And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?
Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?
Even if someone is really smart, you have no way of knowing if they are if they can't communicate that with you. Not to mention working on a team is all about communication.
I mostly agree with your assessment, except I don't think that it's unfortunate at all. If applicants are so dense that no one can get along with them, those people, imo, should be removed from the team.
It doesn't matter that you can 10x everyone around you, when you are bumming a team consisting of hundreds of people out.
The problem discussed above was that some people are simply bad at handling the kind of stressful situations that interviews present them with. (Note, it's not necessarily about any stressful situation, just one where you're under intense scrutiny.) Hence, you can end up not hiring someone because they're struggling to show their skills in an interview, even though they'd be an excellent hire otherwise (including being a great team member). This is, indeed, unfortunate.
I do, yes. IME, candidates that take the time to learn the skill will take the time to learn other skills required for the job. If a candidate can't be bothered to learn a skill to get a job, why should I hire them for a senior position? If it's entry-level, that's a different story.
For example, I went from web-hosting software to fitness industry software. There is very little overlap in skills beyond 'writing software'. At hosting job, scale was the biggest issue (dealing with hundreds of millions of events per second) where now, legal/insurance type issues are the biggest hurdles. It requires a totally different way of thinking and knowledge set to be effective at a senior level. If you're just focused on 'writing software' then you're not senior material, you're just a programmer ... not an engineer.
Signalling is an important thing, it's why you iron your shirt before the interview - it may even be why you have a degree. The cost of false positives is high, so if this filters out skilled engineers who think are appeasing the interviewer's ego, the system is working.
This is a skill, learning to sell yourself. It translates into being able to get sell innovative projects to stakeholders, to learning new things, to understanding business requirements.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d love to hear why or how.
Why should I do algorithm or math related tasks as a frontend developer for example. Soft skills are way more important than preparing for potential interview questions.
You say this as if it's a bad thing.
The reality is, companies have multiple qualified applicants for each open role. Hiring teams are actively raising the bar and trying to find more ways to narrow the pool down. If there are 10-20 qualified applicants in the pipeline, and half of them interviewed terribly, it's very easy to cut the applicant pool in half by rejecting the people who couldn't communicate their experience clearly during the interview.
Remember, "interviewing skill" is just another way of saying "how good are you at communicating with prospective employers".
Communication is usually an important hiring criteria. Ability to communicate well in an interview ("good interviewing skills") is a good proxy for ability to communicate in general.
The same reason that your skills are required for the job you are paid for, I suspect. To ensure that you can actually perform your job properly.
Nothing is easy.
Everything in a balance.
Downturns always reveal the important of relationships — the true gold and what is always worth investing in and collecting.
This is my fourth downturn. Nothing — nothing — has fundamentally changed.
I expect it resolves just fine. The intense effort that you acknowledge is precisely what it takes to move forward in this field.
Definitely. Motivation is of major importance in whether a new employee will be successful or not. And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.
Ofc it is not the only factor to take into consideration, but surely an important one.
Seems like a double standard.
There's got to be some give and take in a relationship with an employer. If you're feeling exploited, you're not in the right role. And that will show in the quality of your work. Work can be fun and interesting, and someone who enjoys what they do will relish the opportunity to learn. I know that for me interviewing, though tough, has always been an opportunity to solidify my basic understanding of the field I'm in. Maybe figure out what you enjoy, and find an employer who respects you equally?
I mean that's a good attitude, but really some industrues and some fompanies are exploitative.
And I am not talking Cobalt mines or McDonalds. Look at the game industry- really good developers, much more skilled than average web dev, and they get shit pay and long hours. Why does anyone work there? People exploit their passion.
So they are orthogobal concepts - maybe you are passionate, and someone takes advantage of that
Ask them. They are choosing to work there. They have options.
Also why is McDonalds an example of an exploitative company?
Because we (in UK) are paying in-work benefits to help people who work there survive. So the taxpayer is subsidising the labour costs of this business. If we didn't, there wouldn't be enough people willing to work at McDonalds.
We should only pay benefits to people who are unemployed, a job has to cover costs of sustaining employees. The same pronpem is faced by british farmers - they can't exploit romanian students with schemes where they pay them below minimum wage by charging £50/day for libing on the farm in a tent. And there arent enough british folks who want to break their back for minimum wage.
As a society we have decided that people deserve a livable wage. That is a good thing. Minimum wage laws are a distorting way to accomplish this because they put a cost that should be borne by society (no-skill workers should have a livable wage) and force it on industries that employ workers with no skills. Subsidizing the income through government transfers is frankly a more equitable means of achieving that goal.
That being said, in such a regime however minimum wage laws are necessary, not because McDonalds is exploring the workers, but because they are likely to exploit the government.
That only happens when McDonalds is paying exactly as much as the value they get back. Which is doubtful. If forced to pay more or shut down, your average McDonalds would prefer to pay more. They wouldn't be losing money.
In case someone doesn't see the absurdity of this situation, let me make it clearer:
We all have 24 hours in a day. Given that fact, whenever I'm at the crossroads between "practicing my interview skills" and "diving deeper into <insert language/framework/specialization>" then it makes sense that I should be prioritizing the former because prioritizing the former implies that I will be motivated enough to learn and work with the latter, and nothing more.
Why not just learn the latter in the first place?
I'd argue that interviewing well is strongly correlated with skills that are valuable for a SWE role. It's not perfect, but overall I do feel like there is signal there.
I never said that. I said it's a very important factor, but there are other factors as well. Also, not interviewing well doesn't necessarily mean that you didn't prepare anything. Preparing also means reading up about the company, putting some effort in your CV etc. What I'm looking for, again just as one of the indicators, is that the candidate has put some effort.
The idea that someone investing time and effort into being a smooth interviewer somehow shows that they’re “motivated” seems like a weird tribal dance to me. Who does it benefit?
And again, this is not the only indicator I'm looking for. A candidate who didn't prepare much but can tell very enthusiastically about some project or technology is obviously motivated as well.
What I would say I look for in software developers is people who are genuinely interested in software development. You don’t need to be a committer on 4 open source projects, but show me that you actually like the work (the fun parts at least.) If you’re also interested in the business domain that’s not necessarily required, but a huge plus.
Well, yes, desperate people are going to be "motivated" and work really hard to get the job.
But remember this cuts both ways: people who aren't desperate with have no problem leaving you you for the next big thing. Being an employer doesn't put you in some default superior position. You need workers and workers need work.