Interviews

"What's you're biggest weakness?"

"I'm going to say my honesty"

"Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness..."

"I don't give fuck what you think.".

"you're hired"
Had more or less this exact conversation with the manager during an interview for a promotion I really wanted years ago.
I did not get it.

Maybe an alternate perspective, but I do a lot of interviews for technical roles like developers, product owners, architects, etc.

There’s often a perception that the role can be done isolated at a desk grinding on tasks, but that is often not the case. It’s easy to find people who will do task work, but really hard to find people who are capable communicators and empathizers with the people they will be working with. At the end of the day, we’re trying to fill the roles with someone who we can trust alone in a room with a customer, and not someone who will be alone in a room doing tasks.

I hear you and essentially don't disagree. But I feel like this might lean a tad toward gaslighting.
Plenty of people are fine communicators when it comes to genuine collaborative work but still find the "game" of job applications very difficult or impossible.
Being left alone with a customer is not a thing at all for many roles.
Embracing diversity in abilities and doing so transparently is a thing that can be valuable for both companies and humanity. Presuming everyone can do all the things is, IMO/IME, damaging. It leads to cutting out people who have something valuable to offer. But also leads to not recognising when people are properly bad at something despite the fact that they really shouldn't be given their seniority and role.
In the end, a job application/interview is not like the job at all (whether necessarily or not). That there are people in the world who would be disproportionately good at the job but bad the application seems to me an empirical fact given the diversity of humanity. And recognising this seems important and valuable in general but especially for those trying to understand their relationship to the system.
- Yes I agree, you make some really valuable points here that I don’t disagree with. There’s a bit of an art to this and it is certainly not a realistic expectation that someone should be universally capable. Somewhere in that gray space between universally capable and walking hr incident is where we all fall.
- Well said.
  I can mask pretty easy dealing with customers because for the most part the interaction is predefined.
  Trying to deal with the doublespeak and lies and unspoken requirements of situations like interviews is hard/impossible.
  Because its all nebulous.
True. What the image should say is Capitalism is hell for autistic people. And non-autistic people. And all other people. Capitalism is really only not hell for those born wealthy.
- Yea, because non-free-markets don't require people to get along?
I was just going to say something similar to this. The job application is an assessment for your technical abilities/skills for the job.
The interview is a second assessment to gauge your personality and communication to make sure it's a fit for the team.
There are VERY few jobs where you can work in isolation. Teamwork, personality and communication are important for almost all jobs. Hench the assessment that gauges those aspects.
But I don't want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.
Then you aren't hiring programmers, you hare hiring client reps, and your final products will reflect this.
It's always who you blow and not what you know. A "good fit" is better for the office than a "skilled worker."
- Relevant skills for most jobs are both technical and social, I think you’re implying that the decision is often made purely on social skill sets when technical are what matters and I see this differently.
  If I’m hiring for an Architect for example, I am expecting them to help grow and guide developers, engineers, analysts, and administrators while collaborating with stakeholders AND possessing relevant domain technical expertise. Only having the domain technical expertise isn’t useful without the social skill set to leverage it.
  Similarly if I’m hiring for an engineer, in expecting them to work with other engineers, their architect, their analysts, and their supervisors AND have relevant domain expertise. Again if they only have one half of that they aren’t actually functional.
  It does change for entry level roles, and this may be an unpopular take… but for entry level roles I could care less about your technical knowledge… I’m looking for people who are entering this domain and can demonstrate intangibles like initiative, curiosity, and…. social skills. These are much better leading indicators of success as they are harder to teach and train, and frankly if they have those skills I can trust that the senior roles around them will help develop their technical skills.
But how do I show I am that guy day-to-day but not when it's a high pressure situation I've been playing my head over and over for days?
I've found ways around it but never know when you could need this kind of advice.
- Let it go.
  Seriously. That's the answer. Don't worry about the interview. Just see it as another conversation.
  I the end, interviews are no better than picking names out of a hat, this from research done by Harvard some 20+ years ago.
There are many jobs where the vast majority of your workforce does not also have to be your sales department. Expecting everyone to do so is ableism.
- You’re right about many jobs not being sales, my apologies if I made it sound like my scope of commentary was exclusively oriented to those roles.
  Social skills are important more broadly than sales, and I’m mostly talking about how they apply in the organization as someone interacts with other peers.
but that is often not the case
Is that what you think as a manager or is that the answer I would get from your most introverted dev?
95% of my work is done by me, alone at a desk…

