This week I wanted to continue talking about people’s intrinsic motivation for work—possibly through the lens of a jilted failed job-seeker.
Two weeks ago I laid some groundwork for this but I don’t think I was ready to lean forward in my rocking chair, squint at all you young people and tell you the real problem with job interviews these days.
I have included a very thoughtful cover letter for some percentage of times I have applied for a job. I generally do this when it feels like my resume looks good for the role, but only after four or five beers. A good example of this is online education companies. About ten years ago, I really wanted a role at an education publishing company that needed someone of my skills. Even better, they were physically close to where I was living. I wrote my cover letter in earnest. It included:
- We were homeschooling multiple children and living through the pain of online educational tools
- I coach people at work, children, and just about anyone who gets within coaching distance
- Games and FTUE (First-time user experience) generation are transferable skills
The more perceptive among you will notice that there are no online education companies in my LinkedIn profile. I did not wind up getting this job. I will never really know the reasons behind it because this company, like most companies, did not give out a scorecard. In fact, a lot of the early conversations with companies generally wind up going completely silent. I imagine that some of them find typing polite rejections to be tiring, and I imagine some percentage of them are waiting to go through a full offer cycle with someone else and they are preparing to bring you back in for another round of interviews without realizing that ghosting candidates entirely is not a great recruiting tool. Eventually, they probably do get to an offer stage with a candidate and then they look at how long it has been since they emailed you and the length of time makes it weird. At that point, they must have assumed that the silence spoke for itself, and they are not imagining that I am sitting alone in my kitchen with fourteen hours of solo violinist music playing on YouTube while I wistfully clutch a cup of chamomile tea.
A good chunk of these failed interviews generally get into the weeds for me when the interviewer asks whether or not I am passionate about their space. This is one of those places where the average candidate will make something up. I have always believed that if I made up something on the spot to make it sound like I am passionate about it, it would sound so completely ridiculous that it would end the interview on the spot. I have heard people trying to sound passionate during interviews that have come across this way to me. If someone boldly declares themselves a super huge gamer, and then I ask as a follow-up “What are you playing?” I do not want to hear about a game from over six years ago.
I have generally felt that being super passionate about a subject is a mixed bag. There are a number of people who will look for passion in startup candidates because it means they can lowball the candidate by ten percent. There are also some people who feel that it is important because people will commit themselves to outsized outcomes, and may gloss over the harm that a candidate will do to their own health in pursuit of this.
Before you think this is all a bunch of mad craziness, I was once offered a job that I was completely unqualified for while I was in the middle of interviewing for a different job that I was very well qualified for.
While I may not always have the quote-unquote passion for a particular domain, there are some things I care very deeply about. The CEO observed that I am a family man with a lot of kids for whose sake I am highly motivated to be successful. They also observed that I have spent a lot of time in the independent developer world, and while I have a great deal of experience with mobile games, my abilities to work with independent developers would be more immediately valuable to the company.
I took the job and it was an incredible professional experience. I worked with some very talented people who pushed me to raise the bar constantly, and I loved every minute of it.
It is important because it was the second time I took a hiatus from engineering. If you were going by the passion-detector numbers on more than one part of my career, you might find a few places where the passion level was very low for the market segment I was working in.
At the end of the day, there are some things in my professional life that I care deeply about. I care deeply about helping teams be successful. I care deeply about customer happiness. I also care deeply about improving products that affect the lives of millions of people.
So to get back to the article title: Do you need to love your job? Sometimes the answer is no. If you don’t love it, though, be prepared to be very good at it. I have blown up a few interviews with this answer. Very few interviewers are abundant enough thinkers to hear “I am good at this job but I do not love it”. In this situation, I prefer being blunt to making up a zany passion story.
In closing, I do think that people should be prepared to be passionate about something, even if it is not their job. Whether it is obscure whiskey, stamp collecting, or indie games, your passions tell the world who you are. For example, when the indie game Oasis came out, I called up the founder of the studio when he was making t-shirts for a conference. I asked him if he could make a special one for me, with the game logo on the inside, because I wanted it closer to my heart.
I loved that game.
Thank you for reading along! I will be back next week with more random professional stories and possibly an Amazon Affiliate Link or two.
