I wouldn't want some one on my team who had know idea of what the company did.

I normally for public companies read the annual report and accounts.

This only works depending on the scale of the company. If the company is huge and involved in many things there is less engagement from each employee with the overall mission of the company. This is even more pronounced when employees can't even see the fruit of their work in society. Like when the developer workforce of a company is spread across many countries but the clients are focused only in one company. I think expecting candidates to have a basic idea what the company does is fine. But unless the company is a small startup, expecting them to be engaged with the mission is unreasonable.

There are many reasons for candidates to be excited to work for a company:

- friends

- great team fit

- technological challenges or preferences

- work-life balance

- location

These and others contribute to an employee doing his job with passion. (note: money is not one of them. there is a study that showed that above a certain level for a person, no amount of extra remuneration will result in an increase in productivity)

And I imagine this is the case even for pinnacles of vision like SpaceX. I imagine employees at SpeceX do not care about the future of SpaceX , they care about putting man on mars, making space available cheaply, pushing the boundaries of human exploration and of technological capabilities, Musks vision and enthusiasm. But not SpaceX as a company.

People should really stop expecting companies to have emotions. Companies do not care about people so people should not care about companies either. People care about other people and society at large.

I was talking about for the purposes of the job interview, I though that was obvious. Also you want to look a bit at the companies financials to get a feel for any equity based comp and also if the company looks like its in trouble - eg Carillion in the UK

> Whatever you're trying to figure out with that question, there's gotta be a better way to probe that, that doesn't make it look like you're wasting the available time.