Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply • Hacker News Board

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#111

Post by tlogan » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 9:42 PM UTC

guitarbill wrote: post #7

Thank god the Wall Street Journal is encouraging critical thinking, and more importantly fostering the discussion by putting articles like this out for everybody to read /s On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasiv…

Yes - but that is how corporations are organized.

As an employee, your primary goal should be to make your boss happy: and any changes or initiative will hurt your career. If you are young you might make mistake, but people are not stupid they learn from their mistakes.

So you have to go the point where your "boss" are customers / users of your product. Then critical thinkings works well.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#112

Post by adekok » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

dingbat wrote: post #85

adekok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. Because while they get things done, they challenge the status quo. When I've worked for large companies, the #1, #2, and #3 products of the company were management politics. Actually shipping anything was #4, maybe #5. Critical thinkers looked at that and went "we could do better", and got punished for it.

in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping". if someone tends to get marginalized, by definition that means they are ineffective at "getting things done".

Or, someone who enjoys getting things done can move to another company, where the management goals are aligned with the corporate goals.

Sometimes I don't want to sell my soul.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#113

Post by naveen99 » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

ReallyAnonymous wrote: post #18

dgax wrote: post #8

The article, especially some of the examples, seems abusive to low-wage employees. How many of us would give a job description that said 'this is not a preparation for a slow motion contest' a second glance? The meat and potatoes of the article is mostly just complaints to be honest. A lack of candidates is always the go-to excuse for managers and executives when explaining poor productivity or vacancies. Job seekers…

I work for a >10,000 employee health care system as a physician. What I have seen is that the front line workers are considered disposable, and should be grateful for a job. The superstars ( always nice, compassionate, and excellent at their jobs) are not recognized by management and so when raises are given, everyone gets them, including the lazy ones. This disappoints the worker bees, and leads to incredible turnov…

So go start a "nonprofit" hospital or other business, and poach the star front liners yourself.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#114

Post by rodgerd » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

For my entire I've been listening to organisations purporting to represent employers slag of the education system for not being sufficiently vocationally-focused - for not just eternally chasing a narrow range of whatever skills will turn out good little technicians at no cost to employers - while denigrating anything outside that narrow focus as basket-weaving. And the political landscape in the English-speaking world has largely gone along with that.

They have what they asked for. Whoops.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#115

Post by davidf18 » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 10:13 PM UTC

Generally a firm can get workers if they are willing to locate in an area that the workers want to live, that they treat the workers well, and that they offer above market rates in salary.

But, even wealthy firms such as Apple and Google which both have huge profits have conspired to keep engineering and technical wage rates low. There was recently a settlement for the collusion. It had nothing to do with the amount of money the firms had or could spend for talent, just that they wanted to keep the costs down.

So, generally be suspect of these kinds of articles.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#116

Post by Kluny » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 10:13 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #103

zigzigzag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace). The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's…

Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to. Every one of us is sure we know how to do our manager's job better than he does. There are threads every day on…

> Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.

Super good point, thanks for that.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#117

Post by angry_octet » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 11:00 PM UTC

naveen99 wrote: post #109

angry_octet wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been an uptick in user of discredited techniques to screen in recruitment, stuff like MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), lots of pseudo science without measuring validity. It seems like HR have been told to find people with soft skills and so they manufacture something that will give a rating and then rank candidates by that.

> mbti discredited Do you have any good citations? A majority of hacker news readers are INTJ and intp, 2 types that generally find mbti useful in understanding themselves and others. I doubt hr puts much stock in mbti anyway, because it would be an easy test to game if it was officially considered.

Google 'mtbi validity'. It is very possible HN readers are INTJ because they see e.g. introversion as one of their traits -- but it doesn't mean it is true! Poor construct validity is one of the problems. For example, if I ask you, "Are you creative in how you solve problems?" the answers may only slightly correlate with creative problem solving.

A very accessible article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/go...

http://indiana.edu/~jobtalk/Articles/develop/mbti.pdf http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

Overall, MBTI is more reliable than astrology, and has proven to generate significant sums for the owner, CPP.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#118

Post by ACow_Adonis » Sun, Sep 04, 2016, 11:38 PM UTC

dingbat wrote: post #105

bsder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping". Um, they do exactly that? Upper managers are notorious for spending most of their time playing politics and very little time delivering product.

person i was responding to was defining "critical thinkers" as the ones who get sidelined and punished for challenging the status quo and focusing on priorities that are secondary (in fact not even secondary, #4, #5) to the purported main product of large companies, which is political gamesmanship. so, alleged "critical thinkers" in this context are just the frustrated losers who think they are the one who get things…

You're definition of "get things done" is Orwellian in its inanity...

Edit: as per your notion that critical thinkers should apparently just play the game better, rather than...I don't know...think critically/critique it.

Are we even talking the same language?

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#119

Post by dingbat » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 12:02 AM UTC

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #118

dingbat wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

person i was responding to was defining "critical thinkers" as the ones who get sidelined and punished for challenging the status quo and focusing on priorities that are secondary (in fact not even secondary, #4, #5) to the purported main product of large companies, which is political gamesmanship. so, alleged "critical thinkers" in this context are just the frustrated losers who think they are the one who get things…

You're definition of "get things done" is Orwellian in its inanity... Edit: as per your notion that critical thinkers should apparently just play the game better, rather than...I don't know...think critically/critique it. Are we even talking the same language?

please read the comments i am responding to. the comment i am responding to is positing that in large companies, the main product is political game-playing (i do not necessarily believe that this is true), stating that delivering and shipping what people typically think of as "product" is #4 and #5 at best (again, i think that is a distorted generalization).

at the same time, the comment i am replying to posits that "critical thinkers" are the effective people in an organization who are really the ones who get things done. at the same time stating that these people who get things done are sidelined, punished and rendered ineffective by the organization. at the same time stating that these same people are the ones who are focused on low-priority items in that organization.

i agree with you, taken together, those statements are rather inane.. not only that but also wildly inconsistent, an ironic example of sloppy critical thinking.

i do not know where you get the impression that critical thinkers "should" play the game better. i am stating the obvious (which apparently isnt), that you would expect truly effective critical thinkers to be very good at focusing on the main priority within an organization, which based on the definitions defined by the previous commentor, is not "shipping product", but rather playing the game better. i disagree with that conclusion, but it is a consistent conclusion that follows assumptions that i also think are flawed.

in fact, assuming the negative assumptions about large organizations are valid, truly effective critical thinkers in such an organization would be able to see thru typical "mission statements" about delivering great product and service yada yada ... and instead focus on the accumulation of individual power and influence, if that is the main purpose of any human group. "the true organization man is the one who is most skeptical [aka critically thinking] about the organization"... or something like that.

anyway, critical thinking and emotionalism (bitterness and resentment about the unfairness of it all) would seem to be mutually opposed.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#120

Post by cerrelio » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 1:13 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #83

cerrelio wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike that passive-aggressive dynamic of converting the second type of thinking/feedback to the first. And that dynamic generally has a name: "politics". I've been on teams where I had to use rhetoric to convince a (non-technical) manager that following standard design practices like low coupling/high cohesion, etc. results in more robust software. What's sad about that whole political dynamic is that it wears pe…

I don't really like politics, but 10,000 years ago people in mud brick huts where taking politics and today people in mud brick huts are still talking politics. If nothing else politics works and ignoring things that work just make your life harder. Also of note, mud brick huts have been around for a really long time.

I understand completely. You have to find the place whose politics interest you as much as the work. That's very difficult (pretty much impossible) to gauge during an interview. You really need someone on the inside to give a complete view.