Despite that being my own philosophy as a candidate, I never thought about it this way as a hiring manager. I feel kind of dumb! Thanks for putting it this way.
I don't think there's a reason for you to feel dumb: there are a lot of candidates that are the opposite of the grandparent, and want to do "it" for the rest of their lives.
However, a lot of times the "want to do it forever" part could be a sign that the candidates doesn't want to learn anything new, which is indeed a very bad sign.
On the other hand there are people who want to want to keep doing tasks so they get a deeper understanding of the domain, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments... and you can't afford to say no to those people.
> However, a lot of times the "want to do it forever" part could be a sign that the candidates doesn't want to learn anything new, which is indeed a very bad sign.
While that is true for a lot of jobs, there are also a fair number of employers that are perfectly content to have an employee that does job X at their company for as long as they are of working age. In the software world it pretty much follows from the fact that the largest chunk of development jobs out there are just CRUD apps and processes that feed them. Many companies do the same things with largely the same software for years and years and years. As long as an employee is getting the work done, many of those employers are thrilled to have a long-term employee doing the same tasks they've been doing for years.
A developer that isn't willing to learn new things won't be able to do CRUD for long.
You can stick with the same technology and language, sure, but the frameworks and the language will evolve under you. Tools evolve (Git? Github? CI?). Processes evolve (Scrum?). Requirements change (HTTPS? Accessibility?) There are gonna be lots of changes coming from the outside.
Heck, when I think of it, frameworks targeted at CRUD apps were probably the things that have changed the most during my career. I have a few friends doing stuff with C++ and they joke about how much tech in the web/enterprise bubble changes.
I mean I am willing to talk about keep doing it at the next company, assuming increase in rewards for doing it, but I am not going to be incredibly passionate about continue doing the thing that I really know how to do well as some recruiters seem to want, I will instead be pragmatic and professional.
Companies often (but not always) want someone to just do ‘It’ with minimal extra management effort.
This is because every companies success is generally gated by the available extra intelligence and decision making ability at every level (really every organization). The more management work put in, and the more ongoing thinking required to produce unit X (whatever it is for the company), the less competitive they are.
Most companies of course aren’t great at this, but as long as their competitors aren’t much better (and/or other factors add more ‘competitiveness’), it still works out.
Most dumb and value destroying things happening anywhere is because someone who is in the position to make a decision doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to make a good decision, or someone with the bandwidth to make that decision isn’t trusted to do so because of lack of consistent mental bandwidth by someone else to supervise, select, or police folks like them.
For individuals, like you note, the incentives are often the opposite - to grow, take on individual risk, etc.
And most individuals who are not actually entrusted with the scope and scale that would challenge them HAVE extra mental capacity (albeit perhaps not the experience or whatever to actually be successful, but they won’t know that) because they aren’t subjected to those loads generally.
Not to discount nepotism (usually caused by trust issues/difficulty with owners managing non family members), corruption (usually caused by those in control not seeing how to produce value while following the rules), etc.
