IT Is Strangely Ashamed of Money

IT has a strange relationship with money. For a business, everything is clear: it has to make money. A company can talk as much as it wants about its mission, culture, interesting challenges, and changing the world for the better, but without money it will stop existing fairly quickly. Nobody usually argues with that. Making money for a business is normal.

But when an employee starts talking about money, the attitude suddenly changes. Apparently, a good programmer should primarily care about technology, complex challenges, product development, and the opportunity to work with a strong team. Money matters too, of course, but it should remain somewhere in the background. If someone says outright that they came for a high salary, want to increase their market value, and will leave for a company that offers substantially more, they are immediately seen as mercenary and insufficiently engaged.

This is what I call the mercenary-hypocritical divide. The reality is fairly simple: a company hires someone to make or save money with their help. The person joins the company to receive a salary. Yet an entire social ritual has been built around this economic exchange, and the employee is expected to pretend that money is secondary.

This ritual is especially visible at the entrance to the profession. Learning how to do the job is not enough for a beginner. They have to look like a proper, conventional tech worker: follow an approved path, know the correct answers, demonstrate interest in the correct way, and preferably want the same things once wanted by the people now interviewing them.

Better Close the Door Behind Us

IT has plenty of gatekeepers: people who have already entered the industry and now decide who deserves to follow them. There is nothing inherently wrong with experienced specialists participating in hiring. Someone has to check whether a candidate can do the job. The problem starts when a person treats their own path into the profession as the only correct one.

If they spent several years learning everything they could find, digging into details they barely used afterward, enduring bad interviews, and learning through pain, then the next candidate is somehow expected to do the same. Otherwise, it feels unfair. I suffered, and you want to complete a decent course, learn the necessary skills, and start working? No. First, tell me everything I was once forced to learn.

This is how knowledge required just in case appears in job requirements. It does not follow from the employee’s future responsibilities. Nobody has checked whether they will need it even once. These questions are asked because asking them has become customary, because the interviewer knows the answers, or because they consider this knowledge a sign of a real programmer.

In my experience, 99% of the time, most of this knowledge is unnecessary in everyday work. That does not make a deep understanding of a language, algorithms, databases, or architecture useless. Some roles genuinely require it. Requirements should simply come from the work itself, rather than from an interviewer’s desire to recreate their own initiation into the profession.

An employee does not need to follow the same difficult path as the people who came before them. They do not need to know the answer to every question an interviewer can invent. They need to know how to work.

This seems obvious, yet hiring processes very often test almost anything else.

HR Keeps the Game Going Without Knowing How to Judge It

A gatekeeper at least usually understands the technical side, even if they choose strange criteria for evaluating it. HR has a different problem. Many HR specialists simply do not know how to build a hiring process for technical employees and cannot independently determine which knowledge a candidate genuinely needs.

In this situation, the easiest option is to indulge the hiring manager or technical specialist who wants someone capable of everything. The more requirements, stages, and questions there are, the more reliable the process appears. Ask enough questions, and every candidate will eventually reveal a gap. The company can then say it is not prepared to take the risk.

The argument is predictable: how else are we supposed to know whether this person will be a good employee?

There will be no guarantee anyway. You can run five stages, ask a hundred questions, and hire the person who prepared better than everyone else for those exact five stages and one hundred questions. You can reject a perfectly capable developer because they failed to recall an obscure term under pressure. You can choose a confident candidate who speaks beautifully and reject someone who is worse at selling themselves but better at doing the job.

I discussed the problem of good technical interviews separately in What a Good IT Interview Should Look Like. The more important point here is that when a company does not know how to test someone’s actual ability to work, it starts testing how closely they resemble its idea of a good tech worker.

You Do Not Have to Live for the Job to Be Invested in It

One of the expected traits of a proper tech worker is that they should live and breathe their job. They should do more than fulfil their responsibilities. They should constantly demonstrate additional interest: read about technology after work, build pet projects, take on more responsibility, suggest improvements, and generally show that the profession means a little more to them than a profession.

I do not really understand why this is considered mandatory.

You can love programming, enjoy a difficult task, and still have no desire to live for work. You may feel no particular affection for a specific product while still writing careful code, following agreements, supporting the team, and handling all your responsibilities properly. These things do not conflict.

