[scottlamb]

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.