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Comment by robotsonic | Hacker News Reader

>Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

This result seems a bit unsurprising. People who work at Google would already be in the top n-th percent in terms of STEM expertise. If everyone you hire is 'above average' then being a bit better than that has marginal gains and other factors would lead to your success. I'd be curious to see how this plays out at smaller firms where they cannot afford to hire the top-end STEM expertise.

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Your observation is a great one, and I'd love to see more data on this as well.

A related point, though, also rings true. Soft skills like being a good coach and effective listening are so underinvested in, that even marginal improvements in those skills lead to huge differences in success.

I see this in engineering leadership workshops that I've run with Jean Hsu and Diana Berlin, where even teaching a handful of coaching and listening skills can have a transformative impact on participants.

If you're interested in future workshops, you can sign up to hear about them here: https://effectiveengineer.typeform.com/to/cDMeZu

Do you have any ideas on how companies can better assess soft skills during interviews?

At Quip, we run one coding interview that happens on a laptop, and where your conversation and discussions with the interviewer, including how you handle suggestions and feedback, matter a huge deal.

For experienced hires, we'll do deep dives on technical projects that they've worked on. Sometimes, I'll frame these as "Suppose I'm a new member joining that team. Bring me up to speed." These interviews focus on whether the candidate can clearly articulate concepts, explain the big-picture motivations, defend decisions they've made, understand complex technical problems, and stay humble and share lessons learned.

For manager interviews, we'll also do interviews that are one-on-ones with engineers on actual issues that they're facing.

> we'll also do interviews that are one-on-ones with engineers on actual issues that they're facing.

Be careful with this approach. If you're not paying candidates for their interview time, you're not allowed to use their work. Big companies go to great lengths to demonstrate that the entire interview is for the purpose of a hiring decision and nothing more. This is to limit liability. Your approach is very dangerous for your company and if an unhired candidate's idea shows up in your product, even if you arrived at that result independent of the interview, the candidate has a strong case against you in a lawsuit.

If you're doing interviews like this, be sure you've discussed all the nuances with your company's lawyers.

Do you just want something that assesses soft skills?

Or do you also want something where all your interviewers will give the same candidate the same score, and that's robust against being gamed?

The former is easy: "Tell me about a time you helped a colleague improve their performance", "What do you think makes for a good coach?" etc etc.

The latter? I've never seen a convincing way of doing it.

I strongly agree with this analysis. It's already a population with strong STEM abilities, it should suffer from some sort of diminishing returns after an already high hiring standard on a company well-known for hiring only top students.

It's like conducting an analysis on skills of all F-1 drivers, and what differentiates champions from remaining pilots. I'd expect a lot of mindset-related and soft skills to appear as key indicators, and "driving abilities" to have a minimal gap between drivers.

This would be like a study that found that height was completely uncorrelated with performance in the NBA. Doesn't mean that height is irrelevant in basketball, only that selection bias is in full effect and that we're not looking at a 'normal' population with respect to height. Same IMO with respect to google and engineering skill.

This makes so much sense and frequently overlooked. I find even in other areas (such as sports), what makes someone seem really impressive generally isn't what is actually important.

A dumb example is from cycling, people frequently over-practice the ability to sprint at the end of a race but what is really important is the ability to conserve energy throughout the race... Really dumb example, but I think it is somewhat similar.

Another likely bias is that success is probably measured by peer review, and peers are more likely to overvalue soft skills.

Is there any evidence this is happening? I work at Google and as a lower level engineer more often than not wish some of the leads had better soft skills which makes me think they're not emphasized nearly enough in terms of promotion, which is at least one measure of success.

I believe promotion committees try to see measurable impact, which at least to me sounds like soft skills unfortunately don't help much..

Hopefully this will not morph into another recruiting mantra like it went with bullshit interview questions.

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