Interviews
Interviews
151 comments
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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.".
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"you're hired"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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But I don't want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.
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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.
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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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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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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?
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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.
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It's always who you blow and not what you know. A "good fit" is better for the office than a "skilled worker."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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but that is often not the case
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…
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“What is your biggest weakness?”
“Bullet wounds.”
“…”
“Oh and stab wounds too.”
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Acid - I'm vulnerable to acid... I checked that one while making Hominy one time.
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.... Had to check but you definitely use a base for that, not an acid.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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:
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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.
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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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Yeah. We have a bunch of clients so I can be on several projects at a time. And it's a privately owned company that, to my knowledge, the owner has no intention of selling.
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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.
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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.
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Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.
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Comfortable sure, but not, like, pajamas.
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You have to be able to work with the other people there in lots of jobs.
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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...
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It even says autistic in the post. This is not an ADHD thing, even though it's common to have both.
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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.
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Oh lmao I didn't even catch that. Thanks adhd
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jobs are designed specifically to torment autistic people
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Jobs are designed specifically to keep large portions of the population too busy to organize and overthrow exploitative systems of control.
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This is precisely why I gave up on getting an IT career lmao, fuck interviews
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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.
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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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I work in an office and I'm sure an autistic person could do my job just fine. The degree of socialization in my office is fairly low unless you initiate conversations with everyone intentionally. The real joke is needing to sit in a cubicle when your job can be done entirely remotely.
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"Well-paying"
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Yes, there are well paying jobs in the world, specially for things autistic people are stereotypically good at, like programming.
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DON'T YOU DARE ARGUE WITH ME
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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I don't see the distinction. For example, I code...but to get my code out I have to deal with like 4 other teams and their ridiculousness...
If I were at a smaller shop, I'd have to be better at dealing with my coworkers and maybe the customers.
As dumb as some of the interview process is, it does indeed weed out people who won't be good in that environment.
(With that said, I've been in completely adversarial interviews that had nothing to do with the work in question and was just an opportunity for the principle to shit on his lessers).
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This is why you should apply for Civil Service jobs. Many have a written test and no interviews.
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I hate written tests more than I hate interviews
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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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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.
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Hiring for expertise and personailty is a tough set of skills to pair. Reminds me of software I had to work with where you had to have accounting and database skills. Nothing mutually exclusive there, but it's tough to find people with both.
Best you can do is layer it. HR does a quick call to see that you're not an antisocial asshole, maybe something a tad more in depth later, passes to the team's management to go forward.
My last employer did quite well. I sat a 2-hour interview with the whole team. Yes, we got breaks, and as much as anything, that sold me on the job. "The job is very human." And it was! Great company.
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Am I the only one with adhd who's good at and enjoys networking? Most of it is just asking specific questions based on prior information you've been given by the other person.
Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it's not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they've had. Then you get them to "teach" you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you've succeeded in networking.
People are passionate about their skills and hobbies, and most love to elaborate and explain the specifics of it, especially when they usually don't get to do it.
Remember those "Joe is forcing us to see his travel pictures" joke? This is basically that but you're actually interested in the pictures. Listening to someone being passionate about something is a lot more fun than others lead you to believe, give it a try, it's basically nt infodumping.
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Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it’s not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they’ve had. Then you get them to “teach” you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you’ve succeeded in networking.
This works until you try it in DC and suddenly everyone is an analyst at the State Department and when you ask what they analyze they say "data."
They also don't have hobbies they're willing to talk about, and tend not to have strong feelings about music or TV or books or, really, anything.
I do not like networking in DC.
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Networking in DC is an extreme sport
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I'm really great at networking. It's the only way I've found to find new jons. I still suck at interviewing though
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One of the best things you can do to prep is to find someone you can relate to at least a little bit who's already been through it, ideally someone with a few years under their belt, and do mock interviews with them. Interviewing sucks, it's not an easy skill and you hopefully won't need it very much. The first ones are always the hardest.
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Don't worry, the rest of us don't like the process either.
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You just have to figure out the ways your autism makes you a good worker and explain it to them. Honestly chatgpt could probably help with the wording if you just explain your autism to it lol
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Everyone needs to go through that shit at least once... if you're lucky you can lean on your network of former co-workers to provide references that let you just be open "I suck at interviewing" from that point onward. I hope you eventually achieve this blissful state because I too cannot maintain eye contact for more than half a second.
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Oh yeah because us autistic people are WELL KNOWN for our networking skills...
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"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.
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