Beautiful Job Description: Intrinsically Motivated Full Stack Product Hacker

Question for HN, how do you generally feel about the 'Intrinsically Motivated' requirement?

I'm deeply motivated about a great many things that are important to me, but helping to implement or maintain someone elses idea isn't one of them.

For a price I'd be happy to turn up and give you eight hours of hard work per day. I take pride in my work, am passionate about improving my skills and would do my best to translate them into tangible benefits for your organization.

But my motivation for doing so would be mostly based on a financial arrangement, in other words, extrinsic. Does that someone like me shouldn't apply for a job posting like this or am I misunderstanding?

Recently I saw a post that quoted

  Derive your self-worth from the process not the output.
   

The first you control, code quality, integrity, professional communication with team mates etc. The second is not entirely within your control and should not lead to anxiety.

Anyway, I would want to hire someone like that - more intrinsically motivated, than someone who is focused on building Facebook for dogs for an IPO.

I would pay good money, but not expect commitment to the mission, just commitment to intrinsically good code and practises.

That's my take

But the comments have identified possible problems with the posting and have information about the company (complimenting the work experience there and explicitly explaining what technologies they'll use).

Because you can get behind what they do.

I like making things for people. At Etsy, for example, I like that the sell side of their audience are independent makers. I could easily imagine doing some user interviews, discovering something in their experience that can be improved, and then going out and making it happen.

Working with others can be preferable to working alone in that it's a lot easier to release something that helps a large audience. Because I'm not an idiot I would insist they pay me fairly, but my primary motivation would still be helping the users.

Yes, a beautiful job description. However, for me these two statements are inherently contradictory:

"You consider critical thinking to be among your core competencies."

"But technology is a means and not the ends for you, and you don’t flinch at the idea of writing largely PHP for a living."

I interpret this as "think critically, but don't criticize the technology choices we have already made."

Yes, technology is a means, but that does not mean that it's something to just mindlessly accept. This is particularly true in the realm of software where there are so many technological possibilities to choose from.