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“What’s you’re biggest weakness?”
“I’m going to say my honesty”
“Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness…”
“I don’t give fuck what you think.”.
“you’re hired”
Had more or less this exact conversation with the manager during an interview for a promotion I really wanted years ago.
I did not get it.
Don’t worry, once you get the job you’ll discover that they lied about what the work is anyway. You thought the job was sitting quietly at a desk and solving little dev tasks. Actually that’s 25% of the job, the rest is: 25% meetings where they make doing the little tasks harder, confusing, and miserable, 25% other tasks you aren’t good at and that aren’t part of your job, and the last 25% is more meetings about those other things. The ratios will adjust over time until only about 10% of your job is doing your job, and the other 90% is email and meetings.
So many god damn meetings could be a fucking email - or a group chat.
Or skipped.
This is why jesus invented mobile games
Maybe an alternate perspective, but I do a lot of interviews for technical roles like developers, product owners, architects, etc.
There’s often a perception that the role can be done isolated at a desk grinding on tasks, but that is often not the case. It’s easy to find people who will do task work, but really hard to find people who are capable communicators and empathizers with the people they will be working with. At the end of the day, we’re trying to fill the roles with someone who we can trust alone in a room with a customer, and not someone who will be alone in a room doing tasks.
I hear you and essentially don’t disagree. But I feel like this might lean a tad toward gaslighting.
- Plenty of people are fine communicators when it comes to genuine collaborative work but still find the “game” of job applications very difficult or impossible.
- Being left alone with a customer is not a thing at all for many roles.
- Embracing diversity in abilities and doing so transparently is a thing that can be valuable for both companies and humanity. Presuming everyone can do all the things is, IMO/IME, damaging. It leads to cutting out people who have something valuable to offer. But also leads to not recognising when people are properly bad at something despite the fact that they really shouldn’t be given their seniority and role.
In the end, a job application/interview is not like the job at all (whether necessarily or not). That there are people in the world who would be disproportionately good at the job but bad the application seems to me an empirical fact given the diversity of humanity. And recognising this seems important and valuable in general but especially for those trying to understand their relationship to the system.
Yes I agree, you make some really valuable points here that I don’t disagree with. There’s a bit of an art to this and it is certainly not a realistic expectation that someone should be universally capable. Somewhere in that gray space between universally capable and walking hr incident is where we all fall.
Well said.
I can mask pretty easy dealing with customers because for the most part the interaction is predefined.
Trying to deal with the doublespeak and lies and unspoken requirements of situations like interviews is hard/impossible.
Because its all nebulous.
I was just going to say something similar to this. The job application is an assessment for your technical abilities/skills for the job.
The interview is a second assessment to gauge your personality and communication to make sure it’s a fit for the team.
There are VERY few jobs where you can work in isolation. Teamwork, personality and communication are important for almost all jobs. Hench the assessment that gauges those aspects.
I always hated this side of “communication, teamwork, and personality” early in my career. I thought those soft skills were overvalued by people who weren’t good in their technical skill.
Now that I’ve been a senior engineer for a while, I can say the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills. It sucks leading people with bad attitude and those whom we have to babysit all the time.
Lemmy is eat up with kids who downplay soft skills, sometimes acting like those skills are not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Happy to see so many in this conversation talking about their importance!
And us IT nerds are the worst, or were historically. Used to be, you could be antisocial and literally stinky, but hey, we had the arcane knowledge employers had to have. They were forced deal with us weirdo wizards, what with our long hair, holey jeans and beat up Chuck Taylors. Not so any longer. (I’d argue we’ve made huge strides towards a middle ground!)
Reminds me of the return-to-office hate around here. A mandatory, 5-day RTO is a revolting policy that only loses the best employees, plain dumb. But around here we act like there is no benefit to in-person collaboration. It’s obvious to me and I have a dozen examples at hand. Plus, you gonna tell me a group of social animals gains nothing from being social?! Jesus that’s naive.
Working on IT, I see quite the spectrum. One of which was a guy who was socially lacking. He did his job ok, but in office, he didn’t know how to interact with other people. He would bring his own pickles and put them in the fridge, and fish them out for a snack. Then he would get ice for his water, and go back to work. He missed a critical step of using a utensil or washing his hands, and it took a while for everyone to realize why the ice started tasting off.
Then we find that he didn’t wash his hands thoroughly, and I got sick eating chips he had rummaged through earlier.
He did an ok job at his desk, but made other people uncomfortable because he couldn’t pick up on enough social queues to prevent people from disliking him.
He was eventually let go for trying to fix a cable under the desk of the only girl in the office, on the day she wore a skirt. This was far and beyond extreme and I wouldn’t expect most people, no matter where they fall in the spectrum, to behave this way. But the interviews are to try to suss that out. “Culture fit”, I think they’d call it.
