Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude | Hacker News Reader

Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

scarletink.com

68 pointsfagnerbrack72 comments

It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft skills will just flow like hot butter.

This is what I tell my friends:

Don’t see interviews as an adversarial thing. At the end of the day, your mindset should be:

* The company is looking for someone to do a specific job

* You have a unique set of skills and you are very good at doing certain things

* You are looking for certain things from a job

Interviewing is finding out if a relationship will work out — like a first date.

When I look at job qualifications, I am trying to figure out what actual job they need done and whether my experience and skills would be good for that. I honestly don’t even care that they are looking for X years of Y. They’re not looking for a warm bag of bones with a laundry list of skills: they’re looking for someone to do a specific job.

When an interviewer asks me questions, it’s because they like to do things a certain way and they just want to check if I do things similarly. They’re really asking about scenarios they’ve personally dealt with and trying to figure out my approach. I just tell them a story from the closest scenario that I’ve dealt with.

And when it’s my turn to ask questions, it’s the reverse. I know that I like to do things a certain way too and I want to find out if they do things like me. I just have question after question on the spot to build out a mental image of how they work, from day to day to overall company culture.

If you come in with a mindset of “be honest” without making yourself look inexperienced, you don’t have to be worrying about bullshitting, which they will pick up on anyway.

While there is an imbalance of power for sure, seeing interviews as a “fitting” process is much more advantageous and makes interviewing a breeze. It’s a first date. Don’t make it weird.

I agree with everything you're saying here

Also, in reading your post I noticed a normal human tendency that makes me wonder if hiring by interview doesn't inevitably introduce a small but pervasive organizational tendency toward a brittle culture

Notice that when describing your notion of alignment, you say you look for candidates who "do things like [you] do." I think that's insightful, true across interviewers, and from the perspective of organization-building, already a slight misalignment! I think humans tend to select for people who think more similarly to them, but the organizations I've seen that are the most creative and resilient are ones where people think as differently from each other as is possible (especially in terms of how they do things) while still being compatible (past a certain threshold I do think dissimilarity can make it impossible to agree or collaborate)

I know it seems like a small thing, but in aggregate I think it does a lot to explain a few larger-scale problems

You're clearly correct. If you look at almost any organization, the people that move up are the ones that are most like the people already at the top. The hiring process at most companies STRONGLY incentivizes hiring people who are near clones of the people doing the hiring.

The people hiring almost always assume an air of "I am the ruler by which all things are measured" and since I represent the prototype of a perfect and desirable employee, I would expect someone I hire to have very similar properties.

It's human nature. It's also why, if you don't look, behave, and share a lot of commonalities with the upper executives, you will likely never get invited to be an upper executive. And make no mistake, the upper level is a club, and they are really choosing the people they want to be in the club.

I think humans having their own culture and ultimately worldview is just a fact of life and the best that we can do is to learn to coexist and work with each other.

But we don’t have to work side by side for 40 hours a week. Why make both of us miserable?

And to your scenario, I personally too believe a culture of opposing voices is the best culture, but ourselves thinking that is… itself a worldview, making us a part of a subculture. And even then, there are limitations to my acceptance. For example, I strongly believe in keeping track of credit for ideas, so people who regularly forget who suggested an idea (or who don’t care who did it first in history) bother me immensely, so even if you had similar views as me, I wouldn’t want to work with you just on that alone. You are only a little different but, to me, in a wrong and unacceptable way.

But I’ll still work with you. I just don’t want to be on a team of you’s.

I think it's worth making a distinction between values and methods in many contexts, including here. Alignment enabling collaboration across value systems or sometimes even priorities can be much harder to achieve, and some would say undesirable depending on the context

For example, I've met a whole spectrum of viewpoints framed in reaction to the severe and growing housing crisis (esp. in the SF bay area) on this very website, some of which I could see acting as a strong filter on whether I would want to collaborate with someone

Depends on the org size and mission.

Huge? You want diverse approaches.

Medium? Diverse is probably better.

Small? You probably want strong alignment.

Tiny/Ramen-startup/doing hard things? Maybe diverse again. Maybe not.

I'm not sure if I agree, but this model would predict an interesting pattern where a disproportionate number of successful startups that grew went through an early phase of ideological/personality purging at the "small" phase

That might be true a small company but that's not my experience with FAANG interviews and all the companies with x-FAANG employees that just continue to do the same style of interview.

