[dumpster_fire]

The ego here is palpable. Asking candidates to trust the first offer from a hiring manager is equally terrible advice.

> I realize you don't really care about us vs Adobe, you are going for the best bid.

Er yeah. It's a job. Unless you're OpenAI right now, you'd be hard pressed to find a candidate who means it when they say they love your company vision. It's all theatrics and gate keeping by ego massaging. It's a rite of passage for junior devs to believe words like yours until they find fresh grads earning double their pay, and getting dumped onto the streets during layoffs.

To the junior devs: Passion and enthusiasm are positive attributes for a team's productivity, but they are equally fantastic traits for hiring managers to exploit. Never forget that. From: A very jaded senior engineer who has seen a lot from startups to tech shops to big tech.

[bionsystem]

I agree and I would add : you wouldn't know in advance how great a job actually is, when you only know its description. You don't (really) know who you're going to work with, what pain points the company have internally or with their clients, because nobody in their right mind would tell you about it from a recruiting perspective. And obviously you wouldn't know much about the company's future, even funding isn't really a predictor for success.

So yeah salary is the most important common denominator, simply because at the end of the day, it's a written number and you know you're going to get it.