In our interviews one of the things we look for is people who care about our mission (improving workplace cultures, basically). Its not a requirement but it is one of the factors when it comes to making a decision, particularly if we have more qualified candidates than roles.
> If someone came excited about Elm _and_ was interested in the company's product that was fine.
I'd even say if someone is excited about Elm _and_ was interested in making a great quality product (great UX, accessible, performant, maintainable etc.) that would also be a good fit.
I also mentioned above that the engineers we hired to work on features that happened to have Elm front ends would have been working on Ruby on Rails backends most of the time, and we generally expected engineers to be willing to jump into both sides of the stack, even if they specialised in one or the other. A person who is really excited about functional programming and joining only for the chance to work in functional programming languages might end up grating against working in a rails codebase. That's the sort of practical thing we were trying to avoid. (The same would be true today for candidates who are super excited about TS / React / Next.js - they're still going to be expected to occasionally jump into whatever backend stack their team is using).
In our interviews one of the things we look for is people who care about our mission (improving workplace cultures, basically). Its not a requirement but it is one of the factors when it comes to making a decision, particularly if we have more qualified candidates than roles.
> If someone came excited about Elm _and_ was interested in the company's product that was fine.
I'd even say if someone is excited about Elm _and_ was interested in making a great quality product (great UX, accessible, performant, maintainable etc.) that would also be a good fit.
I also mentioned above that the engineers we hired to work on features that happened to have Elm front ends would have been working on Ruby on Rails backends most of the time, and we generally expected engineers to be willing to jump into both sides of the stack, even if they specialised in one or the other. A person who is really excited about functional programming and joining only for the chance to work in functional programming languages might end up grating against working in a rails codebase. That's the sort of practical thing we were trying to avoid. (The same would be true today for candidates who are super excited about TS / React / Next.js - they're still going to be expected to occasionally jump into whatever backend stack their team is using).