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Comment by theprotocol | Hacker News Reader

>you can learn what you need to know on the job

Maybe I've had bad luck, but I've encountered very few prospective employers who were OK with this. The ones I encountered expected to hire someone who would fit in like a jigsaw puzzle piece and they wouldn't settle for anything less. My confidence in my ability to pick up almost any tech quickly did not impress them, and they latched on to my lack of that particular bullet point and kept hammering on things like "oh, you don't know what a [platform-specific term for auto-scaling groups] is?..."

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Same. And I spent 10 years at a company where my job, literally, was new small projects, every 6-12 months, often radically different platforms and technologies, where I had to "come up to speed". (has it's plusses and minuses - you learn a lot of breadth, not a lot of depth). But interviewing for me, has been a very frustrating experience. When I did land a spot, they were desperate, as it turns out. And in interviewing and making hiring decisions for my team; I've had to make these same types of judgment calls. I look for candidates who have enough experience that I know they're not bullshitting. And I look for a work history that shows a progression of continually taking on new skills and roles. Because that's what this job really is. Anyone who's been doing this in the real world for at least 10 years knows this. But it's really puzzling to me how so many hiring managers at so many places just don't seem to understand this.

The same thing happened to me. Recently, one company put me through three Python challenges. One on the phone, and then later two in person. One was on the whiteboard, with no "hello" or questions about who I was, starting immediately as I entered the room. I completed his assignment (and in an object-oriented way). Later he said, "We're looking for someone who can come up to speed quickly." And later HR said, "Feedback was very mixed, but unfortunately you don't come up to speed quickly."

I answered all the questions, have a proven track record, am self-taught for 15 years with increasingly high salary / rates, and yet for this one guy I was incapable of learning quickly. This was determined in a 30 minute whiteboard interview I passed.

Some of the interviewers have extremely low sociability on the psychological scale, even if they're tech geniuses (which isn't even evident). Everyone talks about the skillsets, S-curves and so on, but no one talks about the mediocre evaluation process by those who aren't good at it.

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