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Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

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Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#31

Post by pphysch »

bequanna wrote: post #28
iamleppert wrote: post #23

I’ve worked with these cheerleader types. They have mastered the art of not doing any work, always nauseously happy about everything, even when it’s not appropriate for the situation, and are nowhere to be found when a project or task is due and you need help. In the worse cases, they play politics and actively undermine anyone who is critical of them or point out their (lack of) actual contributions. If someone is o…

I'd rather work with a slightly less qualified person who has a positive attitude than an overqualified person with a terrible attitude. The second type might write great code, but is energy draining for the whole team.

That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of people who are emotionally-developed professionals.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#32

Post by angarg12 »

I've also conducted hundreds of interviews at Big Tech and my experience is far from OPs. I can probably count with both hands the number of times that someone was technically weak across the board, but they got an offer due to their attitude and soft skills. All of these occasions were for intern or junior roles.

I agree that companies overindex on pretense of technical competence (e.g. asking leetcode hard questions), but I'd be very skeptic of extending an offer for a software engineer role who has literally failed all tech rounds, much more for Senior+ roles.

I've also worked with people like Chen, upbeat, likable people who just don't seem to get anything done. Because they are so likeable they get away with it for a long time, because who can be mad at them? However this almost always turns into a net negative for the team.

Going back to OP, who is the title aimed at? if it is a wakeup call for companies and hiring managers to obsess less on obscure coding puzzles and value soft skills and experience more, I'm all for it. If it is advice for job seekers in the current market, I'd say you should still focus on tech skills.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#33

Post by slily »

bequanna wrote: post #28
iamleppert wrote: post #23

I’ve worked with these cheerleader types. They have mastered the art of not doing any work, always nauseously happy about everything, even when it’s not appropriate for the situation, and are nowhere to be found when a project or task is due and you need help. In the worse cases, they play politics and actively undermine anyone who is critical of them or point out their (lack of) actual contributions. If someone is o…

I'd rather work with a slightly less qualified person who has a positive attitude than an overqualified person with a terrible attitude. The second type might write great code, but is energy draining for the whole team.

You sound like a manager. As an IC I'd much rather work with someone who's a little difficult but actually contributes, and the fake positivity that I often see from people in HR-adjacent roles/glorified paper pushers who don't have much actual work to do is really annoying.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#34

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Just to flip this around & play with it some: how do people feel about the importance of technical skills? Has the importance increased or decreased? Has it changed or shifted some how? What's different about how technical skills serve us today?

This question dovetails immensely into this question of what role AI will have in the future, I feel like. It informs how replaceable people are by ML.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#35

Post by treflop »

advael wrote: post #27
treflop wrote: post #6

It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft skills will just flow like hot butter. This is what I tell my friends: Don’t see interviews as an adversarial thing. At the end of the day, your mindset should be: * The company is looking for someone to do a specific job * You have a unique set of skills and y…

I agree with everything you're saying here 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, an…

I think humans having their own culture and ultimately worldview is just a fact of life and the best that we can do is to learn to coexist and work with each other.

But we don’t have to work side by side for 40 hours a week. Why make both of us miserable?

And to your scenario, I personally too believe a culture of opposing voices is the best culture, but ourselves thinking that is… itself a worldview, making us a part of a subculture. And even then, there are limitations to my acceptance. For example, I strongly believe in keeping track of credit for ideas, so people who regularly forget who suggested an idea (or who don’t care who did it first in history) bother me immensely, so even if you had similar views as me, I wouldn’t want to work with you just on that alone. You are only a little different but, to me, in a wrong and unacceptable way.

But I’ll still work with you. I just don’t want to be on a team of you’s.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#36

Post by Jensson »

sokoloff wrote: post #12
ungreased0675 wrote: post #7

Interviewers need to be careful to remain unbiased and objective about their criteria. Saying you evaluate on attitude and personality is pretty similar to letting personal biases and stereotypes drive the process.

Ignoring candidate attitude is not the way either, IMO. Think back to how many ex-colleagues with insufferable attitudes you had to work with. Unless that’s near zero, I think attitude has to have some weight.

If you meet plenty of "insufferable" people then maybe you are the problem. I find most people behave nicely, no bullying or anything they do their job and they answer questions when asked if you don't ask too often.

The worst for team morale were the people who had a hard time with their job and tried to defend or hide that, such people don't answer questions when you ask not because they don't want to but because they can't, their problem aren't social but technical, people who can easily answer do so.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#37

Post by the_snooze »

ok123456 wrote: post #30

After years of upping the ante by ratcheting up what is expected for a technical interview, only to realize you've merely attracted people who are good at cramming for technical interviews, we're told now all that is overrated. Maybe the whole time, people should have considered what adds value to the company instead of treating it as an entrance examination. A coding problem is appropriate if they're right out of sc…

>A coding problem is appropriate if they're right out of school and you can't get a good feel for them, but usually, holding a conversation for an hour or so is enough to get a feel for whether or not this person can do the job you have in find, or think of a job they could do.

Facebook tried to recruit me once. They told me I needed to study Leetcode. I'm a researcher with a pretty good publication record and some bit of media coverage of that. I offered to give a "job talk" in lieu of the Leetcode and field their questions live. They insisted on the coding challenges. I told them to take a hike.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#38

Post by karmakaze »

I mostly find the ones who have tech skills beyond their peers to be easy to work with. The ones I find problematic are those with ambitions that exceed their skills or role.

Edit: There was one exception I recall who was brilliant and got shit done but was cynical as hell. The place was somewhat dysfunctional and they'd been there longer than most, so maybe finding a better place was the answer for them.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#39

Post by unsupp0rted »

advael wrote: post #27
treflop wrote: post #6

It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft skills will just flow like hot butter. This is what I tell my friends: Don’t see interviews as an adversarial thing. At the end of the day, your mindset should be: * The company is looking for someone to do a specific job * You have a unique set of skills and y…

I agree with everything you're saying here 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, an…

Depends on the org size and mission.

Huge? You want diverse approaches.

Medium? Diverse is probably better.

Small? You probably want strong alignment.

Tiny/Ramen-startup/doing hard things? Maybe diverse again. Maybe not.

Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

#40

Post by StefanBatory »

angarg12 wrote: post #32

I've also conducted hundreds of interviews at Big Tech and my experience is far from OPs. I can probably count with both hands the number of times that someone was technically weak across the board, but they got an offer due to their attitude and soft skills. All of these occasions were for intern or junior roles. I agree that companies overindex on pretense of technical competence (e.g. asking leetcode hard question…

My guess is that it is a good advice for working in smaller companies or cities. I'm in a small city, and we don't have a lot of software development companies here. If anything, most of the programming work is more of a maintaining existing software or projects.

There it does feel that social skills are what's important, because you're more of a maintainer. And you're going to be working in a team because knowledge is so spread, and there's very rarely need for things to be done fast or efficient.

That being said it is just my feelings and it might not reflect how it looks somewhere else at all.

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