"What's you're biggest weakness?"
"I'm going to say my honesty"
"Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness..."
"I don't give fuck what you think.".
"you're hired"
Maybe an alternate perspective, but I do a lot of interviews for technical roles like developers, product owners, architects, etc.
There’s often a perception that the role can be done isolated at a desk grinding on tasks, but that is often not the case. It’s easy to find people who will do task work, but really hard to find people who are capable communicators and empathizers with the people they will be working with. At the end of the day, we’re trying to fill the roles with someone who we can trust alone in a room with a customer, and not someone who will be alone in a room doing tasks.
I hear you and essentially don't disagree. But I feel like this might lean a tad toward gaslighting.
In the end, a job application/interview is not like the job at all (whether necessarily or not). That there are people in the world who would be disproportionately good at the job but bad the application seems to me an empirical fact given the diversity of humanity. And recognising this seems important and valuable in general but especially for those trying to understand their relationship to the system.
Yes I agree, you make some really valuable points here that I don’t disagree with. There’s a bit of an art to this and it is certainly not a realistic expectation that someone should be universally capable. Somewhere in that gray space between universally capable and walking hr incident is where we all fall.
Well said.
I can mask pretty easy dealing with customers because for the most part the interaction is predefined.
Trying to deal with the doublespeak and lies and unspoken requirements of situations like interviews is hard/impossible.
Because its all nebulous.
True. What the image should say is Capitalism is hell for autistic people. And non-autistic people. And all other people. Capitalism is really only not hell for those born wealthy.
Yea, because non-free-markets don't require people to get along?
No, but the difference is you don't have the threat of starvation and homelessness if you can't do it.
Absolutely. Capitalism categorizes all people as 'useful' and 'useless', the former really being 'exploitably productive'.
Lots of folks with tons to offer the world are shunted off to the side because what they can offer isn't valued by capital. Either that, or their challenges are perceived as too substantial for the accumulationists to bother to see what accommodations could be made.
But why bother when humans-go-in-money-comes-out is the depth of all thinking and concern? It's not the company's job to care that people are starving three houses over! Why don't they just get a job—
But I don't want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.
I was just going to say something similar to this. The job application is an assessment for your technical abilities/skills for the job.
The interview is a second assessment to gauge your personality and communication to make sure it's a fit for the team.
There are VERY few jobs where you can work in isolation. Teamwork, personality and communication are important for almost all jobs. Hench the assessment that gauges those aspects.
Then you aren't hiring programmers, you hare hiring client reps, and your final products will reflect this.
It's always who you blow and not what you know. A "good fit" is better for the office than a "skilled worker."
Relevant skills for most jobs are both technical and social, I think you’re implying that the decision is often made purely on social skill sets when technical are what matters and I see this differently.
If I’m hiring for an Architect for example, I am expecting them to help grow and guide developers, engineers, analysts, and administrators while collaborating with stakeholders AND possessing relevant domain technical expertise. Only having the domain technical expertise isn’t useful without the social skill set to leverage it.
Similarly if I’m hiring for an engineer, in expecting them to work with other engineers, their architect, their analysts, and their supervisors AND have relevant domain expertise. Again if they only have one half of that they aren’t actually functional.
It does change for entry level roles, and this may be an unpopular take… but for entry level roles I could care less about your technical knowledge… I’m looking for people who are entering this domain and can demonstrate intangibles like initiative, curiosity, and…. social skills. These are much better leading indicators of success as they are harder to teach and train, and frankly if they have those skills I can trust that the senior roles around them will help develop their technical skills.
But how do I show I am that guy day-to-day but not when it's a high pressure situation I've been playing my head over and over for days?
I've found ways around it but never know when you could need this kind of advice.
Let it go.
Seriously. That's the answer. Don't worry about the interview. Just see it as another conversation.
I the end, interviews are no better than picking names out of a hat, this from research done by Harvard some 20+ years ago.
“What is your biggest weakness?”
“Bullet wounds.”
“…”
“Oh and stab wounds too.”
Acid - I'm vulnerable to acid... I checked that one while making Hominy one time.
Don't worry, once you get the job you'll discover that they lied about what the work is anyway. You thought the job was sitting quietly at a desk and solving little dev tasks. Actually that's 25% of the job, the rest is: 25% meetings where they make doing the little tasks harder, confusing, and miserable, 25% other tasks you aren't good at and that aren't part of your job, and the last 25% is more meetings about those other things. The ratios will adjust over time until only about 10% of your job is doing your job, and the other 90% is email and meetings.
So many god damn meetings could be a fucking email - or a group chat.
Or skipped.
I was that more focused and productive person at two jobs. I answered customer emails at a bank and they actually had a meeting about me because my numbers were like 30-50% better than everyone else's. They thought maybe I wasn't actually DOING my work. I was, I was just good at it and quick at typing and copying and pasting and using templates. I streamlined all sorts of stuff to make my job easier. "How are you doing so many emails?!" "CTRL C and CTRL V and templates" "oh"
The interview process is what is causing me the most anxiety right now. Lost my job at the end of June, and I KNOW I need to be looking harder, but I'm just dreading the whole interview process. I've been procrastinating like crazy...I just don't want to relearn a whole culture of a new team; it's so mentally draining. 12 years somewhere and the idea that I have to start all over again...😭
My man, we are in much the same boat. I've turned procrastination into an art form. Sleep till noon, fuck around for a few hours before my wife gets home, drink beer all night, "I can handle it all tomorrow!" Boy oh boy do I have plans for tomorrow! Rinse and repeat for going on 2-months, and the severance pay is near an end.