I get asked what I consider, silly and unrelated stuff. I work on native APIs and was being hired for native API stuff yet my interviews including things like designing server farms for which I have next to zero knowledge. I've never set up more than a simple server. I did get hired by one of them and most of the questions I was asked have never once had any relationship to my job ever.

There's also the leetcode stuff, many of which are of the variety "If you're seen this question before you'll know the answer, if not then it was a 1 in a million that one person solved it and then spread the answer but you're not going to solve it in this 45 minute session".

2 examples IMO are "find the smallest rectangle in a bitmap. The brute force answer is O(N^6). The fast answer is O(N) but I doubt anyone has solved the O(N) one on their own except an exceedingly rare few. The rest read the answer previously.

Another is the code inserted into a matrix and having its columns rotated, given the result, recover the code question which can only be solved by knowing the one single algorithm that fits pretty much nothing else except this toy question. If you've been exposed to it before you solve it. If not, you don't

Those questions didn't help them hire. I'm certainly productive without being able to answer them and so are several of my co-workers who admit to not being able to answer them. Most of us just feel like we got in by luck yet we're all super productive so it's not clear what the point of that interview style was. We were just the lucky few who got questions we knew the answers to already.

The point was to avoid hiring unlucky people, of course!

I like this way of looking at interviews, but it's a perspective that requires a lot more self-confidence than most people have.

You have to be confident that you have something of value to offer. You have to be confident that if this isn't a good fit there will be another one out there that is.

If you don't have this confidence then you'll have a hard time not treating every job interview as a sales pitch that you desperately hope they'll buy.

When I interview candidates, I try to give them opportunities to be their best confident selves, and see if they actually capitalize on it. In initial conversations, I ask them "what are you most proud of on your CV/resume?" From there, a good candidate should be able to go in depth on a topic they're comfortable with.

What I see in other orgs is a counterproductive---if not humiliating---hazing process with "gotcha" techno-trivia that has no bearing on the day-to-day tasking or gauging whether a candidate can grow in the team.

If my friend said that to me, I’d tell that if they’ve been doing stuff and getting experience, then they do have something to offer because they’ve obviously completed work and now know how to do something.

Not everyone needs to be solving cancer and if you haven’t been solving cancer, there’s no need to start trying to solve cancer. Of course, you can start trying at any time if you want too.

There’s always someone way better than you in the world but it doesn’t mean that they’re applying for the same job. Don’t worry about it and just speak honestly about what you’re good at and how it fits what the company needs.

I’ve worked with these cheerleader types. They have mastered the art of not doing any work, always nauseously happy about everything, even when it’s not appropriate for the situation, and are nowhere to be found when a project or task is due and you need help. In the worse cases, they play politics and actively undermine anyone who is critical of them or point out their (lack of) actual contributions.

If someone is overly enthusiastic and doesn’t have the skills it’s not always the case but often they are running a game on you.

I'd rather work with a slightly less qualified person who has a positive attitude than an overqualified person with a terrible attitude. The second type might write great code, but is energy draining for the whole team.

You sound like a manager. As an IC I'd much rather work with someone who's a little difficult but actually contributes, and the fake positivity that I often see from people in HR-adjacent roles/glorified paper pushers who don't have much actual work to do is really annoying.

Well, of course some minimal technical competence is a requirement.

I’m just saying that an unnecessarily negative attitude is more damaging to a group than one below average contributor.

that's hilarious...a grumpy senior engineer who has been in the trenches and is usually the kind of person that gets hard problems out the door is "damaging" but toxic managers who screw their team with a smile is normal or expected.

I realize you didn't say that exactly, but this is what the tone of OPs article is. IF you are a lowly IC, no matter how skilled, you must be the good subservient. The King demands a cheery disposition.

But the King is allowed to behave in any way he chooses. Capriciously firing people. Yelling, demanding, berating, snap judgements, etc...

> But the King is allowed to behave in any way he chooses. Capriciously firing people. Yelling, demanding, berating, snap judgements, etc...

I don't think anyone said that.

Bad attitudes are damaging regardless of which team member acts that way. Manager, Project Manager, Jr. Engineer, etc. An anxious/spazzy Project Manager can unnecessarily put everyone on edge.

Shitty people make other people miserable, period.

> You sound like a manager [not wanting an "overqualified person with a terrible attitude"]

They sound like a bad/lazy manager. If their report is overqualified, they need to be fed better, harder, larger work. If their report has a bad attitude, a decent manager would figure out what's misaligned and fix it.

That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of people who are emotionally-developed professionals.

