

Why Dropbox was right not to hire me - presidentender
http://kaiserleib.com/blog/?p=294

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wccrawford
In an ideal world, the person you describe would be the one hired every time.

But let's face it: Most products are not interesting to the developers working
on them.

I love programming. It's my life. I can get excited about -coding- anything.
The actual product, though? Not so much.

In fact, the company that recently hired me asked if I was interested in their
product, and I honestly answered that I wasn't, but programming was my
passion. When he frowned a little (it was obviously the wrong answer), I told
him that I wasn't interested in the product I was coming from, either, and I'd
been there 5 years and loved it. And it was true.

Avid programmers are the kind of people who took everything apart when they
were kids. How things work, and making them work, is much more interesting
than what the result of that work is.

So I disagree with their assessment, if that's why they didn't hire you. Your
passion for programming should have been more than enough to cover a lack of
passion for the product itself.

And I'll even take it a step further: You could be an asset to the team. You
are the user that got away. You used the product, and left. You can tell them
how to get you to stay as a user, and you've got the technical know-how to
make it happen... And you'll be excited about implementing those features.

~~~
presidentender
The position I applied for was support, not engineering.

------
orijing
I am curious, why did you apply for support, not engineering?

~~~
presidentender
I really, really like support. My body of work doesn't qualify me to work as
an engineer at Dropbox yet - I believe that I'm smart enough, but I have no
evidence of that fact. I will create evidence in the next few months here, and
if Dropbox doesn't want me, someone else will (or I'll have my own product to
make money).

