Answering "why do you want to relocate?" during interviews

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• Hacker News
• "I did not plan to relocate, but the opening at $your company made me reconsider. I then delved into $location history and culture, and found it really fascinating. Since I am [young|experienced in $oldcareer], I decided it would be worth trying out something new."
  by atoav
• If you are in tech, never move for a job immediately. Work there for 90 days before you even touch a UHaul form. I have been at companies where within 20 minutes I hated my coworkers (playing EDM on high all day in office). Just get a hotel at motel 6. If you are loving the job then the move is a less stressful and enjoyable.
  by ransom1538
• Sutton's Law.
  by thrill
• This makes no sense. Even from a completely cynical corporate perspective, wouldn't these people's dependency on the employer for sponsorship be a plus, not a minus?
  by josefritzishere
• This feels like generically good advice when interviewing in general - show an interest in your potential future employer.
  by pavel_lishin
• This seems so obvious. It's like asking your manager for a raise and giving the justification that you want a bigger house.

  Always be marketing what you can/will/have done for the company to bring value, not what the company can do for you.

  by Hippocrates
• This isn't good advice in this case. The company needs assurance you are worth the investment and that means they need to know this will be personally good for you.
  by bluGill
• I take a different view. For a lot of candidates that I've interviewed in recent years, they made the decision to move to London, and _then_ decided to apply to us. Some of the best engineers that I've worked with have joined that way, and many of them stuck around for a long time. Of course the candidate should show an interest in the company. But frankly, if you're an employer in a place that people want to move to, that's something that you should be taking advantage of, not complaining when the candidate is honest about it.
  by chris_j
• Maybe I just haven't met these engineers, but isn't the problem usually "I don't want to relocate" ? Who talks about relocating as if that's the primary motivation for a job?
  by Kirby64
• You would be surprised. A large number of resumes for every job posted are from people outside of the area who want to move there for different reasons.

  Most people want to have a job set up before they move to a new city.

  by Aurornis
• This is very good, practical advice. I would go even further and say that you shouldn’t even allow yourself to get into a position where you need to manipulate your answers to interviewers for this question. If the primary reason you want a job is for the relocation, you might be signing up for a job you don’t even like!

  I’ve been part of a small number of hiring decisions where relocation was involved. There were a lot of failures exactly like this article talks about: Candidates who will say anything in the interview and even signal that they’ll accept any average salary as long as you’ll take care of their relocation were, in my experience, not interested in doing the work after they got here. Taking the job was a means to an end (getting to their destination) and once they arrived they were either looking for the next job or too busy traveling around their new location to do work.

  We tried to mitigate this with clauses requiring them to pay back relocation expenses if they left within N months of arrival, but this didn’t work. They would resign the week after that timer expired or, worse, would start trying to get laid off through poor performance as a way to avoid that clause.

  The best fits for relocation were opposite of what I would have thought: The people most hesitant to relocate were the most successful, both at the job and in establishing their new social life outside of work in the new location. They were relocating and taking jobs for the right reasons.

  by Aurornis
• What are for you the right reasons for taking a job? Most teams will have enough common sense and healthy relationships to offer something workable, also most software products are a piece of whatever - be it insurance front-ends or package sorting algorithms. I mean yes there will be outliers both ways, like a toxic environment which the candidate can hopefully spot during the talks, or your particular product can spark real passion in people (not likely). But speaking for myself I've never spotted a toxic environment (also never landed in one either) and for the few positions where I was really passionate about they didn't care about my passion. So your comment reads like a lot of theory, or ten-thousand-feet-view if you want, while the candidate reality is that the only stuff which really matters is how good you lie about alignment.
  by soco
• The advice can be generalized even more. When communicating with an employer or potential employer:

  -> Subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas.

  -> Suppress the self.

  -> Become a true human resource. You are seeking to sell a large chunk of your life, and the buyers don't want scratched or dented goods. Desires of your own are flaws in the product you are selling.

  This is, sadly, sound advice, but I think it's important to reflect on what this means about how incidental human flourishing is in our current political economy.

  by ElevenLathe
• Well I guess this is an overstatement for the sake of explaining your point and as such it's very effective, but I don't agree with this perspective. The advice tells you to remember that the person hiring you has also put work into that conversation, and that they'll appreciate realizing you have put work into it too. So i think there's an instance of letting our humanity flourish in this, since you're doing an exercise in empathy. There might be too few of these opportunties/spaces left tbh
  by luisminv
• I don’t think the post says this at all. It’s mostly just common sense, like “don’t tell the interviewer you just want the job for the money and the ability to live abroad.” Instead be interested in whatever the company is doing.

  This seems pretty straightforward, but I guess people like OP are exposed to a lot of bad interviewees by nature of their job.

  by keiferski
• I’ve done a number of interviews in my career. You don’t have to be a genius to see through the candidates who play this game where they tell you a perfectly sanitized, idyllic response that they’ve calculated as the optimal phrasing that you want to hear.

  A lot of applicants do it. The skill of interviewing is to get a sense of what the true situation is underneath what the candidate is saying with their words. These candidates who show up and do the “subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas” schtick are plentiful. It doesn’t fool an experienced interviewer, so they’re going to be evaluating whether or not you can do the job without becoming a problem based on whatever other signals they can get. The candidate’s words are almost a no-op, other than a slight signal that they have a tendency to blow smoke instead of having real conversations.

  by Aurornis