> Don't you want people that care about your product instead of the technology behind it? I do.

I would rather have people who care about their craftsmanship and are indifferent about the product than people who care about the product and are indifferent about the craftsmanship. The former ones do a good job regardless of what the product is about.

"caring about craftsmanship" != "caring about elm"

I care about craftsmanship even when I'm writing JavaScript.

And when JavaScript is enough of a burden, I go to TypeScript, not Elm.

But did you try Elm? Must say it's syntactically much sweeter than TS.

Indifferent to either is a red flag for me; I'll take neither, thanks. You don't have to have one at the expense of the other.

Depends how good people you want on your team. If your bar is low, then you might find enough people above the skill threshold that care about your product, but there are plenty of good craftsmen who couldn't care less about your IPTV offering or some other SaaS for housewives, but who would put their skills to great use for either, just because they do care about how solid is the technical part.

Seems like a false dichotomy to me. It's plenty possible to choose (and recruit based on) a suitable language at the time you start a project, and to have people psyched about making a great product.

If down the line you find language XYZ is a much better fit, well you still have choices about migration/etc. I wouldn't expect the devs to revolt against this, if it really is a better fit.

Time and technology marches on, that doesn't mean we can't try to make the best tool choices we can while still accepting that change is a fact of life and adapting the best we can.

I tried this. Bought into the company vision despite lack of experience/desire for RoR. The plan was to migrate to microservices. This happened too slowly and rarely and I ran out of enthusiasm working with a legacy monolith. The scaling problems we're interesting although they could be sidestepped other ways.

You don't get that choice. You can't select for people that care about your product, but you can select for people that care about some technology.

And, if it is a good tech that fits your business, why wouldn't you?

> You can't select for people that care about your product, but you can select for people that care about some technology.

If that's true, it's kind of awful. "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun."

Well, ok. Some people can select for caring about their product. But a random company is almost certainly not in this set.

I find this whole line of thinking odd. First peoples preferences over technology change and pretty much everyones preferences or "passions" develop. Second, you dont need to be passionate about product to produce good work. You need not to hate it. You need to like the position and work you are doing, but that does not require passion for contracted web page for financial company (or whatever).

These are unbelievable fantasies. Where the time comes that another technology is a better fit is few years after when a.) team members might have changed preferences already multiple times b.) given average employee changing job once in 2 years your original team members left.

I think that hiring would is much better when companies hired less on applicant emotional state and more on calm rational decisions about work.

I fail to see how your argument makes Elm a worse option than any other language?

Well, I'm magically passionate about every company I interview for. Not sure that's a very helpful marker. ;)