The Right Skills

Don't forget getting the interview.
I've got the right column on lock. I've never had an interview that wasn't followed by an offer. But I was still stuck in a dead-end job for years trying to get an interview.
Once I finally got an interview adjacent to my field, I was promoted within 6 months, then poached by another organization a year after that and had quadrupled my income in under 2 years.
But it took forever to get that process started.

only heard of most of the crap in my resume. learn fast break things

Interview: “reverse this binary tree with an algorithmic efficiency of O(1)”
Job: “The marketing team would like you to indent this button by 10 pixels”
- production code: "hehe this is running at polynomial scaling"
- All of this. When I tell people I meet that we don't do coding tests, we instead do tiny assignments, they often get quite excited. It also seems to be way, way more effective

Add another column labelled "knowing the right people" with the bar so large the other two are blips.
- Also just being liked by the interviewer. For my current job I had an interview of about 90min, and basically just had a rather one-sided chat with the two guys. They seemed to like me, just let me talk and the next day I had the contract draft in my email.
  I certainly did not excel at anything during the interview.
- I came here to say that. Who you know makes the other two criteria become irrelevant.
  At my work they openly mention that 80% of their hires are from referrals. And I’m not talking about a little unknown company. They have more than 10,000 employees. I’m one of the 20%.
  However, I only got my first job because I knew a VP at that company.
  
  Same
- So true! Out of the five jobs I got over my career, three were from referrals.

So true. At the same time, this happens because a lot of hiring managers don't know intimately what the job actually does, so they resort to cookie-cutter interview techniques.
- "Do leetcode hard on screen share for 12 hours over three months, and then we'll let you know if there's any openings anyone here actually wants to hire you for...then the teams will interview you. Oh and if we don't find a fit within a year of the phone screen you start all over lol"
  Google, meta, etc. Fuck them all.
  Bonus: If you score really high on the pointless quizzes, then you might get a chance at a remote job, which puts you first on the chopping block for layoffs every quarter!
  Extra bonus: There's an office near you, but we're only hiring somewhere else right now that had a shitload of layoffs recently due to shitty management that didn't get fired, so you'll have to uproot your entire life and place your future in our hands for the privilege.
  
  Then don’t work for them.
  The reason they can get away with this is because they have troves and troves of people who grovel pathetically at their feet like they’re some sort of God to be worshipped in the “career” plane of existence.
  Be honest. People want to work for them for the money (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that) and so they can tell their friends and update their LinkedIn profiles with “I work at Google” to impress everyone else.
  There are plenty of well paying, respectable tech jobs that are much more ‘morally noble’ than these conglomerates of parasites that will make you much happier to wake up every morning without having to perform some Freudian ritual in the mirror trying to convince yourself that what you’re doing is “making the world a better place”. Because it’s not. And these other companies won’t have you doing some absolutely dildo-to-ass inducing interview process where you’re essentially giving them labour market data for absolutely nothing in exchange (except to maybe be considered to have someone look at your resume for 0.7 seconds).
  This is a major issue I have with tech. I’ve had the displeasure of being in big tech for many, many years after college (while I was still brainwashed) and working with plenty of truly abhorrent coworkers and people I’ve ever encountered. It’s astonishing, disgraceful, and terrifying how many people in tech have absolutely zero moral compass, and pigeonhole themselves into just “thinking about the science of it all” without thinking about the human impact (isn’t this supposed to be the point of advancing science and technology?).
  And now look at the state of the world because of this. Fucking look around you. You can point the finger at others and blame others for this shit world we’re creating (and yes- there are certainly those in power who wield much more influence and control than any lowly coder), but if you want to help change things, you have to try. At least a little bit. And one way to do this is by just trying to not be working for companies like these. Is that really so fucking difficult? Go somewhere else. Trust me- if the Google’s and Meta’s and Amazon’s of the world begin losing genuine talent because workers aren’t morally willing to contribute to a soulless and arguably evil entity, then they will change real fucking quickly.
  So - STOP GIVING THESE COMPANIES YOUR TIME AND MONEY BY INTERVIEWING FOR THEM. Take a stance for once and stand by your values and conscience. Think about the type of organization you want to work for and how it would align morally with your values. All it takes is a few minutes to research companies that aren’t so fucking awful for the world, and there are plenty of them around depending on what your values are. I have SO much more respect for others who took a position at a “less prestigious” company than those who worked at a Google.
  People will still want to impress others and showcase their egos (to say I’m not guilty of this would be a lie), but if the collective metric for what we consider prestige aligned more with human value output of a company rather than raw salary or profit, then I really do think things could change. But you and I have to put in the leg work. No, it’s not fair that this is the world we were shoved into. But it’s what we have to do.
  Anyway….sorry for the rant lol. I needed to get that off my chest.

Isn't that like almost every job, not just being a programmer

I stopped sitting in on interviews at my old job. Everyone that I thought was a great interview ended up being a shitty employee.

If they have the opportunity to be selecting from a wide pool and picking the best out of the candidates, good for them. Still sucks to be an applicant to such a company.

I'd rather present it as a non-overlapping Venn diagram. It's not the level, those are different skills completely
- At some point you'll need to know the basic syntax of some programing language.

Most people can do most jobs.
Companies shouldn't legally be allowed to be this selective.
- Do you have any qualifiers for that? Like "with sufficient time to learn" or something? Is there some kind of personal development that you think could enable that?
  In my understanding, asking a chef to be a doctor or a software engineer to be an artist often doesn't work great.
  How selective do you think is appropriate?
  To be clear: I'm a hiring manager for some specialized stuff. I'm genuinely curious about your perspective because I hope it can help how I do that work. I'm not trying to argue with you or prove you wrong or anything.
  
