Sorry, You don’t have enough motivation to join our company or team

In 2013 google news had a main feature: it would give you different coverages from different online news sources to the same story or event. But this feature was not supported in Arabic language. So I decided to make a website that does particularly this.
The website was built on top of Cassandra and Elastic Search. It crawled Arabic news sources, and in particular Egyptian ones, and used Elastic Search to get similarity score between different news stories with different fuzzy matching algorithms. If the score exceeded a certain threshold then it would consider the two links covering the same news story.

At first I was expecting some errors that would require tweaking the technique, but I got a lot of correct matches from early trials. With inspection I found that the similarity score was 100% in almost all news stories. The reason is that one symptom of the deteriorating Egyptian journalism was that all news sources were copying each other without even bothering to change a single character, even with the spelling mistakes. Everyone knew that this happens, but I didn’t think that it was to this degree. There is a difference between noticing two news stories that are the same while browsing news in the morning, and having the numerical proof to this on the full scale of almost all online news sources. So the added value of the website was limited, and it had about 40 visits per day only.

After the military coup in Egypt, and like many like me I was trying to flee Egypt by applying for any job abroad. One colleague in my Egyptian company had already an offer from booking.com and forwarded my CV to a recruiter. I got an online interview that I passed and went to Amsterdam for a face to face interview.

At this time booking.com asked you to do a small presentation at the start of the interview about a topic you like. I presented the website I made and I said that I don’t have a lot of traffic so every thing (crawling, matching, web serving, etc) run on a single AWS instance, but I have plans for scaling it up. One of the interviewers said OK, lets talk about your supposed design for scaling up. That was my system design interview.

Of course I did a lot of mistakes, the design doesn’t hold water by my current standards, but I was coming from a C++ , scientific visualization, 3D image processing , computational geometry, computer guided surgery job. I had experience in web development but never on large scale. I had grown interest in large scale distributed systems in last few months before that but it was all based on reading with no real application.

The interviewer didn’t stop here and went to designing something like google news without Elastic Search to do the matching. This was a core software engineer interview, not a senior, not a staff or principal, so this exceeds the limits of such role, but I went on with him using unconventional data structures in such problems (like KD trees) that were not ideal for this problem but came from my background in computational geometry and collision detection, and went with optimization until he had to stop me saying (you cannot optimize this beyond x because this is a problem of type y and there is a mathematical proof for this limit). I said Ok. Then he realized that he almost took all the interview time without allowing the other interviewer to ask me so he left him the remaining time.

Later on after I worked at booking.com I found that he was one of the most respected and knowledgeable engineers, but he was famous for giving super difficult interviews,to the extent that some colleagues called his interviews (the goodbye kiss) because it is like the company is kissing you good bye and you are not getting the job.

After the interview my friend was waiting for me to get the updates. I told him what happened and he was angry at me for allowing the interview to go into complex areas. He wanted me to limit the scope of the interview to just pass without getting somewhere too complex to handle.

I got the job but this was more than just a job for me and for my friend. For me it was another life, escaping a country under a military coup that had less than a year ago massacred thousands of people in a public square, one of those people was a childhood friend who I knew from KG till college. Going to the interview I left behind my wife who was 7 months pregnant, I was making a major step for my family and for my unborn son. For my friend he had just moved to the Netherlands, he knew no one in the country, his wife knew no friends, and he needed a familiar face here. Later, 6 of our colleagues in the Egyptian company moved to the Netherlands in particular to be with familiar faces.

So he didn’t care for how marvelous I was in distributed systems, how smart was my design, etc. I didn’t care either but at this time I had little experience in such interviews to direct the interview. Both of us cared for something else that exceeds just getting this job.

Now I have a Dutch passport, I have worked in booking, amazon, elastic. I was an interviewer in hundreds of interviews. In the feedback meeting after the interview, weather I am the interviewer or interviewee, I hear in many cases the argument that (you / the candidate does not have enough motivation to join the company / team). Sometimes when I say that I want to move to this team or that company because it has this positive attribute, the interviewer says (but many other teams / companies have the same trait).

I still remember a candidate that I was interviewing and in the interview feedback one of the other interviewers said that he wants to work here because he wants to leave his country to get better life conditions which is OK. I felt happy to hear this and in the same time it felt strange to hear in the sea of all the hiring managers or recruiters that require the candidate to be drooling (or pretend to be drooling) to join this particular company or team. I felt that I am not the only one declaring this opinion.

Yes, your company / team is not that unique. and Yes there are other companies / teams that can fit the candidate’s requirements for the job he is looking for. And not all people sleep at night dreaming of moving to your company / team and not all of them are aware of the (pretend that you are interested) game or willing to play it. That said, I will never show to an interview without doing my due diligence, studying all available information about the company/ team, their product, their market position, their culture, their technology stack, you name it. I will do my best to be effective in my job and in the interview.

And I will do my best to deserve the salary I get, Even if the job is not optimal for me. When I joined booking.com I wanted to join core infra department because of my interest in distributed systems. Without proven record in large scale systems I didn’t have a big chance, so I spent a year and 3 months working in front facing systems and playing with distributed queues in hackathons until I got the opportunity to move there. But during this year and 3 months, when I was working on things that was not my first choice, my quarterly evaluation was exceeds expectations most of the time.

Not all people have the same motivation model that some hiring managers or recruiters want to cast everyone in, where you are only productive when you work in a company / team if you only strongly believe in this company’s / team’s particular mission and unique traits. Trying to cast everyone in this particular box deprives you from excellent people who are capable and willing to do the job because they have different motivations.

For many people a job is part of life, not all life. Not everyone gets his purpose of life or self definition from his job, and even if so, jobs imply other things: they imply salary, better working environment than the candidate’s current company or team, new learning experience, city or country to live in and even nationality. Those things are for many people more important than the job itself and the self definition value it may provide.

Not to mention that many people are old school who value doing their job to the best of what they can, regardless of what this job is or how much they like it or hate it.