this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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ADHD memes

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[–] adam_y 214 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"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.".

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[–] faltryka 102 points 2 months ago (14 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] faltryka 17 points 2 months ago

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.

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[–] Zorque 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But I don't want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] LilDumpy 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] hperrin 56 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

“What is your biggest weakness?”

“Bullet wounds.”

“…”

“Oh and stab wounds too.”

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Acid - I'm vulnerable to acid... I checked that one while making Hominy one time.

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[–] CodexArcanum 50 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

So many god damn meetings could be a fucking email - or a group chat.

Or skipped.

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[–] RadicallyBland 47 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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"

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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...😭

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[–] ExtraMedicated 30 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I got insanely lucky wit my job. I responded to an email that came through my college CS department about a potential job and got an in-person interview with the CEO of a tiny company nobody has heard of. The guy's personality made it easier to talk to him despite my anxiety.

Instead of the bullshit riddles that every other tech job interview has, he sent me home with a simple assignment to make a simple webpage where a user could log in.

After submitting that, I kinda forgot about it until several month later when I randomly decide to check my school email account and found an email from him that was almost a month old (my PC wasn't working before that, and I didn't need to use it much at the time).

I replied just in time. 12 years later I'm the most senior developer.

[–] mynameisigglepiggle 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Where you really lucked out here was that the project is still going after 12 years and you haven't been through some bullshit outsourcing/insourcing cycle that clears out everyone who knows what they are doing

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[–] sc2pirate 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] SpaceNoodle 26 points 2 months ago (15 children)

Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.

[–] hperrin 19 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Comfortable sure, but not, like, pajamas.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As a man I've interviewed in a button down shirt, a skirt and open toe sandals and gotten a job offer. Only assholes and IBM require a suit and tie these days.

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[–] SpaceNoodle 9 points 2 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (3 children)

You have to be able to work with the other people there in lots of jobs.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (8 children)

I am very good at socializing with colleagues, users and whatnot, but this skill does not translate at all well in an interview.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't disagree but the way they describe it sounds more like an autistic nightmare. I don't know ADHD to be commonly associated with sensory issues and social cues and that hasn't been my direct experience with it. I've had issues with social cues but I've found it easier to pick up on them when I had peers to practice with that weren't put off by my adhd.

Also I don't know that I would be focused if they just gave me a job because of the whole adhd thing. I'm certainly not significantly better than anyone else in the building at my current job...

[–] Plopp 32 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It even says autistic in the post. This is not an ADHD thing, even though it's common to have both.

[–] BilboBargains 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

There is a huge overlap between the two conditions. Probably far more behaviours in common than exclusive. We think of them as separate as a matter of convenience e.g. to administer healthcare, etc, but there is no precise scientifically reliable definition for either. It's like saying someone is white or black, superficially the difference is obvious but when we look closely we cannot define what we mean by those words with universally repeatable measurements.

[–] Plopp 11 points 2 months ago

Sure, but what's described in the post is very much in line with very common descriptions of things autistic people struggle with - so much so that it's basically in the definition of the diagnose - and it's not something that is typically (or ever) being ascribed to ADHD.

Just because these spectrums are related and interwoven (together with other ones as well) in mysterious ways we don't yet understand, we don't need to treat them as one. Especially as laymen. They are separate diagnoses with different definitions. By, as laymen in a social forum where people often times go before even considering going to get evaluated, cross-ascribing symptoms between diagnoses we risk steering people in the wrong direction and they could potentially waste years thinking they have a diagnosis they don't have (according to our current health care systems).

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

This is precisely why I gave up on getting an IT career lmao, fuck interviews

[–] Nostalgia 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

For the brief period when I was a manger, I tried to make interviews more work-related. I was told I couldn’t ask for a writing sample during the interview for a job that required writing clear, concise communications under pressure. This is one of many reasons why I am voluntarily no long supervisory in my field.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

jobs are designed specifically to torment autistic people

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This kinda depends on the job though. An office job, there's always going to be a social side because unless you're just a flunky, collaboration is a necessary skill for a skilled job in most office settings.

The extent of needed skill at the kind of social interaction you can estimate via interview varies, and a lot of people get stuck and screwed over when they don't actually need that skill set for the job, but we can't just pretend that even a minority of office work allows for a person to be an island. You at least have to be able to interact with project managers that keep otherwise unconnected workers synced up.

It helps if you can say that you suck at interviews, but can execute on the job, and can both say it in a useful way, then back up that claim. Not every hiring person will deal with that, which is bullshit imo, but even that is not outside of the range of bare minimum social skills.

When it comes right down to it, we as workers in a capitalist system have to make hard choices unless we want to start a revolution. You either work on the people skills, reject the kind of work that takes interviews and interaction, or you ask for accommodations and hope that works out.

The system as-is sucks for anyone not built for capitalist dreck like cookie cutter interviews, and it needs change.

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[–] feedum_sneedson 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, there are well paying jobs in the world, specially for things autistic people are stereotypically good at, like programming.

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[–] chakan2 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Ive done pretty well with being honest and I think I end up with happier positions ultimately than I might otherwise have had. The crap jobs weed themselves out.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is why you should apply for Civil Service jobs. Many have a written test and no interviews.

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[–] Zachariah 8 points 2 months ago (6 children)

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.

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