this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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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.
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 think it’s also nebulously counter- or peri- factual in that it’s looking for signals whose value is often that you know to give that signal. Meanwhile the qualities relatively unique to NDs can be hard or impossible to signal.
But I don't want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.
And I thrive at those positions. Hell, give me an angry customer and I'll solve their problem, at least move it along for them, legitimately help, and have them apologizing for being an ass.
You sit in the back and crank it out, I'll cover for you on the front lines!
Sure, just get me hired first ;)
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.
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—
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know you can be social outside of work, right?
Just because we are 'social' animals doesn't mean we spend every moment picking lice out of each others hair.
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?
Idk about you, but I value my time. 5 hours spent for an interview process that does not end with an offer is a loss to me.
Plenty of people blow their brains out. 1 in every 12 autistic people attempt it anyway.
Not directly related but something I found while looking that stat up: a full 18% of 8-year-old autistic kids apparently have a suicide plan.
Let it go.
Seriously. That's the answer. Don't worry about the interview. Just see it as another conversation.
I the end, interviews are no better than picking names out of a hat, this from research done by Harvard some 20+ years ago.
I'm not sure I'm capable tbh. My workaround has been to get a temp job somewhere, be myself, then get offered a full time gig. It's worked multiple times but it's ironically more effort.
I've done that a dozen times. Worst case, you stack your resume. What's wrong with that?
How is this supposed to be better.
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.
It's always who you blow and not what you know. A "good fit" is better for the office than a "skilled worker."
Relevant skills for most jobs are both technical and social, I think you’re implying that the decision is often made purely on social skill sets when technical are what matters and I see this differently.
If I’m hiring for an Architect for example, I am expecting them to help grow and guide developers, engineers, analysts, and administrators while collaborating with stakeholders AND possessing relevant domain technical expertise. Only having the domain technical expertise isn’t useful without the social skill set to leverage it.
Similarly if I’m hiring for an engineer, in expecting them to work with other engineers, their architect, their analysts, and their supervisors AND have relevant domain expertise. Again if they only have one half of that they aren’t actually functional.
It does change for entry level roles, and this may be an unpopular take… but for entry level roles I could care less about your technical knowledge… I’m looking for people who are entering this domain and can demonstrate intangibles like initiative, curiosity, and…. social skills. These are much better leading indicators of success as they are harder to teach and train, and frankly if they have those skills I can trust that the senior roles around them will help develop their technical skills.
Now you are the kind of boss I enjoy working with.
Interviews are currently the standardized testing of the corporate world.
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.
You’re right about many jobs not being sales, my apologies if I made it sound like my scope of commentary was exclusively oriented to those roles.
Social skills are important more broadly than sales, and I’m mostly talking about how they apply in the organization as someone interacts with other peers.
Is that what you think as a manager or is that the answer I would get from your most introverted dev?
95% of my work is done by me, alone at a desk…