surely you are not surprised that given a candidate that shows some interest, and a candidate that doesn’t care, the company would prefer the former.
Definitely. That’s why I lie.
if someone else is, then they will probably be easier to work with.
I actually really challenge this point. Specifically because I don’t care, I would say I’m very easy to work with. Example: Did the manager just order us to do something really stupid? Sounds good to me! I’m on it, boss! On the other hand, I’ve worked with tons of people who care way too much. Sometimes it seems like they think it’s their company. Those people are hard to work with.
The order doesn’t even have to be stupid, it can just be something the passionate employee disagrees with. At a previous company, we were told to make some app work because we had an important demo coming up. One super passionate dude on my team almost derailed us because he insisted that we fix the app the “correct” way. In theory, he was correct, however in practice he was dead wrong.
I didn’t care either way, so I just made the thing work.
I could say “I noticed you use MQTT for networking the pots…
Yeah, this is the same game I play. I avoid answering their question of “Why FlowerPot.ly?” and just give some generic answer that applies to any company, not specifically FlowerPot.ly. I would also throw in some lies like, “My brother owns an IoT flower pot. I think it’s so cool!”.
In the US: Yeah, just about every barbershop I’ve ever been to only accepts cash. Sometimes they accept card, but there’s an extra charge and you have to wait until they find where they put the machine. And generally the barbers themselves seem to prefer cash.
Also, food trucks and food stands? Not all of those accept cards.