I never said it was either-or.

Some people are super competent and have a great attitude while others can be below average and make everyone around them miserable. I’ve seen every combination.

I've also conducted hundreds of interviews at Big Tech and my experience is far from OPs. I can probably count with both hands the number of times that someone was technically weak across the board, but they got an offer due to their attitude and soft skills. All of these occasions were for intern or junior roles.

I agree that companies overindex on pretense of technical competence (e.g. asking leetcode hard questions), but I'd be very skeptic of extending an offer for a software engineer role who has literally failed all tech rounds, much more for Senior+ roles.

I've also worked with people like Chen, upbeat, likable people who just don't seem to get anything done. Because they are so likeable they get away with it for a long time, because who can be mad at them? However this almost always turns into a net negative for the team.

Going back to OP, who is the title aimed at? if it is a wakeup call for companies and hiring managers to obsess less on obscure coding puzzles and value soft skills and experience more, I'm all for it. If it is advice for job seekers in the current market, I'd say you should still focus on tech skills.

My guess is that it is a good advice for working in smaller companies or cities. I'm in a small city, and we don't have a lot of software development companies here. If anything, most of the programming work is more of a maintaining existing software or projects.

There it does feel that social skills are what's important, because you're more of a maintainer. And you're going to be working in a team because knowledge is so spread, and there's very rarely need for things to be done fast or efficient.

That being said it is just my feelings and it might not reflect how it looks somewhere else at all.

After years of upping the ante by ratcheting up what is expected for a technical interview, only to realize you've merely attracted people who are good at cramming for technical interviews, we're told now all that is overrated.

Maybe the whole time, people should have considered what adds value to the company instead of treating it as an entrance examination. A coding problem is appropriate if they're right out of school and you can't get a good feel for them, but usually, holding a conversation for an hour or so is enough to get a feel for whether or not this person can do the job you have in find, or think of a job they could do.

If having the disposition of a golden retriever is good for a particular role, then that's what you look for. A better soft skill, in my opinion, is knowing where to pick your battles and not arguing endlessly about everything else.

>A coding problem is appropriate if they're right out of school and you can't get a good feel for them, but usually, holding a conversation for an hour or so is enough to get a feel for whether or not this person can do the job you have in find, or think of a job they could do.

Facebook tried to recruit me once. They told me I needed to study Leetcode. I'm a researcher with a pretty good publication record and some bit of media coverage of that. I offered to give a "job talk" in lieu of the Leetcode and field their questions live. They insisted on the coding challenges. I told them to take a hike.

Unfortunately, I've heard similar stories from a Ph.D. in distributed databases applying to Google. At first, it seemed like a match. They were looking for someone with that exact knowledge. Then, a few emails later, the recruiter sent them "study material" for their interview. He just declined at that point.

Leetcode is a form of hazing that no other professional class endures. I'm surprised they don't make programmers solve problems for 36 hours straight to see how they do when massively sleep deprived. Just because...

EVERYONE in the tech world knows that nobody does leetcode like things in their daily jobs. The vast majority of actual software dev at large companies is untangling complex messes and dealing with cross team integrations (when relevant).

Actual hard problems in real domains might take years to solve and involve very large systems.

It’s used primarily as cargo culting and also as a way of suppressing salaries. Big tech and other companies use it to keep H1B candidates from easily switching jobs and having to do indentured servitude in hostile work environments.

That’s all it is - along with the entire industry being massively overqualified as a whole and needing a way to cull the recruiting pipeline to only the most desperate. (People on visas)

Mastery of the subject matter is never overrated when the goal is ambitious and the success criteria is unforgiving.

Bloated monopolies with compliant regulators can afford this sort of thing. FAANG was hungry once, and we got along because we respected each other’s abilities and were knife fighting our competitors.

Focus on an attitude of humility around what one still has to learn, what one always still has to learn. Focus on an attitude that others may always have something to teach.

Focus on an attitude that mastery is never attained, only arbitrarily pursued.

The interpersonal dynamics of mutual respect fall out.

I don't agree - it's about equal

A certain level of soft skills and attitude is required to function as a member of a team.

A certain level of technical skills is required to do the job.

Both have a minimum bar to clear and you shouldn't hire an asshole genius just like you shouldn't inept social butterfly or whatever the genius equivalent is for soft skills.

Once the bar is cleared you look at being better than required minimum in both aspects.

The author didn’t say the aren’t equal, at least, just technical is overrated. And I’d tend to agree. We historical weigh technical skills at like 95% of the assessment. It probably should be more like 60% and as we’ve moved in that direction we’ve had much better hires.

That's a flawed way of looking at it. A perfect tech skill candidate would have 60% in the bag before you looked at soft skills getting them close to a pass.

You have to either have hard minimums on both or multiply them instead of adding.

You've summarized it nicely :)

Interviewers need to be careful to remain unbiased and objective about their criteria. Saying you evaluate on attitude and personality is pretty similar to letting personal biases and stereotypes drive the process.

> letting personal biases and stereotypes drive the process

also known as "culture fit"

Ignoring candidate attitude is not the way either, IMO.

Think back to how many ex-colleagues with insufferable attitudes you had to work with. Unless that’s near zero, I think attitude has to have some weight.

If you meet plenty of "insufferable" people then maybe you are the problem. I find most people behave nicely, no bullying or anything they do their job and they answer questions when asked if you don't ask too often.

The worst for team morale were the people who had a hard time with their job and tried to defend or hide that, such people don't answer questions when you ask not because they don't want to but because they can't, their problem aren't social but technical, people who can easily answer do so.

Agree. In 30 years and thousands of colleagues, the truly insufferable are productively measured in the dozens. The outsized impact they have on the team until eventually (hopefully) fired is still worth paying attention to potential signals in the interview process, IMO. (This is several times more important if they're going to have any leadership responsibilities as part of their role.)

I completely agree with this assessment.

But to play devil's advocate, someone else might claim that if I never meet any insufferable people, I am likely the most insufferable of all. (Just trying to steel man the position I disagree with here.)

If you've ever played for a high level competitive team, you'd know this is moreso true than the reverse (though technical skills definitely matter a lot). If you play in a Hall of Fame guild in World of Warcraft (top 200 guilds to clear Mythic in the World), they evaluate you in two ways. Number one is how you respond to criticism, and number two is how competent are you playing compared to others at a similar level that play your class and role. It's number one first, because those that want to be the best typically will have a great attitude toward failures. It's also because attitudes rub off on others you interact with a lot, so you're bringing everyone down if you complain, shift blame, take it personally, etc. The amount technical skills matter here is just that you won't get into one of these guilds without good parses and full mythic clears already.

I agree with this article in spirit, but in practice we have made some very bad Jr-ish hires on attitude alone, which we tend to look closely at where I work. There needs to be a verified bar of technical excellence in order to succeed at engineering. There's too much stuff to learn.

Going into an interview with a can do attitude doesn't say much about problem-solving abilities; it also says nothing about getting over humps, or determination in the face of real difficulties. One can be enthusiastic about anything.

At a more senior level, a company can probably have a better handle on what you're capable of. At that point, it's more about fit for a given role and, really (although folks here may not like this), whether you click--the first date thing. Which IMO is perfectly fine especially at a more senior level.

Of course, I say this as someone who has gotten every one of my (few) jobs since grad school through personal connections.

Not sure of this is the right comparison but I once saw a presentation about high performing teams which were compared to top league sports teams. In this regard of course you don't want a jerk that ruins the whole team but you definitely want someone who can actively help you winning and that's usually mostly done by technical skills. In my mind I still hope that the "game" is about programming and not politics.

My opinion is that attitude is a big deal, in some teams/orgs it's more important than technical skills.

However, not everyone (self included) has good enough in-person ability to emit a positive attitude. I've had a person come up to me and tell me I look too serious while I'm in the middle of serious and challenging technical work. I can't be immersed in technical work and appear approchable or happy unless maybe I practice putting on a fake smile.

When I'm working from home, you can't see my face, based on my chat responses you will think I have a great attitude.

The most productice and objectively succesful year of my career was during covid and it was downhill after they started forcing to have office days.

Not only that, back in the day when I did shift work, I chose nightshift despite my managers telling me my skills could be more useful during the day. I made that choice because like wfh, interactions were remote (plus no distractions), the social aspect of getting people to think positively of you is much easier remotely.

I can't speak for others, but personally, I spent almost no time socializing outside of work, I have "no life", I spent most of my time socializing on the internet or having fun with tech stuff (or just watching movies).

I had a senior manager give me some good news once, I thanked him and told him how grateful I was. My manager later on tells me the senior manager thought I was unhappy. I have no idea what I could have said or sounded/appeared like to indicate my positive reception of the news. I would love to learn and practice such skills but until then, in-person is a major barrier for me.

Uh, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it overrated. While I agree with advice that it’s important to have a good attitude and round your technical skills out with soft skills, if you’re looking for a technical job your technical skills are literally what you’re hired for. The soft skills get you in the door, differentiate you from other less rounded candidates, and make for a more productive and happy team. I’ve made the mistake of giving too much leeway to hires that had a good attitude but just couldn’t swing the fucking bat. And we all know how destructive ingratiating, subservient types can be.

I mostly find the ones who have tech skills beyond their peers to be easy to work with. The ones I find problematic are those with ambitions that exceed their skills or role.

Edit: There was one exception I recall who was brilliant and got shit done but was cynical as hell. The place was somewhat dysfunctional and they'd been there longer than most, so maybe finding a better place was the answer for them.

> He has been at Amazon for years, has been promoted a couple of times

I guess this is the Dilbert principle? Hire a few incompetent people, promote them to middle management so they don't screw up the actual work. It probably does work when you have a constant supply of skilled programmers at the lowest tier with 6-month turnover. (NB: that is just Amazon rumors, no idea what actual turnover is like)

Just to flip this around & play with it some: how do people feel about the importance of technical skills? Has the importance increased or decreased? Has it changed or shifted some how? What's different about how technical skills serve us today?

This question dovetails immensely into this question of what role AI will have in the future, I feel like. It informs how replaceable people are by ML.

I hope that more employers start to value other skills in additional to technical skills. It’s absurd to me that you can be a successful software engineer, but will likely be unable to land a new job without dedicating time to brushing up on Leetcode-style programming questions. Investing time on this won’t make you better at your current job and as simply a gatekeeping exercise.

Yeah it’s pretty stupid but everyone is willing to play the game since we all need to eat.

I did drop out of Facebooks interview process right after the recruiter told me i need to come up with a better reason why i wanted to work at facebook for the next interview. I told them i thought they were going a little too far and I didn’t want to work at a company that was that full of themselves.

I had a Snap recruiter say I wasn’t excited enough about a C++ job writing cat filters for me to interview with the team - when she had promised to send me a link to their Lens Studio stuff to evaluate but never did. What was I supposed to do, don cat ears over the phone? Mind you this was the day after they laid off 10% of the company.

> He demonstrated a knowledge of Amazon’s business and history and explained how he would put in any energy necessary to be a successful part of the company.

I really can't do that if I was him, because it means I have to lie.

Latest news I read about amazon is that they were banned from lobbying in the EU parlement for refusing to answer to allegations regarding their labor practices.

As if today's excessively interview-ritual-prepped people needed to be told more things to fake.

I suspect most big-tech hiring realizes this, but mostly they just want large numbers of disposable interchangeable worker drones, and they have theories/evidence suggesting they should select for candidates who demonstrate willingness to contort themselves to whatever prepped interview rituals the company demands.

I've given up on the increasingly dysfunctional/dystopic big-tech, so will probably have to found a startup, and sadly filter out any candidates who present like they're trying to pass a BS-tech interview.

The title of the article, is, of course, just click-bait. And the author of the story could only make Chen (the subject of the story) an offer because they had others on staff who could be tasked to train him and/or cover the gaps in his technical skills.

I guess the main point was that enthusiasm, self-awareness, openness, curiosity, leadership, etc. are of important. Of course they are, does anyone disagree with that? But I think an important point lost in how the message is presented is that these things are not in opposition to technical skills. You can have both.

Depends. I rather have world most obnoxious but most skilled in history brain surgeon operating my brain than a nice guy soothing my ear but me dying on the operating table. Deep down we all prefer Dr House. But PC culture mandate we picked a more PC person. Always look for technical skills first then evaluate how you can work with that. You want a superior culture of technical expertise and have the team built around it. Not the other way round building teams around a nice bean counter...e.g. what happen to Philips.

This is the thing. Amazon is basically a fast food restaurant or a best buy and not a technology company like say Google. The only real difference between Amazon and say IBM, is that Amazon is younger and used to have pretty smart leadership. It is a conformist place that is really only successful because Wall Street doesn't want to fund more than one ecommerce company.

I'm so jaded and bitter about the industry, this article triggered me a bit, but the advice is generally in the right direction.

> During the final five minutes, when candidates can ask questions, Chen posed as many as he could fit in (I let the interview run over).

I'm probably making a big deal out of a few words here, but how much enthusiasm am I really suppose to have towards a company and culture where I'm generously allowed (/s) to ask questions during the final 5 minutes?

