"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.".
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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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.
"you're hired"
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.
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—
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.