Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

However, not everyone (self included) has good enough in-person ability to emit a positive attitude. I've had a person come up to me and tell me I look too serious while I'm in the middle of serious and challenging technical work. I can't be immersed in technical work and appear approchable or happy unless maybe I practice putting on a fake smile.

When I'm working from home, you can't see my face, based on my chat responses you will think I have a great attitude.

The most productice and objectively succesful year of my career was during covid and it was downhill after they started forcing to have office days.

Not only that, back in the day when I did shift work, I chose nightshift despite my managers telling me my skills could be more useful during the day. I made that choice because like wfh, interactions were remote (plus no distractions), the social aspect of getting people to think positively of you is much easier remotely.

I can't speak for others, but personally, I spent almost no time socializing outside of work, I have "no life", I spent most of my time socializing on the internet or having fun with tech stuff (or just watching movies).

I had a senior manager give me some good news once, I thanked him and told him how grateful I was. My manager later on tells me the senior manager thought I was unhappy. I have no idea what I could have said or sounded/appeared like to indicate my positive reception of the news. I would love to learn and practice such skills but until then, in-person is a major barrier for me.

If someone is overly enthusiastic and doesn’t have the skills it’s not always the case but often they are running a game on you.

Also, in reading your post I noticed a normal human tendency that makes me wonder if hiring by interview doesn't inevitably introduce a small but pervasive organizational tendency toward a brittle culture

Notice that when describing your notion of alignment, you say you look for candidates who "do things like [you] do." I think that's insightful, true across interviewers, and from the perspective of organization-building, already a slight misalignment! I think humans tend to select for people who think more similarly to them, but the organizations I've seen that are the most creative and resilient are ones where people think as differently from each other as is possible (especially in terms of how they do things) while still being compatible (past a certain threshold I do think dissimilarity can make it impossible to agree or collaborate)

I know it seems like a small thing, but in aggregate I think it does a lot to explain a few larger-scale problems

I did drop out of Facebooks interview process right after the recruiter told me i need to come up with a better reason why i wanted to work at facebook for the next interview. I told them i thought they were going a little too far and I didn’t want to work at a company that was that full of themselves.