Want To Work For a Cool Tech Company? Hone Your Social Skills 139
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.
I'll never be employed (Score:1)
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.
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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 k
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...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.
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(the inability to get laid being not the least of those limitations)
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having people skills can actually make you a stand out that will get promoted and allow you to progress in your career.
That's what people here DON'T want. They don't want to be promoted. They want to stay with coding forever.
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I don't understand the downmods. This is a legitimate thing; I personally would much rather be a coder for the balance of my career than get pushed into a lead/management role where I'd be miserable and ineffective. Sure, I could probably learn enough to fake it, but it's not what I want to do. It's career-limiting, sure, but does it have to be that way? Doesn't actually doing useful work mean anything anymore? Is engineering turning into marketing? Do we want technical decisions to really be made bas
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That's an incredibly self-defeating statement. Social skills are learned just like your coding skills are. You may never be a world-class entertainer and storyteller, but being able to meet someone, shake their hand, and engage in a few minutes of small talk and crack a joke or two is
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Social skills are learned just like your coding skills are. You may never be a world-class entertainer and storyteller, but being able to meet someone, shake their hand, and engage in a few minutes of small talk and crack a joke or two is a learnable skill for anybody who decides to try.
Neil deGrasse Tyson made a great point in a (relatively old) video someone posted here last week: You can always become better at something. You might not ever become great at it, but if you practice then you can always become better.
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You would love it at NSA. Assuming you walk your talk and 1) actually get stuff done, and 2) you aren't a degenerate.
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Hmmm... Never got past (2) - or at least what seems to pass for (2) in the TLA's eyes. Didn't care much. I guess that means I'm even more of a degenerate.
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Clearly you are not familiar with the freakshow that is the NSA.
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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
Re: I'll never be employed (Score:2)
Great. You'll be pleased to know that the "cultural fit" referred to above is codeword for weeding out anyone with life commitments they would consider more important than work.
45 with three kids? No worries! Hope you like pizza fuelled all night gaming marathons and our monthly team trip to Vegas! Oh, you don't? Sorry, you aren't a cultural fit.
I'd decry the practice if I didn't know that I would do the exact same thing if it was my own money on the line. If you want success you need obsessive commitment f
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Fine by me if that's the criterion they want to use, so long as there are also companies out there refusing to hire young "rockster" devs who crave all-night gaming marathons and monthly team trips to Vegas in favor of 45 year-olds with kids. Honestly, if I applied at the company you describe, I'd be glad if they weeded me out due to "cu
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As a freak, I have always found it much easier to fit in with the small companies. It's the larger companies with all of the political nonsense and high degree of specialization that push your tech skills to the back burner.
Smaller companies have fewer of the kind of people that require better social skills to deal with.
Just another reason (Score:1)
but if you are valuable enough, then they will overlook issues.
Re:Skilled Introverted programmers need not apply (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm not just somewhat introverted. I'm seriously introverted, and if they'd had the Autism Spectrum Disorder stuff when I was in school I probably would have been diagnosed.
I set out to learn how to behave socially. It didn't come naturally to me, so I read stuff and observed and managed to get by. I don't do well at parties with lots of strangers, but I can usually avoid such and socialize with friends. Having a sense of humor really helped.
Early in my career, my manager told me that I was technic
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This post is excellent. You captured what I was trying to say and expressed it much better than I did, thank you!
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*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.
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Oh, it's not on a whim at all. It's the realization that the degree to which a person can work well with, communicate with, interact with, etc. (basically, "fit in with") others is massively important, so much so that if a person is too lacking in those areas then it's better for your team and for your business to not hire them, no matter how good they look on paper.
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There are so many candidates that have such an obvious lack of any technical skill or talent, that companies really can't turn away people that are actually able to do the work. Perhaps this is part of the perception that there is some sort of "shortage". They want an ideal perfect fit but that simply doesn't exist.
If I could "do it all" I would not let someone else exploit my labor. I would work for myself and keep most of the value of my skill for myself instead of letting someone else take it.
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I turn away people who are qualified (in terms of technical skill) but don't pass the personality test *all the time*.
In the past month alone I've passed on 2 candidates who were very technically competent, but one could barely carry on a conversation and the other was obnoxiously arrogant and smug.
OTOH in the past 4-5 months I've hired about a dozen developers who have a variety of skill levels but are just great to be around and to work with - they have a good work-life balance, they aren't easily offende
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That's fine, but then you have zero right to complain about a tech labor "shortage". If there's a shortage, then you should be hiring anyone who's qualified, no matter how bad their interpersonal skills are. It's your job as management to help them succeed as part of the team, and if you can't do that, then you are incompetent.
If you want to take the easy route and only hire people who are easy to manage, that's your prerogative, but you can't complain about any kind of shortage if you do this.
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Please read my other posts - not only did I not complain about a shortage, I went so far as to say that I don't really think there is a shortage.
Regardless, I think you're missing my point: my position is that some people, no matter how good their skills are, are a *net negative*, because tech skills are only a part of the equation (an equation that includes things like interpersonal skills), and that people/teams/companies that don't properly weigh that part of the equation end up paying the price for a lo
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Please read my other posts - not only did I not complain about a shortage, I went so far as to say that I don't really think there is a shortage.
Sorry, I was only responding to your one post, and assuming that like so many other managers that you might buy into the whole tech-worker shortage idea.
