I can&#x27;t speak on their behalf, but I can see how this would be interpreted as a negative signal. If someone is really excited about ML stuff, and you aren&#x27;t going to hire him for your ML team, then I would be afraid that the person will be disappointed that the work we give him&#x2F;her is less about solving complex problems and more about getting stuff done. There&#x27;s also the issue that this person is probably going to jump ship the second he gets an offer to work on ML stuff.<p>As someone having a strong interest in math and theoretical computer science, I think their bias is fair. I think I&#x27;m a pretty good programmer, better than most I&#x27;ve met with similar experience, but I&#x27;ll admit that I don&#x27;t care as much as people who are really passionate about building stuff. They will write sloppy code sometimes, but they&#x27;ll also focus on getting stuff shipped, whereas I naturally want to focus on solving interesting issues like that bug which only seems to happen 1&#x2F;20 unit tests but no customer has reported.<p>It took me some time to learn how industry differs from university programming, and if I were recruiting, I don&#x27;t know if I would want to deal with the hassle. Obviously now that I know I accept industry for what it is and make sure I do my best, even when it doesn&#x27;t align with my own interests necessarily, but that takes some maturity (not that I am particularly mature), and I can see why hiring managers would rather avoid the risk when hiring and firing is very expensive and annoying.