I find myself to be more interested in the technical problems, rather than the product itself. Unless the product is something I'm making as a side project, I would also care about the product if I start my own company.
However I don't get why recruiters want you to be excited about their company's product?
I've been interviewing lately with a gaming company, it went very well except I answered the question "why do you want to join us? Why gaming?" with saying "honestly I'm more interested in the technical challenges that you have rather than the output as a product, I do care about serving end customers with good experience, but I would work for gaming company or e-commerce company"
Usually I don't say such things in an interview but this time I wanted to try it to see their reaction. As I expected it was a deal breaker for them.
Why do companies care about that? We're basically providing our technical know how as a service, not our product creation know how. You wouldn't expect a plumber to be excited about your new home, you expect them to be good at what they do. So why is it different in software engineering?
Cheers
As someone who has been on both sides of things but leans much more on the side of the fence you're asking from, my take is: they are looking for someone who drinks the Kool aid.
From a pure efficiency standpoint, caring does matter to an extent. With your side projects, you wouldn't spend your voluntary time doing something you don't care about. That excitement translates to more happiness, productivity, and (more cynically) the decent chance you will complain less if they need you to work overtime. You're in it for the MISSION so if the MISSION needs you to work until 8 tonight then you'll be gungho.
So my extremely cynical answer here is: they often care to have leverage to use on you. Is this true everywhere? Nope. But assuming it's true can often net you a sane work life balance. I would just tell you to lie. Do some research on the product or team, maybe learn what their own corporate BS is that they spout for their mission, and parrot it back to them slightly modified during the interview. When you get the job, then you can fake a little along the way but as long as you remain a high performer people will overlook your apparent lack of "excitement" because they don't want to risk losing you.
To my employer: I swear this isn't true for me. :)
On a serious note, a doctor can be professional and care about outcomes without caring about the patient. Providing care and emotionally caring are separate things, and are generally best kept separate (doctors are not supposed to practice on family). In fact, I recently met a doctor who is not very personable but has excellent patient outcomes and is highly regarded in his field.
But yeah I always do what you suggested in interviews, I just wanted to try it this time
There’s a lot more that goes into a hire than technical proficiency, because there are a thousand other people with the same skills and what not checking those boxes.
Personality is far more important.
I would care more about the product if it was something I believe in, maybe a job at Firefox because they care about a private internet.
Just that most of the opportunities are not something I care about, but I need to pay bills in the end.
Business people can say AI can help business, but they don't know how AI can solve which problem in the existing process. For example, search engine was once a cranky tool in the web. It is not usable, everyone hated it. A guy should assemble a "coding" for the query to get a good result. Before it was cool, PageRank algorithm was a lab thing in the past, but until Sergey Brin and Larry Page used it for search engine, it changes how search engine works and everyone finally loves search engine because they don't need to assemble a complex query anymore, but simply throw some keywords. You name that company, Google. It beats other big names at that time, such as Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
Back to your case, I think the company wants it happen for them, like Google.
I disagree. It's not just the purview of software engineers to understand or see how the company's product helps the customer. Lots of roles need to come together to create a successful product. Generally speaking, the employees that signal their passion for the given company/product/mission/etc are the one's more easily leveraged for longer hours, less pay and more work. As someone else mentioned here, be professional over passionate. The company isn't as passionate about the employee as the passionate employee is about the company. I can guarantee you that.
It doesn't mean you should be unprofessional, it's unethical to not do the work your paid for well.
Being a professional means doing what you say you’re going to do, doing it well, and doing it honestly.
In my experience, expecting passion for the product instead of professionalism for the work has always turned out to be a badly managed company. The best companies I worked for expected professionalism, not passion.
Are there any well managed ones? It seems they all do this.
Personally, I think it's important to have some interest and sense of responsibility in the final product you're contributing to, not just solving technical problems.
I don’t think that answer was terrible, but could be tweaked a little. Go into what technical challenges you think that company would face and why it excites you, but don’t present it as a negative and I wouldn’t blink an eye at it. but at the end of the day, youre not there to solve cool problems, youre there to make money
That said, I worked on iPhone games that nobody wanted to play at the company. One day our metrics tanked and people were spending hours trying to figure out why. I just opened it and in thirty seconds the first screen related to those metrics was blank. Wanting to dog food the product, if anyone actually had used it, is very useful
Even if you get a lot of pleasure out of puzzle solving and other technical aspects of your work, you will experience moral injury if you are working on a product that you think is harmful.
I defer to subject matter experts where I work, I am very much a specialist in the details of the system, but I know the product I work on makes some people happy and it gets mentioned on the news (in a positive way) almost every day.
That adds to the satisfaction of my work.
This book
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0...
says that a good corporate culture has a mission that is obvious to everyone who works there and that everybody can understand how what they do relates to that mission.
It might not be "I am pumped to work on this product" but it is "having a story that makes sense", which is absent in many workplaces.
I have ADHD, which might be part of this.
If they just wanted some software written, they'd hire a contractor, or outsource it to another company/country.
With research, it's vague. Someone who does half as much work but does the right kind of work will go much further. Data isn't enough for research insight; attention matters more.
