Ask HN: Would you work for a company if you do not use their product?

I could work for a company where my reaction to the product was "meh, whatever." But I doubt I'd work for a company whose product is something that I find morally reprehensible or something that I think is just absolute crap.

There's a whole mess of stuff out there that might be really interesting but that you'll never 'use' personally. Math geeks might love working in a derivatives company, working on software and algorithmic stuff all day long. Not one of those geeks might ever deal with derivatives outside their day job, ever.

While having a belief in the company you're working for and what they're doing is valuable, I don't think you need to be a 'user' of a company's services or products to work somewhere.

Perhaps that's not what you're asking, or perhaps you're only looking to work at consumer-facing public web service companies?

This really boils down to your personal priorities. Do you need to believe in the product to enjoy work or are interesting problems/fun workplace enough for you?

Currently, I'm trying as hard as I can to get a hold of the most difficult projects I can find in the workplace. If that means working on a technically challenging product that I kinda-sorta believe in, then so be it. My goal is to get my technical chops up. I suspect that as time and my experience progresses, the actual product will mean more to me.

I think one of my favorite jobs was working on IBM Information Archive, a piece of hardware that I will never use.

On the other hand, I've taken one job with a company whose "product" I found counterproductive to society. I got so depressed I could barely work, and was drummed out in 6 months.

It's almost never worth it.

Do you mean believe in the product or use the product? Your post says both and they're not the same thing.

I work for a company that builds machinery that costs close to $1M. I'm not likely to ever use one of them (but I wholeheartedly believe in the product: medical instrumentation).

If you only look for jobs where you would have used the end product, you're likely to spend a lot of time unemployed.

If you're an expert in the field, your expertise may be needed for the business, but you may not need the product.

For example, many of the big name financial companies have a higher premium because of the service and knowledge of the financial experts (or at least perceived knowledge).

There are many financial firms that offer less expensive options but have less customer service, etc... So I expect many Morgan Stanley and Fidelity financial analysts to have a portfolio from a different company.

I have been working (coder, project lead, product owner) in the gaming industry far too long now. I hardly ever play computer games, I hate most of them, and some of the products I was involved in were, simply put, just very very bad concepts.

Yet, I derived motivation and pleasure from the technical challenges and the creative atmosphere created by the crazy geeks I have the privilege to work with. Besides, the rather short development cycles with hardly any maintaining after release make for fun projects: Code and forget.

Something else to consider: If you don't like their product, you may be able to help them to turn the product into something you can enjoy as well, and with this they may be able to open up to new audiences. Sometimes, the naysayers can actually be useful, or so I like to believe.