“What is your biggest weakness?”

“Bullet wounds.”

“…”

“Oh and stab wounds too.”

Acid - I'm vulnerable to acid... I checked that one while making Hominy one time.
- .... Had to check but you definitely use a base for that, not an acid.

Don't worry, once you get the job you'll discover that they lied about what the work is anyway. You thought the job was sitting quietly at a desk and solving little dev tasks. Actually that's 25% of the job, the rest is: 25% meetings where they make doing the little tasks harder, confusing, and miserable, 25% other tasks you aren't good at and that aren't part of your job, and the last 25% is more meetings about those other things. The ratios will adjust over time until only about 10% of your job is doing your job, and the other 90% is email and meetings.

So many god damn meetings could be a fucking email - or a group chat.
Or skipped.
- This is why jesus invented mobile games

I was that more focused and productive person at two jobs. I answered customer emails at a bank and they actually had a meeting about me because my numbers were like 30-50% better than everyone else's. They thought maybe I wasn't actually DOING my work. I was, I was just good at it and quick at typing and copying and pasting and using templates. I streamlined all sorts of stuff to make my job easier. "How are you doing so many emails?!" "CTRL C and CTRL V and templates" "oh"

Reminds me of a friend of mine. He was promoted to some sort of engineering metrics analyst. His job it turned out, was to take a bunch of different reporting products and then create a presentation once a week to go over all of the metrics and have them in easy to understand graphs on a specific template.
So of course a month into the job he automates the entire thing and his job now takes a total of 5 minutes because he waits on the actual numbers to be crunched and spit out into the new template.
He's super bored and asks me if he should tell his boss what he's done and possibly get another promotion out of it. I said "Sure, if you want to be promoted to the layoff line."
So his boss gave him some extra tasks and he just keeps blazing through them. His boss wants to know how he's able to be the most productive person they've ever seen in that position. He asks me again, if he should tell the boss and his boss' boss because they are super impressed. I said "No. Absolutely not. Just shrug and tell them you just do your best every day. They'll eat that right up." He does. He gets a promotion a couple of months later to a middle manager of some type. Probably due the Peter Principle.
Don't ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
- Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
  I think you're usually legally obligated to. I mean, crappy boss never ask is one thing, but if they inquire how you do your job, which templates you use etc, the employer owns the templates you created during your paid work time on probably the computer which is also the employers property. You don't have to throw every detail about how you do your job on the table yourself if no-one asks, but if they do you should or they'ld win any legal dispute and you could be fired on bad (financial) terms. Likely whatever you show and explain is still to "complicated" anyhow.

The interview process is what is causing me the most anxiety right now. Lost my job at the end of June, and I KNOW I need to be looking harder, but I'm just dreading the whole interview process. I've been procrastinating like crazy...I just don't want to relearn a whole culture of a new team; it's so mentally draining. 12 years somewhere and the idea that I have to start all over again...😭

I got insanely lucky wit my job. I responded to an email that came through my college CS department about a potential job and got an in-person interview with the CEO of a tiny company nobody has heard of. The guy's personality made it easier to talk to him despite my anxiety.

Instead of the bullshit riddles that every other tech job interview has, he sent me home with a simple assignment to make a simple webpage where a user could log in.

