> 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 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.