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Want To Work For a Cool Tech Company? Hone Your Social Skills
jfruh writes Big companies like Google may need to fill seats with high-skilled workers, but smaller companies — which often fit the profile of the hip workplaces people dream of — still have the luxury of picking and choosing. That's why applicants' social skills and "cultural fit" are so important, which may shatter your dreams of tech as a clique-free meritocracy.
Want to work for a startup which is guaranteed to fail? Go look for employers who care more about having fun than getting shit done.
Don't like working with nerds and introverts? Then your tech business will fail.
Rich white frat boy "tech founders" like being around other rich white frat boys. Anyone that says otherwise, has never set foot in present day San Francisco.
Want to work in a decent, non-dead-end job, with the opportunity to advance your career and make a meaningful difference to the world? Learn to interact with people. Learn empathy, learn communications skills, learn to temper your urge towards condescension and dismissal. If you're a coder, it's 50% of your job, assuming you're doing your job right.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
It will often carry you much further than just being the best technically.
I've seen it over and over in my professional career and even with myself. At many jobs, I've been the least qualified as far as pure, hard core tech skills, but having people skills, being outgoing, and NOT being afraid to stand up in front of even a small group to give a presentation has carried me further than many people I knew starting out, and knew the tech far more than I did or still do.
It will help you get your foot in the door on many interviews, and it will carry you in the company quite often. You can't be an idiot and no clue about the technical skills required, but if you aren't the #1 tech stud in the group, having people skills can actually make you a stand out that will get promoted and allow you to progress in your career.
And , it also helps you get laid a bit more too, but that's a different thread.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
...having people skills, being outgoing, and NOT being afraid to stand up in front of even a small group to give a presentation has carried me further than many people I knew starting out, and knew the tech far more than I did or still do.
That's a key point. I've known a lot of hugely gifted yet socially inept coders, who took their fear of personal interactions and reinterpreted it as disdain for the hoi polloi, and decided that the skills within their comfort zone were all they ever needed. And their employers saw them coming a mile away, and let them carve out their tiny moated kingdoms, for crap wages and zero upward mobility. The "genius nerd in his nerd cave" career track is a comfortable one. But it is so limiting.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
I like people well enough, but I'm a Morlock, not an Eloi. I want to get things done, not gab with your about the brats you spawned to replace yourself.
Right on, man! (or woman!). I like your personality type. I think it adds to the cultural diversity of a workplace. Many places I've worked have had the person who "tells it like it is", and mostly, unless they're overtly hostile, people appreciate someone like you and learn to get along. "That Bruce is such a grump." "I know - I showed him a picture of my kid and he said 'I don't care about your kid'. He's such a character!" Seriously, a team comprised of diverse personalities may even be more productive than a team of people who all just want to show eachother pictures of their kids all the time. Be productive and don't rock the boat - don't be someone you're not.
I am Audience.
>your dreams of tech as a clique-free meritocracy
How is a meritocracy not just another type of clique?
How is hiring people for their excellent social skills not a meritocracy?
There are so many implicit values embedded in the statement that it becomes a declaration of an extremely specific type of workplace the submitter (or editor) wants and thinks everyone else should want as well. It's the equivalent of the guy without a knife asserting that the guy with the knife should drop it and fight like a man.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Thanks, I'm good.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nah, you can be /somewhat/ introverted and still do well. But the fact of the matter is that social skills *are* crucial. It's not discriminatory, it's business, and a person who can't communicate well, who can't interact well, is a net negative, no matter how awesome a coder they are. It's not fair to the business and it's not fair to the rest of the team to have to "deal" with the guy or gal who just can't mesh with the team.
I've wasted so much time dealing with prima donnas and socially inept "geniuses" that I don't hire either these days. The very first interview is always a personality interview, and if I struggle seeing the person fitting in with the rest of the team, I don't even bother moving on to a technical/skills phase of the interview.
That doesn't mean we don't hire people that just geek out on tech, but they are people who are passionate but also kind of laid back, people with a good sense of humor, people who can express themselves clearly and can communicate well, people who don't get offended when someone disagrees with them, people just cocky enough to take some risks but who aren't arrogant - they have individual humility while still being very bullish on what they can do to help the team.