After submitting that, I kinda forgot about it until several month later when I randomly decide to check my school email account and found an email from him that was almost a month old (my PC wasn't working before that, and I didn't need to use it much at the time).

I replied just in time. 12 years later I'm the most senior developer.

Where you really lucked out here was that the project is still going after 12 years and you haven't been through some bullshit outsourcing/insourcing cycle that clears out everyone who knows what they are doing
- Yeah. We have a bunch of clients so I can be on several projects at a time. And it's a privately owned company that, to my knowledge, the owner has no intention of selling.

Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.

Comfortable sure, but not, like, pajamas.
- As a man I've interviewed in a button down shirt, a skirt and open toe sandals and gotten a job offer. Only assholes and IBM require a suit and tie these days.
- Formal pajamas
- Unpopular opinion: I think jeans are honestly more comfortable than pajamas. Pajamas feel a bit too loose and airy somehow, jeans and a t shirt or something feel a bit closer and thicker and give a reminder that something is between your skin and the outside while still being soft.
To some of us, no clothes are comfortable.
Sensory issues are a sonofabitch and literally no neurotypical will ever have sympathy.
- Guess I'll start interviewing candidates in the nude.

My most talented coworker was a contractor that was hired on full time. He has repeatedly said he would never have made it through the hiring process. I think about that a lot.

Because it is bullshit. HR have no clue how to find good candidates, and whoever hired them to get a new hire had no idea what the new hire should be able to do and so just gave HR a few buzzwords to work with. But even if they had been given a good job description, they are basically muppets.

I think more than likely the NT world just doesn't think about people with autism, it's not hate.
- The way that autism is used as an insult says otherwise.
- No, no, I definitely feel the hate. It's real, and for some reason it got WAY worse after covid.
Interesting, you just replaced losers and clueless in the gervaise principle
https://thepowermoves.com/the-gervais-principle-summary-review/
- Jesus! Although I agree that sociopaths are running things, they are the cancer of this world. The reason why we overproduce for the landfill instead of having only as many people work as really needed due to our high output.
  Inventions are made by the smart and driven, not the manipulative. They just steal those inventions and run with them.
  Its still kind of interesting that there is someone on the complete opposite who thinks these monsters should actually rule. I think they should be excluded from any position of power since they are proven to be bad leaders, make bad decisions and cover up their mistakes by pointing at someone else.

I don't disagree but the way they describe it sounds more like an autistic nightmare. I don't know ADHD to be commonly associated with sensory issues and social cues and that hasn't been my direct experience with it. I've had issues with social cues but I've found it easier to pick up on them when I had peers to practice with that weren't put off by my adhd.

Also I don't know that I would be focused if they just gave me a job because of the whole adhd thing. I'm certainly not significantly better than anyone else in the building at my current job...

It even says autistic in the post. This is not an ADHD thing, even though it's common to have both.
- Oh lmao I didn't even catch that. Thanks adhd

jobs are designed specifically to torment autistic people

This is precisely why I gave up on getting an IT career lmao, fuck interviews

For the brief period when I was a manger, I tried to make interviews more work-related. I was told I couldn’t ask for a writing sample during the interview for a job that required writing clear, concise communications under pressure. This is one of many reasons why I am voluntarily no long supervisory in my field.

Ive done pretty well with being honest and I think I end up with happier positions ultimately than I might otherwise have had. The crap jobs weed themselves out.

This kinda depends on the job though. An office job, there's always going to be a social side because unless you're just a flunky, collaboration is a necessary skill for a skilled job in most office settings.

The extent of needed skill at the kind of social interaction you can estimate via interview varies, and a lot of people get stuck and screwed over when they don't actually need that skill set for the job, but we can't just pretend that even a minority of office work allows for a person to be an island. You at least have to be able to interact with project managers that keep otherwise unconnected workers synced up.

It helps if you can say that you suck at interviews, but can execute on the job, and can both say it in a useful way, then back up that claim. Not every hiring person will deal with that, which is bullshit imo, but even that is not outside of the range of bare minimum social skills.