And yeah, it's like being thrust into a whole new family, because your former family is dead. You're an orphan, thrust into this new group of relatives you've never even heard of. They're all very nice and smiley, but it's still scary as hell.
"This is your aunt Sally, she'll help get you settled. And this is your new daddy, Tom. He's fair, but a little gruff, really a teddy bear! Just don't tell him I said that! Ha ha! If you need clean sheets, talk to Hilda over in Housekeeping, she's so nice! But keep your receipts or she'll murder you in your sleep. Ha ha!" Been doing this over 3 decades, I 'm socially adept and it's still intimidating.
My wife is going through it now. Started the highest paying job she's ever had this past Monday. But hey, at least we're not foreigners, truly strangers in a strange land like her. Imagine moving exactly halfway around the globe and trying to fit in! That woman is as brave as anyone I've ever met.
OTOH, I have zero fear of interviews. Hell, I'd do 4 a day and would welcome the opportunity. It's the legwork, and paperwork, that I find daunting. At my last job, they interviewed 100 people before landing on me and another guy. Jesus, I had no idea. It was only 1 of 8 resumes I fired into the void. Dumb luck or did I make my own?
Hope an earlier comment of mine helps:
I got insanely lucky wit my job. I responded to an email that came through my college CS department about a potential job and got an in-person interview with the CEO of a tiny company nobody has heard of. The guy's personality made it easier to talk to him despite my anxiety.
Instead of the bullshit riddles that every other tech job interview has, he sent me home with a simple assignment to make a simple webpage where a user could log in.
After submitting that, I kinda forgot about it until several month later when I randomly decide to check my school email account and found an email from him that was almost a month old (my PC wasn't working before that, and I didn't need to use it much at the time).
I replied just in time. 12 years later I'm the most senior developer.
Where you really lucked out here was that the project is still going after 12 years and you haven't been through some bullshit outsourcing/insourcing cycle that clears out everyone who knows what they are doing
My most talented coworker was a contractor that was hired on full time. He has repeatedly said he would never have made it through the hiring process. I think about that a lot.
Because it is bullshit. HR have no clue how to find good candidates, and whoever hired them to get a new hire had no idea what the new hire should be able to do and so just gave HR a few buzzwords to work with. But even if they had been given a good job description, they are basically muppets.
Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.
Comfortable sure, but not, like, pajamas.
As a man I've interviewed in a button down shirt, a skirt and open toe sandals and gotten a job offer. Only assholes and IBM require a suit and tie these days.
Unpopular opinion: I think jeans are honestly more comfortable than pajamas. Pajamas feel a bit too loose and airy somehow, jeans and a t shirt or something feel a bit closer and thicker and give a reminder that something is between your skin and the outside while still being soft.
More unpopular opinion, jeans are the worst type of pants that I've ever had the displeasure of wearing.
I don't disagree but the way they describe it sounds more like an autistic nightmare. I don't know ADHD to be commonly associated with sensory issues and social cues and that hasn't been my direct experience with it. I've had issues with social cues but I've found it easier to pick up on them when I had peers to practice with that weren't put off by my adhd.
Also I don't know that I would be focused if they just gave me a job because of the whole adhd thing. I'm certainly not significantly better than anyone else in the building at my current job...
It even says autistic in the post. This is not an ADHD thing, even though it's common to have both.
jobs are designed specifically to torment autistic people
This is precisely why I gave up on getting an IT career lmao, fuck interviews
For the brief period when I was a manger, I tried to make interviews more work-related. I was told I couldn’t ask for a writing sample during the interview for a job that required writing clear, concise communications under pressure. This is one of many reasons why I am voluntarily no long supervisory in my field.
Ive done pretty well with being honest and I think I end up with happier positions ultimately than I might otherwise have had. The crap jobs weed themselves out.
This kinda depends on the job though. An office job, there's always going to be a social side because unless you're just a flunky, collaboration is a necessary skill for a skilled job in most office settings.
The extent of needed skill at the kind of social interaction you can estimate via interview varies, and a lot of people get stuck and screwed over when they don't actually need that skill set for the job, but we can't just pretend that even a minority of office work allows for a person to be an island. You at least have to be able to interact with project managers that keep otherwise unconnected workers synced up.
It helps if you can say that you suck at interviews, but can execute on the job, and can both say it in a useful way, then back up that claim. Not every hiring person will deal with that, which is bullshit imo, but even that is not outside of the range of bare minimum social skills.
When it comes right down to it, we as workers in a capitalist system have to make hard choices unless we want to start a revolution. You either work on the people skills, reject the kind of work that takes interviews and interaction, or you ask for accommodations and hope that works out.
The system as-is sucks for anyone not built for capitalist dreck like cookie cutter interviews, and it needs change.
Most of this is because, for people who are hiring/interviewing, this is a distraction from the job they were hired to do. Figuring out who to hire isn’t usually one of their core competencies. So they base their decision on superficial bullshit (and then if needed justify their choice later). Often as the job seeker, you’ve learned more about candidate selection than they have, so you’d be better at picking someone than they would.
This is why you should apply for Civil Service jobs. Many have a written test and no interviews.
Am I the only one with adhd who's good at and enjoys networking? Most of it is just asking specific questions based on prior information you've been given by the other person.
Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it's not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they've had. Then you get them to "teach" you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you've succeeded in networking.
People are passionate about their skills and hobbies, and most love to elaborate and explain the specifics of it, especially when they usually don't get to do it.
Remember those "Joe is forcing us to see his travel pictures" joke? This is basically that but you're actually interested in the pictures. Listening to someone being passionate about something is a lot more fun than others lead you to believe, give it a try, it's basically nt infodumping.
The lighter side of ADHD