But how do I show I am that guy day-to-day but not when it’s a high pressure situation I’ve been playing my head over and over for days?
I’ve found ways around it but never know when you could need this kind of advice.
The interviewer(s) has no power over your life, not presenting your case to a judge here. You didn’t have the job when you woke up this morning, you may or may not have it when you go to bed. You can’t lose anything, only gain.
Some advice that has stuck with me came from Andrew Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, modern sensibilities take that old-school title all wrong. It’s a book about the author’s quest to better understand social interactions and document his findings for future people feeling as lost as he did, thereby making himself a better person. It’s the only book I’d recommend to anyone. Give it a spin.
When faced with potentially world shattering change, and an interview is not that, I force myself to take a breath and ask, “What happens if the very worst consequence I can imagine comes true?” Go nuts here, get dark, what’s the worst you can imagine?
The answer is invariably, “I’ll soldier on, somehow survive.” Not like I’m going to blow my brains out, whatever happens. And you won’t either.
“Will I get this job?” is nothing compared to the many difficulties life throws up. I’m on the hunt now, after leaving an employer that treats their employees like gold. In fact, I’m on severance pay ATM, but running out fast. What if I have to go back to an office everyday? What if I only end up getting paid half what I was making? Fuck, what if I end up selling boiled peanuts on a corner downtown to make our mortgage? Well, I won’t die, that’s for sure.
The second thing I’d say, talk to the interviewer just as you would a friend of a friend, an acquaintance that maybe has an opportunity for you. They’re not kings, and you’re not their subject. Approaching them as an equal makes one hell of a difference, exudes sincerity, and that lets them see you as your really are. And isn’t that what you both want?
It’s always who you blow and not what you know. A “good fit” is better for the office than a “skilled worker.”
True. What the image should say is Capitalism is hell for autistic people. And non-autistic people. And all other people. Capitalism is really only not hell for those born wealthy.
Yea, because non-free-markets don’t require people to get along?
No, but the difference is you don’t have the threat of starvation and homelessness if you can’t do it.
I’m guessing you weren’t around for the Soviet Union, where every country behind the Iron Curtain was a poverty stricken hellscape (and still hasn’t fully recovered). I’ll take the end-stage capitalism we’re currently enduring over that shit any day of the week.
This is too involved a topic for a thread like this, but the red scare propaganda we learned about the Soviet Union isn’t a complete picture of how things were there. From researching around, it seems like at least on the dietary front, their caloric/nutritional consumption was comparable to the US, although there’s some variation in the estimates of different researchers/institutions. Sure, they didn’t have Macdonalds or Pineapples and stuff like that. But not having shitty unhealthy fast food and a fruit that could only be as widely available as it was in the west through imperialism isn’t exactly what I’d call a poverty stricken hellscape.
As far as recovering even now… there was a really important thing that happened between then and now that’s had an impact on these countries: privatization. Sell off public goods to private interests so they can profit off them at the expense of everyone else. And surprise, like we see everywhere else, private businesses don’t act in the public good and only occasionally, incidentally produce results that are good for everyone.
Like I said though, it’s a really complicated topic that’s worth reading more on if you genuinely want to learn. They didn’t do everything right, but these communist societies managed to rise out of feudal or colonial systems to become modern industrial powers despite all the forces aligned against them.
As for capitalism, even if it can produce great abundance,
a) That isn’t actually benefiting the vast majority of people. It’s hard to overstate how cruel it is to have people going hungry in a country that can produce so much food it throws a lot of it out with only like ~2% of it’s population working on a farm.
b) Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of that abundance isn’t merely from free trade and the ingenuity of industry. A LOT of it is built off the exploitation of other countries and the over-use of resources to the point of causing environmental damage.
Whatever you think society should be like, it isn’t hard to make a less cruel, less environmentally destructive, and more inclusive system than capitalism.
Absolutely. Capitalism categorizes all people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’, the former really being ‘exploitably productive’.
Lots of folks with tons to offer the world are shunted off to the side because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital. Either that, or their challenges are perceived as too substantial for the accumulationists to bother to see what accommodations could be made.
But why bother when humans-go-in-money-comes-out is the depth of all thinking and concern? It’s not the company’s job to care that people are starving three houses over! Why don’t they just get a job—
because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital
People categorize people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’. Hell, get down to Biology 101 and mate selection, animals select useful against useless. What do you have to offer?
“I’m having a heart attack! Help!”
“I’m a really nice guy that does wonderful paintings of the local pelicans!”
“Fuck off, I need a skilled physician and I’ll pay anything right now!”
Yes, people get paid more or less dependent upon their use to society. Why would society support you if you have little, or nothing, to contribute? For those of us in first world countries, we’re populous enough and technologically advanced enough to support a wide range of talents. Of course there are plenty of counter examples, but that’s mainly how it goes in any given economic or governmental framework.
tl;dr: We’re social animals with needs. Fulfill needs or GTFO. You don’t have to like it, but you better understand it.
