[ammon]

I generally agree with the phrase "if you're not paying for a product, you're the product". But the market for engineers is just so lopsided that I think it's less true here. There are a lot of recruiting companies. The only real thing that sets one apart from others is whether they have candidates. So one way to look at it is that yes, we are incentivized to build what companies want, but the main thing they want is for us to have engineers. And the only way we get engineers is by building what engineers want.

That does not fully express my motivations. I am an engineer and find the idea of making the process better for engineers more exciting than making it better for companies. But it explains how I think the incentives work.