this article is missing the picture. Yes the candidate engineer / salesperson / marketer is motivated by money.
But of all the things they could work on, why this team, problem or company? Many jobs will pay similar money.
Some version of this question is extremely helpful in
(a) understanding if the candidate is going to be disappointed/not get what they want a few months into the job
(b) identifying what motivates them, to help them find fulfllment and growth in their career (part of your job as a manager).
Maybe they applied to 80 jobs and this was the only one that invited them to interview? I think a lot of times the resumes go into a black hole, especially with AI screening no one even looks at them!
Sure, but why those 80? Hopefully there was at least one thing about each of those 80 jobs that made it worth applying to, vs. skipping it.
And if someone just mass-applied to literally every single job that was available, only got accepted to interview at one of them, and ended up across the interview table from me? Yeah, I'd think it would be a pretty basic expectation for them to do 20 minutes of research into the company or job description before the interview to find at least one or two things they like about it. Hell, those one or two things could even be learned during the interview process.
Doesn't have to be something earth-shattering. "I like working with $TECH_STACK that you use." "I like that I can take transit to your office and it's a short commute." "I enjoyed interacting with my interviewers and felt like we connected well and would work together well." It's not that hard!
Feels like a red flag if they can't even manage that.
Maybe you could interpret this question as "what makes you interested in this field/domain" rather than "why do you want to work for us in particular"?
I think the point is, that for many people that simply isn't true.
Its a down job market right now. Unless you are super amazing, you are probably getting rejected a lot right now. Many people can't afford to spend years trying to find the perfect job - rent needs to be paid. And quite frankly 80% of tech jobs are basically the same and interchangeable. Silicon valley loves to claim they are changing the world, but at the end of the day, almost nobody changes the world with a SaaS app.
Good comments overall. One insight here is to put yourself in their shoes to understand how to negotiate the best outcome. Most people don't rationalize themselves as mean or psychotic - there is probably some rationalizing behind the decision. E.g. diamondage is not a great engineer and we need to clean up the cap table before we increase the valuation because we can hire someone amazing.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's right or true. But assuming that's their position, does it change anything about your negotiation strategy?
Yeah this is the not-easy but emotionally intelligent thing to do. I think I can trace it back to a fight with the lead developer who then skipped me and talked directly to them. There is a chance I can resolve the situation at the root if I can talk directly with them about this situation, particularly as since then, said engineer has not met his promised targets (six months overdue on an initial claim of 1 month). But this is only speculation.
Estonia could have a shot at becoming the "Delaware" for non-US entrepreneurs, esp EU, i.e. have all the high-growth companies incorporate because of clear, friendly startup support infrastructure and laws.
It is very entrepreneurial of the Estonian government. Quotes from their announcement:
"e-residency is also launched as a platform to offer digital services to a global audience with no prior Estonian affiliation – for anybody who wants to run their business and life in the most convenient aka digital way! We plan to keep adding new useful services from early 2015 onwards."
Plug: I'm one of the founders of Ginger.io, the healthcare company Larry, Sergey & Vinod mention. We're doing some really interesting things in healthcare and sensor data-- deploying across a varity of healthcare systems and driving interventions, and the best part is having a real impact on people's lives.
If you'd like to learn more, shoot us an email at hello@ginger.io or see our Join-Us page.
With any advanced technology product, production volume plays a big role in making the underlying tech commodity and gradually dropping price per unit.
F22's would be a lot cheaper to make (than today) if everyone had one in their backyard, like a Honda Civic.
For someone not willing to sell all their hardware, the alternative would be to flash all drives with fresh OSX / Windows, and then recover from the cloud at your destination.
A cynic would say that you might as well leave the data on your phone if you go the "cloud route" as the government would already have all your data. ;)
Use client-side-encrypted online storage (any one of the many AWS-based choices, say).
Unless someone already had passive/active access to your machine before you left, they won't be able to get at your data.
Your restore should be fine, too. Just watch out for passive access being added by the tech teams inspecting your machine (say reinstall-persistent malware) - though this shouldn't happen in the majority of cases, we'd hope.
Maybe now we can all just give them tablets with root access, intentionally designed to be "hacked".
Even better, give them Raspberry Pis' and let them code what they need to get to Facebook and every other site. 5-10x cheaper than an iPad, substantially more instructive.
You want them to code a Facebook-capable web browser? I mean, I'm in favor of handing out hackable hardware, but at least let them install a pre-built browser. :)
But of all the things they could work on, why this team, problem or company? Many jobs will pay similar money.
Some version of this question is extremely helpful in (a) understanding if the candidate is going to be disappointed/not get what they want a few months into the job (b) identifying what motivates them, to help them find fulfllment and growth in their career (part of your job as a manager).