Capitalism hates free markets. Capitalism is all about maximizing profit at all costs. Free markets promote competition, which negatively impacts profit. It’s why so many capitalists seek to monopolize markets.
There are many jobs where the vast majority of your workforce does not also have to be your sales department. Expecting everyone to do so is ableism.
“None of this has anything to do with your ability to perform the desired task” is the major flaw in this. Social interaction is a pretty huge part of any job where you work with people, and so-called “chemistry matches” are often rated as the top thing teams are looking for. This is why so many hiring managers will bring in other team members into interviews.
Edit: just because you don’t like this fact doesn’t make it less true. People want to work with other people that they don’t want to strangle.
Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.
To some of us, no clothes are comfortable.
Sensory issues are a sonofabitch and literally no neurotypical will ever have sympathy.
Guess I’ll start interviewing candidates in the nude.
haha another neurotypical mocking me for something I have zero control over that makes my life miserable lemmy is so supportive and inclusive.
And all of you ask why I am so angry all the time.
Sorry about your reading comprehension.
Your reply was sarcastic and unrealistic, that is mockery, a textbook definition.
The issue here isn’t my reading comprehension
You know this is literally harassment but the mods won’t see it that way, and if I respond to you like I REALLY want to, I’ll be the one with the ban.
I think you know this and are doing it on purpose.
I think you’re angry because you are very confused.
No, I’m angry because I was born with EDS and am medically angry nearly all of the time and it’s largely untreatable.
I’m angry at you SPECIFICALLY in the MOMENT for your mockery.
The only confusion is why people like you are so magnificently dedicated to being such assholes to the mentally different and pretending its no big deal.
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I met a guy like this. He just changed jobs every year. His past employers said they never got any work out of him, but he just kept leapfrogging, getting better and better jobs at each company advancing his career.
Gosh, same. I can do the charisma thing and chameleon whatever I’m supposed to say, and heck, even be good at the damn job…
…too good.
Once it stops being interesting, I start trying to find ways to make it fun, or squeeze in creative projects during downtime, and uptight types don’t like discovering that I’ve still got the spark they sacrificed right out of business school.
Disclaimer: Not claiming to be a genius or anything.
Tip in case you haven’t discovered it yet:
Don’t tell them about your efficiency improvements. They won’t appreciate it. You’ve made their job harder by requiring them to think about something. To them it was already automated and that automation was you.
Instead, just keep producing the same outputs and say nothing. You’ll only get a raise or promotion when you get a new job, so spend the extra time on that. When you do get a new job, give the automation to one coworker, preferably your replacement.
Source: am experienced engineer
Most of this is because, for people who are hiring/interviewing, this is a distraction from the job they were hired to do. Figuring out who to hire isn’t usually one of their core competencies. So they base their decision on superficial bullshit (and then if needed justify their choice later). Often as the job seeker, you’ve learned more about candidate selection than they have, so you’d be better at picking someone than they would.
This doesn’t make logical sense. If candidates are studying for what will get them jobs then that wouldn’t make them experts in what is needed for the job but the frivolous bullshit that will get them hired.
I think most people who hire people prefer a personal recommendation because they are never trained on how to spot talent. When they can’t take that shortcut, they grasp at straws.
Rarely do you come across someone who actually knows how to pick the best candidate.
Or, picking the best candidate is inherently an impossible task given too little data and too much variability in people’s responses and ability to read the interviewer and give them what they want.
Maybe. To me it seems that you could become good at it if you worked at it.
This is worth watching in its entirety but it points out why interviewers are rarely actually experts in any way: https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA?si=n39py_-N_gPzPYGa
In short, the only way to get good at something is to try it repeatedly with feedback. Generalized interviewers / HR perform enough interviews to get better at them, but they don’t get meaningful feedback. Whether or not a candidate is actually good for a job often won’t be clear for months to years and an HR interviewer is often completely disconnected from that.
Conversely an on-team interviewer might get to see a candidate grow and perform, but simply doesn’t perform enough interviews to get good at it. They’re too busy working on the team doing stuff and most teams aren’t hiring that many people, that often, for them to get enough sample data.
And these forces oppose each other, the more actual task work you do, the less you’ll be interviewing others, both because you’re busy doing other stuff and because if you’re focused in a niche task then you’ll have less expertise to interview a broader range of positions. But the more broadly your responsibilities, the less of an expert you are. Same thing with team size, the larger the team, the more hires, but also the more people to do the interviews.
Companies value referrals because the whole interview process is inherently flawed and unfixable.
My most talented coworker was a contractor that was hired on full time. He has repeatedly said he would never have made it through the hiring process. I think about that a lot.