Living for your job and having a stake in it are different things. An invested employee wants the company to remain stable because their salary and peace of mind depend on it. At a startup, they may care about the company’s growth because that growth could bring them money, experience, a promotion, or simply preserve their job. None of this requires voluntarily turning an eight-hour workday into twelve hours.

I know plenty of developers who genuinely work for two or three hours a day and handle the same responsibilities that take someone else eight hours. Whose problem is that? The employee’s or the employer’s? I do not think it is anyone’s problem.

The employer needs a certain level of productivity, and it receives it. The employee is not pushing at 100% because there is no need. The work is done, the expected result is there, and everyone benefits. The simple fact that an employee is tired does not make their result more valuable.

In Thoughts on KPIs, I wrote about an invested employee from the perspective of the company that wants to evaluate their work. That does not contradict the current point. An employee can care about producing a good result while having absolutely no interest in heroic sacrifice for someone else’s business.

Money Is a Normal Motivation

Financial motivation is often described as something short-lived and almost harmful. Supposedly, someone who only works for money will not develop, will not learn the profession deeply, and will leave at the first opportunity.

But why would they not develop?

A person is perfectly capable of noticing a simple connection: the more sought-after their skills are, the more experience they have, and the more difficult the problems they can solve, the better their chances of getting a well-paid position. They do not need some abstract love of growth. Wanting a better life is enough.

A mercenary-minded specialist is more likely than most to monitor vacancies, compare requirements, attend interviews, and check how much the market is prepared to pay them. They understand which skills are currently in demand, where their gaps are, and what exactly prevents them from reaching the next salary tier. The market gives them feedback much more often than it gives an employee who has spent ten years at one company and trusts their manager’s internal assessment.

That does not make every highly paid specialist a good programmer. Salary depends on more than professional skill. Demand, interview skills, self-presentation, location, connections, and ordinary luck all play a role. Someone can earn more than a stronger colleague simply because they understand the rules of the market better.

But financial motivation certainly does not prevent professional growth. Sometimes it provides the clearest possible reason for it. The person studies because the next set of skills will let them demand more money, not because they want to fit the beautiful image of a passionate engineer. The result is no worse for it.

Vibe-Based Hiring Selects for Confidence

In Hiring Is Not Broken, I wrote that the market has changed and technical skills are no longer enough. Candidates now have to learn separately how to pass interviews, package their experience, and communicate with people. I still believe that. If the market tests a particular skill, candidates have to develop it even when the test itself is poorly designed.

The need to adapt to hiring does not prove that hiring measures professional ability well.

The ability to explain a decision clearly, discuss a problem with colleagues, and describe your experience is genuinely related to work. Vibe-based hiring starts somewhere else: where a company looks for someone similar to the people already inside it. Someone sufficiently confident, with the right background, familiar interests, the expected level of excitement about the product, and the same idea of what the profession should be.

This kind of selection filters for confident people rather than professionals. A confident person may turn out to be a good specialist. Or they may not. The vibe itself tells us nothing.

A mercenary-minded candidate understands the rules fairly quickly. They memorize technical answers that are only useful during interviews. They prepare stories about initiative, teamwork, professional growth, and difficult workplace conflicts. They invent the correct reason for leaving their previous job in advance. They study the company’s product just enough to perform convincing interest. If necessary, they say that money is not their main concern.

They may not believe a single one of these lines. They do not need to. The lines exist to help them pass the interview.

I do not see a moral problem on the candidate’s side. They have rationally adapted to a hypocritical system. The company built a game that requires correct answers and then became surprised when people started memorizing them.

Paradoxically, mercenary-minded people turn out to be the most honest participants. At least they understand that they are playing a game. They do not tell themselves that motivation questions reveal someone’s personality, that a collection of technical terms measures professionalism, or that excitement about a product guarantees a long and happy life together.

The candidate pretends on the outside. On the inside, they are much more honest than the people who created the entire ritual and genuinely came to believe in it.

Wolves Do Not Break Hiring. They Show How It Works

Wolves are the extreme form of this adaptation. These are people who have learned to treat hiring as a separate discipline. Sometimes they inflate their experience, prepare a convincing story, and openly demonstrate how far someone can get by optimizing themselves for selection criteria.