> In training new bar-raisers at Amazon

I don't know who this "bar-raiser" term applies to, hopefully everyone? Everyone wants to be a bar-raiser, but I bet most of them are trying to raise the bar in ways that are important to them but not valued by the company. How much enthusiasm am I suppose to have for a company that doesn't value the things I do? Yet when I accept that my bar-raising efforts are not appreciated by the company and instead try to just work for a paycheck and nothing more, then I have the attitude problems the article warns against.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Chen was a new developer? I was enthusiastic like Chen once, but 20 years in the industry ruined me, and it will ruin Chen too I bet.

</rant>

A true piece of advice here is that the most important thing you can do in an interview is make the interviewers like you. Chen lacked the required skilled, everyone "agreed that he missed the technical bar across the board", but they offered him the job. Why? Because they liked him. Making the interviewers like you is the most important thing you can do.

Being naively enthusiastic and subservient to power is a way to do this. Consider faking it if you really need the job.

I also suggest thinking out loud through any technical discussions or problems you work on. Imagine a good Twitch streamer playing a video game you've played before, you know how to solve the problems, and it's quite enjoyable watching someone else work though the same problem again, especially if they are vocal about it in an engaging way. The interviewers know the problems, and they enjoy watching other people work though the problems that they already know how to solve. It's more fun for the person doing the interview too; lower the tension, get a conversation flowing, show that you can collaborate on problems well, that's more important that stoically solving the problem in silence.

Someone new, and let's be honest, who is naïve and hungry for the big-tech paycheck is going to naturally be enthusiastic.

Compare that to someone who has worked in organizations for 20+ years. That person is going to be a realist, which doesn't automatically mean toxic/negative. But they are not going to bounce around the zoom screen with excitement.

This is hard to take seriously from Amazon.

I realize it's a big org with many diverse teams. It's just that the company seems to be rotting from the head down. And it's hard to overlook the stories of how some employees get so exploited.

I fear that many people high up in comfortable positions - ie L6+ - have drank the kool-aid with respect to this corporation, and why wouldn't they they get paid rather well, it's the L4s and L5s that get screwed over or have a carrot of promises dangling in-front of them.

Amazon prizes attitude? This article reads like counter programming to the articles that said Amazon treats its workers as disposable.

If you need your workers to eat shit then it is a problem if you hire people who will leave when you tell them to eat shit, so you hire people with the right "attitude" to get good results.

To be fair, in a comment on the original article, the author does confirm that this was a career fair type of event, where I'd assume the "hiring bar" is usually lower, and I'd assume there are certain target numbers to hit.

> the company seems to be rotting from the head down

A strange metaphor that is more fiction than fact (as most cliches are). I couldn't find an academic paper on the topic but did find an article that said "putrefactive processes occur in the intestines, that is, in the section of the fish carcass inhabited by bacteria and microbes that enter the body with food." which sounds likely.

A more thoughtful response: https://thoughtmanagement.org/2011/11/21/does-the-fish-rot-f...

Personally I think many people have a deep belief in hierarchy and they pick models that fit that belief (or conspiracies!).

I try to look at things more systematically and I tend to look for emergent causes from our society rather than blame individuals ostensibly in charge!

But a great saying. Terrible SEO spam article but contains a little history: https://vogueindustry.com/17250557-the-fish-rots-from-the-he...

> rotting from the head down

Jeff Bezos stepped down 2021 - need a better metaphor.

Focus on both, this hire for the vibes non-sense doesn't get the best product build, I will hire someone who has less social skills, than I am likely to hire someone with low technical skills but a good attitude fore most technical positions.

Work with fun people who aren't jerks. Arrogance and ego are counterproductive and wastes of energy. Look for other people who are curious because the incurious are just there for a paycheck. The end.

Sure, attitude should be right, but this as well could be a survivorship bias - Chen has been working for a couple of years and turned out to be a success. Was the conclusion made from one example?

Preaching is easy. Practicing is hard.

I would like to see Amazon Director+ having a winning attitude, not an adversarial one pitting people against each other.

Until these directors can fix a bug, they should not be allowed to talk about tech skills. Their fluff pieces are merely delusional articles meant to garner "likes" on social media.

"Attention to detail" this is maybe the most important thing, comes with good focus, and also I'd say pragmatism

kiss the right people's ass and make sure you are well liked. Everything else is secondary

This is a rarity.

Many interviewers are so biased and lack nuance that they literally just go with whether or not the person passed the question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com