Because it is bullshit. HR have no clue how to find good candidates, and whoever hired them to get a new hire had no idea what the new hire should be able to do and so just gave HR a few buzzwords to work with. But even if they had been given a good job description, they are basically muppets.
Yea…no…you’re not taking a 4 round interview for one little task. That job is going to have bullshit corporate politics attached to it. If you can’t make it through that interview you’re not going to make it through the bullshit corporate politics.
If it’s really a simple task, it’ll be two rounds, and pay like ass.
Yea but I think part of the point is the corporate politics are not required to do the job, they are required to work at that company.
Also what the op finds simple may not be to average people, but if they have specialized skills and training, it becomes a ‘simple’ task.
I’ve been consistently top performing in all my positions with glowing reviews from all my managers. I can play with the corporate game very well. And yet almost all my jobs were found through networking and the few interview cycles I’ve attempted were always failures, often surprising the people who vouched for me on how bad I was at interviewing. I’m talking failed interviews which I ended up getting in demoted through another neurospicy person fighting for the me against management, only for me to outperform everyone else by 50%.
These are not the same skills.
I was that more focused and productive person at two jobs. I answered customer emails at a bank and they actually had a meeting about me because my numbers were like 30-50% better than everyone else’s. They thought maybe I wasn’t actually DOING my work. I was, I was just good at it and quick at typing and copying and pasting and using templates. I streamlined all sorts of stuff to make my job easier. “How are you doing so many emails?!” “CTRL C and CTRL V and templates” “oh”
Reminds me of a friend of mine. He was promoted to some sort of engineering metrics analyst. His job it turned out, was to take a bunch of different reporting products and then create a presentation once a week to go over all of the metrics and have them in easy to understand graphs on a specific template.
So of course a month into the job he automates the entire thing and his job now takes a total of 5 minutes because he waits on the actual numbers to be crunched and spit out into the new template.
He’s super bored and asks me if he should tell his boss what he’s done and possibly get another promotion out of it. I said “Sure, if you want to be promoted to the layoff line.”
So his boss gave him some extra tasks and he just keeps blazing through them. His boss wants to know how he’s able to be the most productive person they’ve ever seen in that position. He asks me again, if he should tell the boss and his boss’ boss because they are super impressed. I said “No. Absolutely not. Just shrug and tell them you just do your best every day. They’ll eat that right up.” He does. He gets a promotion a couple of months later to a middle manager of some type. Probably due the Peter Principle.
Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
I think you’re usually legally obligated to. I mean, crappy boss never ask is one thing, but if they inquire how you do your job, which templates you use etc, the employer owns the templates you created during your paid work time on probably the computer which is also the employers property. You don’t have to throw every detail about how you do your job on the table yourself if no-one asks, but if they do you should or they’ld win any legal dispute and you could be fired on bad (financial) terms. Likely whatever you show and explain is still to “complicated” anyhow.
The interview process is what is causing me the most anxiety right now. Lost my job at the end of June, and I KNOW I need to be looking harder, but I’m just dreading the whole interview process. I’ve been procrastinating like crazy…I just don’t want to relearn a whole culture of a new team; it’s so mentally draining. 12 years somewhere and the idea that I have to start all over again…😭
My man, we are in much the same boat. I’ve turned procrastination into an art form. Sleep till noon, fuck around for a few hours before my wife gets home, drink beer all night, “I can handle it all tomorrow!” Boy oh boy do I have plans for tomorrow! Rinse and repeat for going on 2-months, and the severance pay is near an end.
And yeah, it’s like being thrust into a whole new family, because your former family is dead. You’re an orphan, thrust into this new group of relatives you’ve never even heard of. They’re all very nice and smiley, but it’s still scary as hell.
“This is your aunt Sally, she’ll help get you settled. And this is your new daddy, Tom. He’s fair, but a little gruff, really a teddy bear! Just don’t tell him I said that! Ha ha! If you need clean sheets, talk to Hilda over in Housekeeping, she’s so nice! But keep your receipts or she’ll murder you in your sleep. Ha ha!” Been doing this over 3 decades, I 'm socially adept and it’s still intimidating.
My wife is going through it now. Started the highest paying job she’s ever had this past Monday. But hey, at least we’re not foreigners, truly strangers in a strange land like her. Imagine moving exactly halfway around the globe and trying to fit in! That woman is as brave as anyone I’ve ever met.
OTOH, I have zero fear of interviews. Hell, I’d do 4 a day and would welcome the opportunity. It’s the legwork, and paperwork, that I find daunting. At my last job, they interviewed 100 people before landing on me and another guy. Jesus, I had no idea. It was only 1 of 8 resumes I fired into the void. Dumb luck or did I make my own?
Hope an earlier comment of mine helps:
