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

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

#121

Post by avindroth »

dilemma wrote: post #15
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…

Creativity and critical thinking. In subordinate position it gets you labelled a dreamer, a weirdo, or an idiot. In executive position, visionary, maverick, multidisciplinary thinker, etc. You can only truly creative in a position with autonomy, so you either climb the ladder or start your own thing.

Gervais's Principle gets into this as well.

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

#122

Post by naveen99 »

angry_octet wrote: post #117
naveen99 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-an…

Thanks for the references, I read them.

> inconsistency of results

Atleast on hacker news, the test is fairly consistent. There have been several surveys here.

> lack of statistical analyzability

That is the academic psychologist's problem.

> 89 / 100 fortune 100 companies use it internally

A lot of people hear recommend blindly investing in s&p 500. I trust fortune 100 companies more than psychology associations and bloggers.

> college board chose not to use it

Yes. Because it is one static test that can be memorized to produce desired result by test taker. But if one takes it for their own understanding, there is no reason to cheat (and it becomes useful)

Not convinced that these two blog posts and 1 white paper opinion piece count as discrediting mbti. I will look for a meta review.

In the end, I think personality testing, similar to iq testing is not politically correct. But it can be useful, as a self test atleast.

Companies prefer to use it but keep the process non transparent. They like the flexibility of being able to say "personality fit" without the transparency of a test because one it doesn't open up liability and two the test is gameable in an adversarial situation.

Atleast I haven't seen any claims of racial differences in mbti, which might make it useful as a way to find engineer / rational types in underrepresented groups in software.

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

#123

Post by thr0waway1239 »

I agree with the following commenter that critical thinking is not a soft skill.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426545

Definition from Wikipedia:

"The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as “desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude.”"

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_skills

I think economics is an important part of thinking critically. Does philanthropy do more good than bad? Does affirmative action always get the desired results? Does equality of opportunity lead to equality of outcome? What should be the role of government and how to fund it?

My views on a lot of subjects changed after getting just a rudimentary understanding of economics. While I cannot claim I am a very critical thinker, I am probably a more critical thinker after I learnt economics. And in my view, economics is more science than non-science, and you can grasp it better with more acquired knowledge.

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

#124

Post by zigzigzag »

cerrelio wrote: post #63
Retric wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain. Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc. Granted, this assumes peopl…

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…

The other problem with that is it makes it hard to put in place a systematic improvement process. A formal failure analysis process is a wonderful thing that can rapidly drive improvement, but to have such a thing you must first be able to say "that was a failure, let's analyse it". In a highly PC environment where nobody ever fails at anything, everything is always wonderful and the only possible change is to become even greater, it's hard to be fully honest with yourselves.

Here's an example from my own career: I once worked at software firm which routinely sent customer feedback to a black hole. Literally, there were forums where customers could talk to each other, and feedback forms on the website, yet either nobody read them at all or there was someone in customer support who theoretically read them but actually didn't.

I discovered that when I tried to use one of the company's own web forms to report a technical issue with one of their products. When nothing happened, I started asking around. The email thread I started (which was plenty polite: just asking who owned this form and whether my feedback was being processed) quickly got like 20 people CCd onto it as everyone tried to pass the buck and eventually it became clear that whilst it had perhaps once been connected to something, the form had at some point stopped being monitored and nobody had noticed, in fact, the feedbacks weren't even being stored anywhere. We were literally throwing customer feedback in the bin.

Eventually, after asking the question of who was actually responsible for this process and who was going to fix it maybe four or five times (lots of people appeared to be involved in nebulous ways and nobody was willing to take responsibility), I pointed out that this seemed like a fairly serious failure and perhaps there should be a post-mortem of some kind, which was a routine occurrence in other parts of the firm.

This suggestion went down like a lead balloon, as you may imagine. I don't recall if the issue was ever fixed: at some point I ran out of energy and stopped caring. This is how engineers get a reputation as being awkward and difficult: they exist in a world where things work or they don't, and there's no shame in writing a bug because we all do it, but when your software is buggy you're expected to admit that and fix it. Lots of people in fluffier job descriptions don't exist in such a world and interpret any hint that they might have actually ... failed ... as hostile and threatening.

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

#125

Post by zigzigzag »

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…

There's feedback and then there's feedback.

If a manager makes a decision having weighed the factors, and some team members disagree, but it's an arguable thing (corporate strategy for instance) and the difference is mostly one of opinion, sure, I agree. Constant criticism of that will get tuned out.

There's also cases where something is just clearly dysfunctional. For instance, if the CEO is constantly talking about how the firm needs to move fast and innovate, but installing a new piece of software on your workstation takes six months and involves three forms, it's fair to say that isn't a difference of opinion (all parties want to move faster and innovate more), that's a failure of execution. Someone, somewhere, clearly feels that this bureaucracy is worth it, but they probably can't defend that given the firm's priorities.

You can phrase that as "this process is great, but we could make it even better" if you want to be as well-loved as possible. My experience has been that this usually leads to an answer of the form "thanks, we're glad you love our service, unfortunately we have many other things we're doing right now kthxbye" - i.e. when nothing is bad and everything is merely a proposed improvement, improvements that might be even slightly threatening to anyone just get ignored entirely. And you can't complain because everything is peachy, right?

