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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

As an interviewer, I don't ask questions like these.

By a very large margin, for most of the time you are actively developing as a full time employee at a large tech company, you're working on integrating systems, either through a build language or extending your software to use an already existing API.

What are the most useful skills for these tasks? Being able to communicate effectively, feeling comfortable asking questions, feeling comfortable admitting when you don't understand something, and being kind and friendly with those you interact with.

Therefore, when interviewing new hires, I do not ask many technical questions beyond a general competency question.

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A company full of people great at communication but too little technical expertise will fail. I think it takes both types - technical gurus who can generate useful information and solve the harder problems, plus connectors/communicators who gather information.

I get the feeling at many companies now, there are fewer truly interesting technical problems than there are engineers enthusiastic or desperate to exercise their hard-won CS knowledge. Most real-world work of commercial value requires skill of course, and experience, but is not especially algorithmic. I think the surge of interest in DS is that here people see an opportunity to do something mathematical day-to-day (but 10% or less of DS is the "sexy" stuff).

Much of the work I do that could be considered "data science" involves trying to write generic visualization tools that allows us to plot various datasets and the results from models we've built (a lot of 2D/3D/4D weather/atmospheric data).

This is data science, not software engineering.

>What are the most useful skills for these tasks? Being able to communicate effectively, feeling comfortable asking questions, feeling comfortable admitting when you don't understand something, and being kind and friendly with those you interact with.

I've never liked this idea or thought it was true. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how could of communicators people are if they don't have the skill or talent.

Give me a genius programmer on the spectrum over someone who smooth-talked their way through the interview but doesn't know shit any day.

What about the reverse? Genius programmer that's remote and can't speak the same language as you or your team?

I think either way, a completely non-technical "good communicator" or a "genius programmer" non-communicator make it difficult to get these tasks done.

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