Comment by Timothee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Timothee | Hacker News Reader

The part about "team player" doesn't make much sense to me.

How do you decide if someone is an "average team player" or an "above average team player"? Hard overall, impossible from a LinkedIn profile. Unless of course, they base their decision from what the people have entered themselves. But then again, who would put "I'm an average team player"?

That being said, considering the similar setup for comparison, it's interesting that "good communication skills" rates so poorly comparatively to "team player". It's not completely surprising I guess for software development (though I might disagree), but it also means I might want to update my profile/resume…

On another note, even though I rarely take part in the "programmer/developer/engineer" discussions, I find the "Python/PHP/Java… engineer" titles to be odd. These people are probably "software engineers", but "Python/PHP/Java… developers". The specific language doesn't mean much to your ability to engineer software. (unless maybe, you actually work on the language itself)

"above average team player" vs "average team player" literally made me laugh out loud. This whole infographic just an advert for mixtent. No real data posted? Simply percentages and rankings? At a minimum they could have included the sample size.

I was wondering the same thing. The most generous interpretation I can give Mixtent is that the survey asked its respondents to rate these developers as team players and then found that those developers who tended to be ranked as above average team players also tended to be ranked as better overall engineers. But in general, this "finding" destroyed all credibility the article might have had with me.

I think it does have some value.

I, like you, assume they did a cross questionaire (Do you prefer Alice or Bob? Do you think Alice is a better team player than Bob? Do you think Alice has a better work ethic than Bob? etc)

But while this does not tell us much about the fact that "better team players" get chosen more, it does teel that "people who appear more like team players" get chosen more.

Since most of what one puts in resume/cv is _trying to appear something_ the information that appearing a good rails dev is less useful than appearing like a good "team player" has some (arguable) value.

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