  Given enough time.
  Obviously professions that take years to study have that barrier to entry.
  But if your job isn't life or death most likely they will already have to teach you everything you need to know on the job.

put a triple the height column right there - luck to get an interview in the first place. You're lucky if an actual human reads your CV nowadays, instead of an AI fishing for keywords
- I'd even say add another column of "Skills to get the interview".

sobs in social anxiety

real 😭

As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn't expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count -- a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume -- about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you'll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
- 100% this
  And the same thinking applies to interviews, but that's very difficult. My leadership sometimes gets surprised about how much I help interviewees, and I have to clarify to them that I don't care about how good they are at interviewing. I care how good they are at the job.
  Unfortunately, this makes my interviews super long, but we have arguably the best engineering team in the company.
  Our new CTO was very skeptical of our long interviews and ordered us to shorten them. Fortunately, we had one scheduled already. He sat in on it and is no longer worried about our long interviews. He understood the value once he was able to see where the candidate stumbled and excelled in our ... simulations? of the work. We try to simulate certain tasks in the interview, especially collaborative ones, to see how they would actually do the work. It's really hard for us as interviewers to prepare and run, but it's proven highly effective so far
- But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count -- a lot.
  Let's not exaggerate. We have many kinds of spell checkers, all kinds of autocomplete, code reviews, automated testing, linters, and compilers that won't compile if something is spelled wrong. Spelling is the least of a programme's concerns, as it should be.
  
  Except I'm not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.

I don't know, if I have enough Daniel Abrahams for the job :⁠-⁠(

Hardest interview I ever had was a job where I worked the least. Second-most lucrative.

The more HR takes over the interview process, the more important getting past HR becomes than doing the job.

This couldn’t be more true for my job. My last job had so many moving parts that we never weren’t under water. My current employer has things so segmented that I’m encouraging friends at the old place to jump ship by telling them how easy things can be when you have proper leadership.

I'm interviewing people right now and I feel like it's actually the opposite. I know for a lot of folks this is true, and I've been through those interviews, but fuck, I would love if I could find somebody who is just on par with the interview questions and could just answer them all satisfactorily, because that's what we actually need.
- Can you share what kinds of questions you're asking? Or at least generic versions of them?

If only you could use ChatGPT during an interview the same way as when you're employed. Then everyone would finally recognize how outstanding you are

A lot of people with poorly developed social skills like to pretend that poorly developed social skills don't make them a bad coworker. I don't think I agree with that. Your job isn't just the stuff you like. Organization, prioritization, collaborating and interacting with your coworkers, attending meetings and making useful contributions, just generally not being a dick...all of those are your job. Interviews often take place after they're already convinced that you have the required background, so they're largely interested in discovering whether you're a good chemistry match for the team.
Can't really speak to grueling tech interviews though. That's a whole different category of thing.
- I get this, and being good at customer service helps a lot in interviews.
  But on the other hand it's really fucked up how we are all expected to go to work and always be pleasant when most of us don't want to be there and are only there so they don't become homeless. So I don't care if my coworkers are pissy, it's healthy to act how you feel.
  At 18 years old US society puts a gun to our heads and says "work or die", with no guarentee of being able to find work that pays for a life.
  
  On the one hand the way corporations expect loyalty and devotion all the time in return for a very small percentage of their profits being paid out to us as salary sucks. On the other, having to work if you want to eat is just kind of...life? Not saying we couldn't work on something better as a society, but there's been very few people at any point in human history who didn't have to work hard to survive. I'm glad that I get to at least do soulless work in an office which is mostly just boring instead of hard labor or something actively dangerous.
- I think for many people it has to do with nervousness. Also power dynamics. When you already have the job, and especially after being there for a couple months, getting on with your coworkers is easy and discussions aren't awkward usually. A random stranger doing an interview that decides whether or not you become homeless puts pressure on people, and they dont know anything about their personality. Should I joke, what do they find funny, do they find that unprofessional, am I being to quiet, do I need to ask more questions, should I bother asking any.
  A few weeks after working with Becky I know the exact number of questions to ask her and how we mesh/joke intertwine etc.
  
  Power dynamics is definitely part of it, and I've found that I have much better luck in interviews when I treat them as a conversation rather than just being grilled. It's easier to do in your 40s than in your 20s though.
- The problem with that analysis is that the simple skill checklists used by HR workers who don't even understand what the terms mean are woefully bad at assessing people's job fitness. If you have ABC but not XYZ it doesn't matter if you invented ABC, those glorified hall monitors won't let you interview. But they will if you just lie on the form, knowing you can convince the actual manager that you know ABC inside out and can learn XYZ in five minutes.
- A lot of people with poorly developed social skills like to pretend that poorly developed social skills don’t make them a bad coworker. I don’t think I agree with that.
  this is definitely true, but it's a doubled edged sword, some of the best people in their fields are just complete assholes. Either through time, or ego, sometimes it's just because they're too good for the world. Usually, these people are few and far between.
  It's also worth considering how much of the job actually is being socially proficient. In most cases people are willing to put up with people being a little weird and goofy if they're good at what they do. Sometimes those are the best people. Some of the people i have the most respect for in my life, are the weirdest people i've met. Unreasonably kind people, who are a little socially out there, i still really appreciate because they're genuinely good people. Some of the more unruly people are some of the most interesting, and knowledge people i've ever met. They also guarantee a unique perspective on things, which is valuable sometimes.
  Different people attract different company, and different people work differently, ultimately the simple rule of getting as many differing points of view on something as possible, still seems to be holding true.
  than again, this all depends on the type of team you want. You may want a groundbreaking research team, you may want a greybeard maintenance team, depends on the environment.