an angle or too little downforce is applied.
It's also fun to find the perfect tool for the job. I'm surprised nobody makes a "mechanics tool set" that is completely based on 1/4" hex driver bits with positive engagement. Organized to do all kinds of screws, plus sockets to do nuts and bolts.
I think you vastly underestimate the variety of the things humans will be passionate about.
But sure, many people will still be doing jobs that they aren't passionate about, and that's fine. Passion shouldn't be a requirement. Maybe it's a bonus, though, both for the employer and employee.
How many jobs necessarily have a focused mission where you can easily make that an implicit requirement? Even if you take a position at ESPN, you might work on nothing externally facing. Does an accountant/lawyer/janitor also need to be a sports geek to apply?
It is great if you could get a position in which you are passionate, but those are few and far between.
I don't know where I stand on this exact issue but one should be careful that the questions they are asking don't slot the acceptable candidates into a gender, economic class, race, age group, or religious affiliation.
If you changed the nouns and adjectives for this example to something else you could find your way into trouble.
See that's wild because for someone writing code I think a bit of detachment is necessary to make a good product. Emotional investment and technical decisions never really mix all that well.
And drive isn't really all that it's cracked up to be because folks will burn themselves out. I've worked at more than one place where it's been a struggle to get people to take PTO, one time to the point where we got managers to all but mandate vacation because it was affecting work.
What share of products and companies have a reasonable expectation of people passionate (irl-passionate, not ”professional passionate”) for their domain?
> surely a money-seeking apparatus can form a justified expectation?
Hiring managers have all sorts of opinions and expectations. Often they use lazy heuristics because hiring is hard work. Gauging passion (for the business domain or particular company) is one such lazy heuristic, ineffective in part because it is easily faked and sometimes not apparent. False positives and negatives both occur. It might also be irrelevant.
Also, yeah, you're right that I anthropomorphized after saying companies have no human qualities. There's a lot more nuance. The idea was that for groups of self-interested people following incentives to cooperate, they collectively have a much different character from the individuals within, in terms of their ability to reason, their motives, and their grasp on reality, among other things.
I am currently wondering, in a very similar vein, if the people who work on Apple Fitness have ever trained for an event in their lives.
The optimistic view is they've left plenty of space for third party apps to come in and thrive, and a number of them have. But if you were trying to build an app that bridged people from sedentary lifestyle to an active one that needed a 'Real Fitness App', well they haven't really done that either, and I can't help but wonder if it's a personnel problem.
The workflows are all wrong for adjusting things the night before a session and much worse for correcting things in the middle of a workout.
ESPN is good example of company where you want your employees to dog food the product. If they use it for their own passion they probably often think what could be better and what more could be done.
Not saying it is always needed, but it is example of place where you want interested people. Same goes for more creative things. You do not want disinterested writers writing scripts or composing music...
Ouch. I work at a sports tech company where about only about half the engineers were sports fans going in. I wasn't one of them. I'm obviously biased, but I think that the intersection of tech people and sports fans is small enough that the companys' growth and/or technology would suffer significantly if they insisted on hiring only the intersection. Domain knowledge is important, but "domain" can be multi-dimensional (my team's domain is "AV" more than it is "sports"), and general tech quality matters too.
But more broadly, I agree this question could be useful. It's not "say why you want to have a job, and it better not be for money", which would indeed be silly. It's more like "you're good and a lot of companies would hire you, so why this job?" I don't think I've ever asked this question, but it's good to know they have some passions that overlap with what we do, and this question could be a way to find those.
As an infra engineer, I try to pick up companies that make make a difference. But they never ask me about my motivation. They ask why I want to change the job, not why I chose them - it would be kind of stupid in the light of the fact that normally people have several interviews with different companies when they change jobs so that question would be illogical.
Agreed, actually. It does depend on the industry somewhat and sports is probably one where interest in the topic is more valuable than average.
But for me I have to care about what the company does. I don't think it's necessary to be an extreme hardcode fan of the product, but at least caring more than a little bit is important.
Working on a product that I couldn't care less about is going to be too draining. For example, netflix has been recruiting me for a long, long time but I have zero interest in movies. I'd rather do anything else than watch a movie. So I've never been interested in working there since, at the end of the day, it's a movie company and I just don't care about that at all.
As the employer, of course you want someone with passion for your business. But I think the point of the article is that the question "why do you want to work here?" is so cliche that it doesn't work anymore. Candidates just embellish the answer that they have prepared and even memorized, when not straight lie, like the "name 3 weaknesess" nobody is going to answer in full truth.
Want to check for passion for sports? Initiate an almost casual conversation about sports, and you will learn if the candidate is passionate or not.
For somewhere like ESPN where you can reasonably expect to find people who are genuinely passionate about your product, this is reasonable. ESPN employees should be passionate about sports just as employees at a video game company should be passionate about gaming.
