I’ve seen versions of the first statement several times from different users on HN, so know I’m not singling you out, but I believe this to be a deeply flawed view:
It’s not the candidate’s job to be interested in your company. As a founder, leader, or even hiring manager it’s your job. Create a positive working environment. Get to know your employees and what their goals and interest are. Do your best to find ways to incorporate their interests into their work and align it with the company’s needs. Build rapport and treat them with respect, so when you must ask them to do tasks that don’t align with their long term goals they won’t resent you.
If you can use your tech stack to get desirable talent in the door, that’s excellent. Now it’s your job to retain them, keep them productive and happy.
Regarding your second statement, every job ad I’ve ever seen for software engineering contains a list of preferable languages and libraries, and I’ve never doubted that all things being equal, preference would be given to candidates with greater familiarity in that stack. Should it ever the primary criterion for hiring? Probably not.
> It’s not the candidate’s job to be interested in your company. As a founder, leader, or even hiring manager it’s your job.
It’s my job to do that for the right candidates. Positive working environment, caring about employee growth, long term goals—all these things you mention are extremely important, and they are what we should be competing on. If an engineer would forgo an opportunity that provides those just so they can compose monoids in the category of endofunctors, that’s unfortunate—but I am under no obligation to indulge them.
> Should it ever the primary criterion for hiring? Probably not.
I explicitly referred to when it’s the primary concern; we don’t disagree here.
Surely there must be some lower bound of technology after which a candidate can be completely excused for turning down a job regardless of the factors you have said should be their criteria. Examples: Perl, COBOL, or punch cards.
There is—at which point you need to find candidates primarily by their willingness to work with your tech stack, which means you probably have the wrong tech stack. It's not like leadership at punchcard-dependent firms disagree, and think their tech stack is great; they just can't switch that choice on a dime, and often need those punchcard experts specifically for the get-of-the-punchcards effort.
It’s not the candidate’s job to be interested in your company. As a founder, leader, or even hiring manager it’s your job. Create a positive working environment. Get to know your employees and what their goals and interest are. Do your best to find ways to incorporate their interests into their work and align it with the company’s needs. Build rapport and treat them with respect, so when you must ask them to do tasks that don’t align with their long term goals they won’t resent you.
If you can use your tech stack to get desirable talent in the door, that’s excellent. Now it’s your job to retain them, keep them productive and happy.
Regarding your second statement, every job ad I’ve ever seen for software engineering contains a list of preferable languages and libraries, and I’ve never doubted that all things being equal, preference would be given to candidates with greater familiarity in that stack. Should it ever the primary criterion for hiring? Probably not.