It is convenient to accuse them of breaking the industry. I think the opposite is happening. Wolves expose holes that already exist. If someone can memorize the required answers, assemble a plausible story, and pass a multi-stage hiring process, then that process was testing answers and stories. Professional ability may have appeared as a random side effect.

I have already compared wolves to penetration testers in What a Good IT Interview Should Look Like. The analogy still seems right to me. An ordinary mercenary-minded candidate will quietly study the system, pass through it, and start collecting a salary. Wolves do the same thing so openly that the problem becomes harder to ignore.

This does not mean that every lie is good, that every wolf is a strong specialist, or that companies should stop evaluating candidates. The point is simpler: if your system repeatedly admits people who have learned to imitate the desired qualities, the problem does not exist only in those people. You may be testing the wrong things.

From what I have seen, companies are gradually starting to understand this. Huge question-and-answer sessions are slowly giving way to conversations about personal experience and system design. This is a good shift. System design can also be memorized, and experience can be embellished, so there is still no magical guarantee. But a detailed conversation about past decisions is at least closer to real work than an exam on a random collection of technical terms.

In this sense, mercenary behavior genuinely helps the industry become healthier. People do not agree to keep following pointless rituals in the intended way forever. They find shortcuts, break the expected scenario, and force companies to change their selection processes.

The Corporate Family Ends When the Budget Does

Corporate culture is fine in itself. Reasonable team building, communication between colleagues, and clear working rules create an environment that is pleasant to work in. It is good when people can talk normally, trust each other, and avoid turning every work-related question into a political struggle.

I see no reason to live for that culture.

Attempts to impose the image of a family on employees look especially fake. A family implies relationships that continue when one of its members is no longer profitable. A business does not work that way, and it should not. If a company is losing money and has no additional source of funding, it will cut costs. If an employee’s work is automated, a crisis arrives, or an executive develops a personal dislike for them, that employee will be fired. As soon as the business no longer needs you, it will fire you immediately. No amount of “we are a family” will prevent it.

This is also visible in companies that spend years broadcasting their culture to the outside world and then fire hundreds or thousands of employees in the name of optimization. From the business’s perspective, there is not even an internal contradiction. It is solving a problem related to survival, valuation, or owner expectations. The contradiction lies in the rhetoric previously used to bind employees to the company.

A business’s problems with making money become problems for every employee. The problems of an individual member of the corporate “family” do not become problems for the whole company. The arrow quite obviously points in one direction.

A normal corporate culture ends where a pleasant working environment is presented as an employee’s moral debt to the company. You can love your colleagues. You can be proud of the project. You can genuinely enjoy team-building events. None of this overrides the employment contract or turns a business into a family.

We Could Just Be Honest About Work

I do not want to end this article by advising everyone to become more cynical, stop caring about their profession, and lie to their employer at the first opportunity. Interest in the work is useful. A good culture is pleasant. Strong colleagues can genuinely be a reason to choose one company over another.

Money is also a valid reason. Often the main one.

Honest working relationships look fairly boring. A company understands which result it needs, finds a way to evaluate the skills related to that result, and pays the employee the agreed amount. The employee fulfils their responsibilities, follows agreements, and receives their salary. If they want to develop for the sake of their next promotion, that is fine. If they are genuinely interested in the product, that is also fine. If they finish their work in a few hours and do not ask for extra tasks just to perform engagement, there is no problem.

You do not have to follow someone else’s difficult path to become a good programmer. You do not have to know everything just in case. You do not have to live for the company. And you certainly should not be ashamed of wanting to earn more.

Companies will continue acting in their own interests. It is stupid to expect employees to act differently. It would be far more honest to acknowledge the economic nature of this relationship and stop building a moral hierarchy around it, where the passionate employee is treated as proper and the mercenary one as suspicious.

Perhaps the mercenary-minded employee understands the situation better than anyone else. They know what their skills are worth, see the rules of hiring, prepare for them, and do not confuse corporate culture with unconditional love. If the system forces them to pretend, they will pretend. At least they will not convince themselves that the performance is the real work.