[mr_briggs]

I feel like this article undermines itself a bit with:

> Sure, the tech stack might be exciting. Or the product may be compelling. The work-life balance may be good. But I promise you that the biggest reason is still money.

I was always under the impression that for a paid job, the reason of money is assumed. Companies want to hear your other reasons - to show you are at least trying to appreciate what they're about aside from making money. Was the question ever being asked to find the main reason?

[johnfn]

If you have plenty of potential job leads and you find yourself in the position of sifting through them for the best one, that may be true. That's not the case for most people.

[dzikimarian]

We're on HN, discussing article on tech blog. Why pretend any of comments were directed at people looking for a janitor position?

[aftoprokrustes]

I would go one step further: why would the question be irrelevant for a janitor? Let's say you search for a janitor for a high school. You have three good candidates. One just applied randomly. One lives just around the corner, and wanted to find a workplace where he would not have to drive for hours. The third one lives far away but loves interacting with teenagers: for instance, he is a karate instructor in his spare time.

Feels relevant to me. You can apply for a janitor job in a lot of places, so it cannot hurt to ask whether there is a reason to choose this particular one. As other said, just saying "I need a job and this fits my profile" should be an acceptable option.

Let's not pretend that question is what will make or break the interview. I always see it more as an ice breaker to get the discussion started.

[zwnow]

Yup, this. Not being able to answer this question is the result of people just shotgunning job applications without checking up on the company first. I wouldn't want employees that could not answer why they would work for me. I also wouldn't want to work for a company that I would not have reasons as to why I would wanna work there.

[__loam]

The expectation that most candidates should care about the "mission" strikes me as incredibly naive. I recently did a job search and spoke with a company I really wanted to work at, and that seemed like an awesome fit. I had a great conversation with the hiring manager and everything looked awesome. Well, they actually found a great candidate that day and decided not to move forward. That's the reality of the job search for most people.

Applying for companies you want to work at almost seems stupid when more than half the time they just send you an email telling you they don't think you're a good fit. It's a luxury and a privilege to work at a so called dream job. In my view, and especially in the current market, the optimal strategy is to talk to whichever recruiter is emailling you, and do no additional research until after the technical interviews are over with. It's frankly a huge waste of time to know anything about a company before you even know if they have a position for you. Having the expectation that your employees care as much about the company as you do is just ignorance.

[zwnow]

To be completely honest, it's pretty easy to find a job in the current market. Maybe american market is different but in Europe you can practically just chose some company and you'll get a job.

[metabagel]

The article gives the reason. We all want to work for money. Sure, most of us can call up some enthusiasm for the technology we’ll be working with, but often we don’t quite know what exactly we would be working on anyway.

A better way to go about it is to examine the preferred working style of the applicant vs the way the company operates.