If a candidate doesn't have these qualities, then I genuinely don't care if they are the greatest developer in the history of the world - without the right personality type, they are just too much of a hassle and I pass on them and let them be some other company's problem.
The reality of it is that there are more qualified IT professionals than there are jobs available. Competition is very stiff for many system admin and engineering jobs. System admins are overworked and under-appreciated: they are treated as very disposable. Screw that! I tell most folks to stay out of IT.
Since I was born with speech and hearing impediments. However, I can socialize online decently (like this /. post) but many people don't like those. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Clearly you are not familiar with the freakshow that is the NSA.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Get picked off the street and made a certified nuclear reactor operator in 18 months. They will do all of the training required, you just need to be serious in your studies. Especially when you haven't clue one on the subject :}
I do qualify it as a tech job, I could write much to back that up but it'd be just be a lot of junk you wouldn't wish to read.
Just saying fate works in odd ways. I was unemployed for close to two years prior.
You are disposable. There will always be another one just like you that they can hire. They can get a dozen resumes with a single call.
Only if citizens are not given their proper prioritization above non-citizens.
That's if they don't just get someone on a H1B visa.
That's an even bigger problem since it presumes that a US citizen is never competent enough.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
*sigh* I wasn't. Read the article, then the parent subject line. I was saying that the more general issue is finding people who can be the right fit for a team, regardless of their skill level.
So that disqualifies various sets of people - those who are so extremely introverted that they can't interact with the rest of the team very well, those who are poor communicators, those who are prima donnas, and those who have poor reading comprehension.
Want To Work For a Cool Tech Company? Hone Your Social Skills
I think you meant "hone your social skills please."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's exactly the other way around.
Want experienced pros who can rescue your projects from total disaster?
Treat them like humans.
It's the companies that need to hone their social skills. End of Story.
Point in case: I am - once again - in a gig with an agency. They took some effort to convince me to give them a try. We did 2 months of contracting to try things out, then I came on. ... any marketing buzzword you can think of - you're b-bingo cards would be filled many times over in one regular workday. We even have a whole department specialized in producing power-point presentations (No joke!). The naivety with which technical issues are approached here leaves me gasping for air every odd week. It takes effort to remain calm, explaining even the most basic concepts of web-development to people who do and sell web to our customers 24/7. Our headroom is a bunch of outlet multipliers from the hardware store and a bunch of off-the-shelf home-SAN-drives piled into one heap for company backup purposes, managed by a student on the side. A truly scary sight. The only host that come close to anything a pro would use I salvaged from a ancient Acer laptop lying around that I cleaned and installed Debian 7.6 on. Our production pipeline is a sight to make a grown man cry.
"Change Management" "Corporate Publishing"
However, and here is where it gets interesting:
I've rarely worked with such kind, forthcoming and polite people. The respect that I'm treated with and the patience with which the team treats me when I can barely hold back my techie-frustration I've rarely seen. I've seen so many asshole agencies in my life that I'm still genuinely suprised how this shop completely breaks the mold in my book. It's a team that lacks the in-house experience and actually is aware of the fact. Aside from that, they are a refreshing experience after years of too much crap.
I've seen so many shops in which devs are treated like shit - that they themselves have lost their social skills or have no interest in using them, is of no surprise to me.
I've come to the conclusion, that I'd rather work with the sort of company I am in now that with some so-called dedicated web-development team that can't treat their members like normal people.
Bottom line:
That social skill thing works both ways. I've taken such amounts of crap from corps and companies in this industry that I find conclusions like those of the GP laughable at best. In most cases their just plain wrong.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
One reason companies offer all the silly perks (pool table, excessive free food, etc.): it's a way to compensate employees tax-free. I can pay my guys $1000 more apiece but they'll only take home $700. Maybe $1000 worth of "free perks" and creating the perception of a "fun culture" offers better "bang for my buck" in terms of attracting and retaining employees than the extra $700 in take-home pay. Then again, maybe not. But I'm willing to entertain the argument that it does.