This doesn't apply to something that nobody in their right mind can possibly be genuinely passionate about such as insurance or tax preparation.
and yet lots of people go to school for a very long time to study accounting, or do graduate work in actuarial sciences, so I think you're wrong. It's easier to communicate passionate about the verb than the noun. Like what if you applied to a tax prep company and they had an free version for low-income people? It would be easy to talk about how you wanted to really help people with a difficult and expensive requirement where there is real need.
and yet lots of people go to school for a very long time to study accounting, or do graduate work in actuarial sciences, so I think you're wrong
I’ve talked to tons of people in school for those very things. NONE of them were passionate about tax prep, auditing, or mortality tables. All of them were in the game for one reason: they wanted a well-paying, steady job at an accounting firm or insurance company. In fact, all those I talked to who had actually worked in those industries found the job incredibly boring and either put up with it in the hopes of some day making partner or flat-out quit the industry.
A big clue to how little passion there is for this field is the sheer number of co-op students employed at these firms/companies. Heck, when it comes to tax time they basically hire an army of co-ops to get it all done (and feed them pizza to keep them working late into the evenings).
They don’t use regular employees for the work because no one wants to do that as a long term job. People just put up with it as a kind of hazing (or paying your dues), kind of like how residents are treated at a hospital.
Oh, and almost all graduate students these days (in fields with decent-paying industry jobs) are people who can’t or won’t work for whatever reason (including visa status) and so they go to grad school to delay entering industry, not because they’re passionate about the subject.
That's pretty much how I'd always imagined those professions are. I'd imagine there are people in law, medicine and finance who genuinely enjoy those jobs even if most are probably just in it for the money. But insurance and accounting seem like things nobody could want to do except for money.
I actually went to grad school for computer science mainly because I just enjoyed being in school and they were paying me to go. Wish I'd scheduled an extra class my last semester so that I'd have a masters right now but I was both overconfident and totally burned out. I also discovered that I'm just not interested in academic CS research. I'd be interested in a stable tenured teaching job somewhere if writing peer reviewed papers and publishing them in journals nobody reads wasn't part of the job description. I'd say most of the other grad students, especially the non-international ones seemed genuinely interested in computer science and the AI research that almost everybody except me was doing.
What about somebody who wants to be part of a team for their culture, independently of the product, because they match really well with the culture (this happened to me and to somebody we hired). I'm not a user of the product but I'm considered a good representation of the company's culture (and I love where I work)
You are talking about two different things here. First is DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE, second is being fanboy of the company you are working for. I would say domain knowledge can even be a requirement, but the author talks about the second one, you don't have to be a fanboy of the company and still make good work.
When I worked at an online clothing retail store, I had zero interest in fashion, but I think I still did a pretty good job.
When I worked at a data mining/data broker startup, I had zero interest...--who's passion is it really to snoop on people and steal their information (FAANG)?
This obsession with hyper optimization at every level is wasteful and unhealthy. I prefer to hire a mix of good enough people, it's a less conflictual team environment. At the end of the day if they are professional, they will get the job done.
I don't understand why questions made for high-quality outlets with a very clear identity are then asked in low-paying endeavours where even founders have no clear higher-level vision and mission. I've seen the McKinsey dumberies and these questions asked even in factories and helpdesk sweatshops, for fuck's sake.
> The product was worse and the team had to spend too much time (more than 0 minutes) explaining to a front end dev why a baseball box score had an order that stats were always displayed in because that’s the way fans expected it
See, for me this is an argument in favor of hiring people who don’t know the field. "It’s done this way because our users expect it" is a good reason to do something, but it’s great to have it stated explicitly and consciously. It’s even food for thought: "how do we keep it this way AND improve it so that even our frontend dev who doesn’t know sports understands it?"
Everyone can learn any business. That your business is the passion of many people doesn’t mean you should only hire passionate people.
Yeah, one of the most fun gigs I ever had was for this little startup in the Outdoor space. When I interviewed, there were something like 30 mountain bikes parked in the lobby.
It was folks from all walks of life, ages, and income levels. But they were pretty much all fit and healthy (and generally fun to be around). There were office kayaking trips.
I can't imagine you'd be able to pull that off today. There would be some form of DEI lawsuit inside the first week.
And yet sports fans around the world complain about companies turning their favorite sports past time into a soulless business opportunity where everything including the fans themselves counts as a commodity, has a price and a number.
Everybody is in it for the money.... especially companies.
Yeah, sorry, this is exactly the toxic shit that makes interviews hell.
> I think the value of the question is that, all things being equal, do you want the person who wants to be there because they have a connection to what you do, or do you want someone who just wants a job?
I think it's none of the businesses' business why I'm there for. Under the capitalist system, you need a paycheck to survive. Attaching conditionals to this is shitty, no matter how you try to justify it post-fact.
Also, you don't ever get "things being equal" with candidates. They just aren't.
If you had somehow managed to slip through the HR screening without being a sports fan then the day of interviews would root that out and you would not get an offer.
It ensured that everybody who was there lived and breathed sports and would run through walls to create a great product.
Compare to later when I worked at FOXSports.com where sports knowledge was a bonus. The product was worse and the team had to spend too much time (more than 0 minutes) explaining to a front end dev why a baseball box score had an order that stats were always displayed in because that’s the way fans expected it (true story).
I think the value of the question is that, all things being equal, do you want the person who wants to be there because they have a connection to what you do, or do you want someone who just wants a job?
I’d pick the former.