When it comes right down to it, we as workers in a capitalist system have to make hard choices unless we want to start a revolution. You either work on the people skills, reject the kind of work that takes interviews and interaction, or you ask for accommodations and hope that works out.

The system as-is sucks for anyone not built for capitalist dreck like cookie cutter interviews, and it needs change.

I work in an office and I'm sure an autistic person could do my job just fine. The degree of socialization in my office is fairly low unless you initiate conversations with everyone intentionally. The real joke is needing to sit in a cubicle when your job can be done entirely remotely.

Most of this is because, for people who are hiring/interviewing, this is a distraction from the job they were hired to do. Figuring out who to hire isn’t usually one of their core competencies. So they base their decision on superficial bullshit (and then if needed justify their choice later). Often as the job seeker, you’ve learned more about candidate selection than they have, so you’d be better at picking someone than they would.

This doesn't make logical sense. If candidates are studying for what will get them jobs then that wouldn't make them experts in what is needed for the job but the frivolous bullshit that will get them hired.
- I think most people who hire people prefer a personal recommendation because they are never trained on how to spot talent. When they can’t take that shortcut, they grasp at straws.
  Rarely do you come across someone who actually knows how to pick the best candidate.

This is why you should apply for Civil Service jobs. Many have a written test and no interviews.

I hate written tests more than I hate interviews

Am I the only one with adhd who's good at and enjoys networking? Most of it is just asking specific questions based on prior information you've been given by the other person.

Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it's not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they've had. Then you get them to "teach" you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you've succeeded in networking.

People are passionate about their skills and hobbies, and most love to elaborate and explain the specifics of it, especially when they usually don't get to do it.

Remember those "Joe is forcing us to see his travel pictures" joke? This is basically that but you're actually interested in the pictures. Listening to someone being passionate about something is a lot more fun than others lead you to believe, give it a try, it's basically nt infodumping.

Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it’s not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they’ve had. Then you get them to “teach” you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you’ve succeeded in networking.
This works until you try it in DC and suddenly everyone is an analyst at the State Department and when you ask what they analyze they say "data."
They also don't have hobbies they're willing to talk about, and tend not to have strong feelings about music or TV or books or, really, anything.
I do not like networking in DC.
- Networking in DC is an extreme sport
I'm really great at networking. It's the only way I've found to find new jons. I still suck at interviewing though

Don't worry, the rest of us don't like the process either.

One of the best things you can do to prep is to find someone you can relate to at least a little bit who's already been through it, ideally someone with a few years under their belt, and do mock interviews with them. Interviewing sucks, it's not an easy skill and you hopefully won't need it very much. The first ones are always the hardest.

"None of this has anything to do with your ability to perform the desired task" is the major flaw in this. Social interaction is a pretty huge part of any job where you work with people, and so-called "chemistry matches" are often rated as the top thing teams are looking for. This is why so many hiring managers will bring in other team members into interviews.

Edit: just because you don't like this fact doesn't make it less true. People want to work with other people that they don't want to strangle.

You just have to figure out the ways your autism makes you a good worker and explain it to them. Honestly chatgpt could probably help with the wording if you just explain your autism to it lol

Everyone needs to go through that shit at least once... if you're lucky you can lean on your network of former co-workers to provide references that let you just be open "I suck at interviewing" from that point onward. I hope you eventually achieve this blissful state because I too cannot maintain eye contact for more than half a second.

Oh yeah because us autistic people are WELL KNOWN for our networking skills...
Honestly every person who tells an autistic person to 'leverage their network' deserves to get dickpunched by a bear

!ausomememes@lemmy.autism.place

Just crosspost :)
- I did before I left that comment. I just wanted to make sure you knew that community existed since this meme really has nothing to do with ADHD and everything to do with autism, and you posted it in the ADHD community.