Uh, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it overrated. While I agree with advice that it’s important to have a good attitude and round your technical skills out with soft skills, if you’re looking for a technical job your technical skills are literally what you’re hired for. The soft skills get you in the door, differentiate you from other less rounded candidates, and make for a more productive and happy team. I’ve made the mistake of giving too much leeway to hires that had a good attitude but just couldn’t swing the fucking bat. And we all know how destructive ingratiating, subservient types can be.
Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 b…
Unfortunately, I've heard similar stories from a Ph.D. in distributed databases applying to Google. At first, it seemed like a match. They were looking for someone with that exact knowledge. Then, a few emails later, the recruiter sent them "study material" for their interview. He just declined at that point.
Leetcode is a form of hazing that no other professional class endures. I'm surprised they don't make programmers solve problems for 36 hours straight to see how they do when massively sleep deprived. Just because...
EVERYONE in the tech world knows that nobody does leetcode like things in their daily jobs. The vast majority of actual software dev at large companies is untangling complex messes and dealing with cross team integrations (when relevant).
Actual hard problems in real domains might take years to solve and involve very large systems.
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#63This is hard to take seriously from Amazon. I realize it's a big org with many diverse teams. It's just that the company seems to be rotting from the head down. And it's hard to overlook the stories of how some employees get so exploited.
> rotting from the head down
Jeff Bezos stepped down 2021 - need a better metaphor.
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#64I'm so jaded and bitter about the industry, this article triggered me a bit, but the advice is generally in the right direction. > During the final five minutes, when candidates can ask questions, Chen posed as many as he could fit in (I let the interview run over). I'm probably making a big deal out of a few words here, but how much enthusiasm am I really suppose to have towards a company and culture where I'm gener…
Someone new, and let's be honest, who is naïve and hungry for the big-tech paycheck is going to naturally be enthusiastic.
Compare that to someone who has worked in organizations for 20+ years. That person is going to be a realist, which doesn't automatically mean toxic/negative. But they are not going to bounce around the zoom screen with excitement.
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Agree. In 30 years and thousands of colleagues, the truly insufferable are productively measured in the dozens. The outsized impact they have on the team until eventually (hopefully) fired is still worth paying attention to potential signals in the interview process, IMO. (This is several times more important if they're going to have any leadership responsibilities as part of their role.)
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#66It 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…
That might be true a small company but that's not my experience with FAANG interviews and all the companies with x-FAANG employees that just continue to do the same style of interview.
I get asked what I consider, silly and unrelated stuff. I work on native APIs and was being hired for native API stuff yet my interviews including things like designing server farms for which I have next to zero knowledge. I've never set up more than a simple server. I did get hired by one of them and most of the questions I was asked have never once had any relationship to my job ever.
There's also the leetcode stuff, many of which are of the variety "If you're seen this question before you'll know the answer, if not then it was a 1 in a million that one person solved it and then spread the answer but you're not going to solve it in this 45 minute session".
2 examples IMO are "find the smallest rectangle in a bitmap. The brute force answer is O(N^6). The fast answer is O(N) but I doubt anyone has solved the O(N) one on their own except an exceedingly rare few. The rest read the answer previously.
Another is the code inserted into a matrix and having its columns rotated, given the result, recover the code question which can only be solved by knowing the one single algorithm that fits pretty much nothing else except this toy question. If you've been exposed to it before you solve it. If not, you don't
Those questions didn't help them hire. I'm certainly productive without being able to answer them and so are several of my co-workers who admit to not being able to answer them. Most of us just feel like we got in by luck yet we're all super productive so it's not clear what the point of that interview style was. We were just the lucky few who got questions we knew the answers to already.
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#67It 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 like this way of looking at interviews, but it's a perspective that requires a lot more self-confidence than most people have. You have to be confident that you have something of value to offer. You have to be confident that if this isn't a good fit there will be another one out there that is. If you don't have this confidence then you'll have a hard time not treating every job interview as a sales pitch that you d…
When I interview candidates, I try to give them opportunities to be their best confident selves, and see if they actually capitalize on it. In initial conversations, I ask them "what are you most proud of on your CV/resume?" From there, a good candidate should be able to go in depth on a topic they're comfortable with.
What I see in other orgs is a counterproductive---if not humiliating---hazing process with "gotcha" techno-trivia that has no bearing on the day-to-day tasking or gauging whether a candidate can grow in the team.
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, I've heard similar stories from a Ph.D. in distributed databases applying to Google. At first, it seemed like a match. They were looking for someone with that exact knowledge. Then, a few emails later, the recruiter sent them "study material" for their interview. He just declined at that point.
Leetcode is a form of hazing that no other professional class endures. I'm surprised they don't make programmers solve problems for 36 hours straight to see how they do when massively sleep deprived. Just because... EVERYONE in the tech world knows that nobody does leetcode like things in their daily jobs. The vast majority of actual software dev at large companies is untangling complex messes and dealing with cross…
It’s used primarily as cargo culting and also as a way of suppressing salaries. Big tech and other companies use it to keep H1B candidates from easily switching jobs and having to do indentured servitude in hostile work environments.
That’s all it is - along with the entire industry being massively overqualified as a whole and needing a way to cull the recruiting pipeline to only the most desperate. (People on visas)
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#69It 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…
That might be true a small company but that's not my experience with FAANG interviews and all the companies with x-FAANG employees that just continue to do the same style of interview. I get asked what I consider, silly and unrelated stuff. I work on native APIs and was being hired for native API stuff yet my interviews including things like designing server farms for which I have next to zero knowledge. I've never s…
The point was to avoid hiring unlucky people, of course!
Re: Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude
#70It 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 like this way of looking at interviews, but it's a perspective that requires a lot more self-confidence than most people have. You have to be confident that you have something of value to offer. You have to be confident that if this isn't a good fit there will be another one out there that is. If you don't have this confidence then you'll have a hard time not treating every job interview as a sales pitch that you d…
If my friend said that to me, I’d tell that if they’ve been doing stuff and getting experience, then they do have something to offer because they’ve obviously completed work and now know how to do something.
Not everyone needs to be solving cancer and if you haven’t been solving cancer, there’s no need to start trying to solve cancer. Of course, you can start trying at any time if you want too.
There’s always someone way better than you in the world but it doesn’t mean that they’re applying for the same job. Don’t worry about it and just speak honestly about what you’re good at and how it fits what the company needs.