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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

All tech companies need to do is pursue some niche hobby or game modding/speedrunning/hacking forum, it's the low hanging fruit of neurodivergent savants, most of whom are likely significantly smarter than most engineers at any non-FAANG tech company, just without the necessary social skills for the hiring game.

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I went through the hoops recently for a technical support role for a large company that makes NAS appliances.

I was given an in by a friend already working there as she personally had my resume forwarded to her manager and joked "he's used Gentoo for 15 years, he can do this"

Despite years upon years of experience, the final hiring manager round believed I "wasn't interested" in the role because I "didn't ask any questions about the company"

During said interview (a forth round of interviews) I had admitted that I'd either asked everything I wanted to know either to the employee who referred me, or the managers in previous rounds.

As an absolutely neurodivergent person I was quite surprised by this response. In my own mind I would have thought "I've been picking the brain of your employee for weeks" would have demonstrated quite a high level of interest.

Sadly as they say I "didn't play the interview game" and thus have come up short

That's such a stupid reason to reject someone, i wonder if the company was just making up reasons. Its basically impossible to have interesting questions about the company after round 4 of interviews.

I mean, in most tech jobs the social skills don't end at the hiring game. I've had several jobs where dealing with corporate culture and its games, managers, peers, meetings, review cycles, etc was significantly harder than any of the tech stuff. Many companies are at least partially dysfunctional and some are very dysfunctional. Being able to understand the power games going on, not fully but at least enough to stay out of the fray, can sadly be a critical skill.

Wow there's a lot of prejudice to unpack there, but the one I'm most curious about is your impression that people are working at non-FAANG businesses because of their excellent social skills.

There's a lot of imagined, manufactured offense here which should perhaps remain packed up. You know a strawman fallacy makes your paraphrasing both inaccurate and rude, no?

> neurodivergent savants, most of whom are likely significantly smarter than most engineers at any non-FAANG tech company, just without the necessary social skills for the hiring game.

Was replying to this.

> neurodivergent savants

That's stereotyping.

> significantly smarter than most engineers at any non-FAANG tech company

Elitist in more ways than one by claiming engineers working anywhere but a FAANG are not only dumber than FAANG engineers, but also inexperienced kids.

> just without the necessary social skills for the hiring game

Ah yes all it takes is "one weird trick" to get hired!

That "one weird trick" is probably 60-70% of why you would pass an interview. If you've gotten to an interview, they already believe you have the technical qualifications. The technical / white board interview is just due diligence. Having social skills requisite to make the interviewers like you is very literally the only thing they don't know about you, which is what they're testing for.

The hiring requirements for FAANG / MAGMA / F100 companies are higher than those for non-FAANG. Maybe smarter isn't the best term, knowledgeable or competent would work better. His point still stands though.

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