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

#126

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dingbat wrote: post #119
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're confusing critical thinking with Machiavellianism.

Actually you're confusing a lot of things. Your two penultimate paragraphs directly contradict each other.

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

#127

Post by dingbat »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #126
dingbat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're confusing critical thinking with Machiavellianism. Actually you're confusing a lot of things. Your two penultimate paragraphs directly contradict each other.

critical thinking and Machiavellianism are orthogonal. if you read the comments i am responding to, you'd see that those comments are the ones which are making the assumption that critical thinkers are non-Machiavellian, which is just as inane as the idea that critical thinking should be Machiavellian in nature. perhaps the problem is that for most people it is more emotionally satisfying to believe themselves as non-Machiavellian critical thinkers, thus confusing the two as related somehow.

consider two fundamental properties of critical thinking: asking the right questions, and objectivity. in a large organization that was defined (not by me) as having politics and power-playing as the main priority, then the person who thinks they are "getting things done" as long as those "things" do not involve icky political managerial dynamics ("selling my soul"), never thinking to question their own personal biases of "just because i like to put my head down and work on shipping product, is that the right thing to get done?", would seem to in fact not be engaging in critical thinking at all.

again, my reply is responding to (not supporting) the nonsensical proposition that critical thinkers (as ill-defined by other commentors) are more effective than Machiavellian actors, even as they are supposedly marginalized (aka rendered ineffective) within large organizations.

i can understand why that line of thinking is confusing, because it is.

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

#128

Post by crdoconnor »

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".

>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

There's often no point. The main currencies of corporate politics are power, fealty, loyalty, power in numbers and image.

You can use your critical thinking to spin a good story but building coalitions takes time and demonstrating loyalty takes time. In a company on a downward trend is investing that time worth it? Probably not. Is it worth it if your best quality is that you're a reliable kiss ass? Maybe.

If shipping is priority #5 you'd likely do better getting out and moving to a company where it's #1 or #2 where critical thinking skills are more directly rewarded and you don't have to spend 5 years kissing the ring of an idiot boss in order to win political arguments.

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

#129

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dingbat wrote: post #127
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing critical thinking with Machiavellianism. Actually you're confusing a lot of things. Your two penultimate paragraphs directly contradict each other.

critical thinking and Machiavellianism are orthogonal. if you read the comments i am responding to, you'd see that those comments are the ones which are making the assumption that critical thinkers are non-Machiavellian, which is just as inane as the idea that critical thinking should be Machiavellian in nature. perhaps the problem is that for most people it is more emotionally satisfying to believe themselves as non…

No, it's not confusing, it's just wrong. You're confusing objectivity, which is understanding how a situation really works, with a moral imperative to take advantage of every situation.

You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations.

There's absolutely no evidence to support that position, and plenty of evidence to refute it - not least the incredibly stupid and destructive decisions made by corporate "winners" for reasons of political advantage which regularly sink companies and damage their own employment prospects.

If you were truly engaging in critical thinking you'd be able to understand this. In fact all you're doing is projecting the inverse of your own emotional biases onto people who not only have different motivations, but are modelling outcomes as a whole more effectively than you are.

The key question is the size of your predictive horizon. Just because someone is effective at small-scale politics doesn't mean they understand likely outcomes from a broader perspective.

In your system "critical thinkers" would be just as effective in absolutely any political system, including bureaucracy for its own sake, and North Korean dictatorship.

Clearly both of those have fundamental inefficiencies and stupidities which severely limit their practical effectiveness. Playing the game may be expedient if you're trapped inside them, but the inefficiencies and stupidities can only ever be mitigated by individuals who understand what's wrong with them, not by those who conform to them for personal gain.

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

#130

Post by dingbat »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #129
dingbat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

critical thinking and Machiavellianism are orthogonal. if you read the comments i am responding to, you'd see that those comments are the ones which are making the assumption that critical thinkers are non-Machiavellian, which is just as inane as the idea that critical thinking should be Machiavellian in nature. perhaps the problem is that for most people it is more emotionally satisfying to believe themselves as non…

No, it's not confusing, it's just wrong. You're confusing objectivity, which is understanding how a situation really works, with a moral imperative to take advantage of every situation. You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations. There's absolutely no evidence to support that position, and plenty of evidence to refute it - not least the incredibly stupid and destructive de…

> You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations.

my position is exactly the opposite of stating that Machivellianism "works better". in fact the comments i have been responding to, and disagreeing with, were making that case, not me.

(in any case, the opposite of "works better" does not mean "works worse")

those comments assumed the following (il)logical connections: a) critical thinking = non-Machiavellian behavior, b) critical thinkers are supposedly the most effective in "getting things done", c) yet, critical thinkers are supposedly the most likely to be punished and rendered ineffective, d) Machiavellianism is rewarded (aka "works better") in big companies, e) because critical thinkers focus on priorities that are relatively unimportant in large companies, such as "shipping product"

not only are some of these points individually suspect, but taken together they are inconsistent and make no sense at all.

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