Regardless, I think you're missing my point: my position is that some people, no matter how good their skills are, are a *net negative*,
I agree, at least the way modern companies do their management. I think it's
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Good points. Yeah, I don't know if we've just been really lucky or what, but I haven't seen the tech worker shortage (despite all of the yelling about it).
Thanks for the discussion!
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Want to work for a startup that fails? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Nerds and introverts can have perfectly good social skills. Don't use your profession as an excuse to be a jerk.
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"Culture Fit" is an excuse for discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup!!! (Score:1)
Don't you know? Only rich white frat boy social skills count as social skills.
Longs sleeve and shorts? (Score:2)
The ability to wear longs sleeves with shorts is a social skill?
Re:"Culture Fit" is an excuse for discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What I keep reading here about "brogrammer" culture just blows my mind. I struggle to figure out if it is a generational thing, or subculture based on location. But I can assure you, it was nothing like that at startups in the Boston area in the late 80's... Particularly the attitude toward women--I assure you, anybody that had acted like some of the stories we've read lately, would have been instantly fired--and the rest of the guys would have been happy to see such a person booted out.
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Bro. Not cool, bro
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It's generational IMO. I never ran into this stuff when I was in college in the early/mid 90s.
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Good points. So we're basically victims of our own success? We should have thrown a wrench into things earlier on to keep the rest of society from getting so interested in this stuff...
Re:"Culture Fit" is an excuse for discrimination (Score:4, Insightful)
You had me at rich.
But seriously...if they got rich by knowing enough tech to found and build a startup, what's your beef with them? And, of course, most people like to hang out, and associate with people that reflect the same traits and beliefs that they do, that's just human nature.
But if YOU are a flexible person, you should be able to get along with most anyone. Me? I went through high school and ran with many crowds. I hung out with the potheads in the parking lot, I knew a lot of the jocks and went to parties with all strata of kids, many of whom had FAR more money than my family did, but that didn't stop me from connecting and making friends of all types.
I found that working early jobs in the service industry helped....bus boy, waiter, bar tender, retail sales all helped me learn even more about how to work with people.
Same skills took me from there to college and later to my professional life. Know what? I still am able to generally speak with and deal with and even schmooze with folks of all types in the world.
Learn some people skills, and don't get so hung up on what other people are like. So what if it is a rich white frat guy.
Learn to deal with them and it might get you in the circles of people that are getting wealthier and help you do the same.
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Know what you want and then go after it.
If you want "rich" then tech probably is not the career path for you.
Some did get rich through their technical skills. But more did it through business skills, relationships and such.
Because the rich, white, frat guy will hire his frat brothers instead of you. One of them will be named CTO/CIO and t
US Citizenship is an excuse for discrimination (Score:2)
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.
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Current immigration policy in the US, whether or not it was intended to do so, treats the citizen as having too good of a position in the world. Businesses read that as citizenship being business-hostile (unless it's their own).
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No, I do find tech people that ALSO have people skills. I'd be hiring them over someone that can't talk to his co-workers or employers very well.
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B/c those rich white frat boys want to make shit such as Groupon and Zynga. That is the real problem (for me), their outlook on life and their values result in things I don't consider useful or beautiful but just something that makes them richer and the rest of the world poorer and dumber.
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You get rich by specifically not sharing. So rich white frat boys tend to hang together and use money to establish a business and hire disposable staff to do all the work, whilst the rich white frat boys take all of the credit and the bulk of the money, often leaving the people who do the actual work with unpaid salaries and a bankrupt company. So want to work for a company where you actually do the work, you need three things, the skill, the willingness to work cheap and the willingness to work for promis
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The one startup I worked for in Silly Valley was run by an Indian guy, not so young, but extraordinarily colorful - not so much "flamboyantly gay" as "the Cat from Red Dwarf". I half expected him to click his heels and spin around every time he walked past. I'm sure he was rich, as this wasn't his first time as a startup CEO, but that's all he had in common with "rich white frat boy".
OTOH, my interview with him consisted of us discussing who I had worked for in the past that he knew - not quite a clique,
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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.
Sorry if us white crackers don't get your quirks but with very few exceptions few of us care what skin color you have. What we DO mind is cultural differences and that you think we are out to get you when we aren't. Culture you can hide, but the chip on your shoulder is visible to all and I for one don't care to tip-toe around all the PC garbage.
Just be nice and don't blame your color when we look at you weird. Chances are we are just thinking about something else. Just smile and move on.
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Sorry, but "I just don't like you" is not a federally defined form of discrimination.
Disparate Impact (Score:1)
Unfortunately, disparate impact can change that statement.
General applicability (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
If you're a hooker (or manager?), it's 100% of your job, assuming you're doing your job right...
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Well, honest interaction is part of it. But in that line of work there's a significant component of convincingly and shamelessly lying to people, of telling them what they want to hear so they'll give you what you want them to give.
That is, for managers, anyway. I'm not sure what's involved in being a hooker.
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Also if you have any interest in moving into more of a leadership type roll, even if you want to stay mostly technical (i.e. technical lead, software architect) social skills become even more important.
Apparently spelling and grammar skills aren't that important.
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This is Slashsparta! [*kerplunk*]
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Oh and you also need to know *everything* remotely technical so we don't have to employ more than one of you nerds. That's right, not only do you have to spend every hour of your life learning all the skills required for the job description, you should also have documented proof of you working insane hours, learning the new technologies we won't ever use (but that shows *passion*, right?) and yet still be a party animal seven days a week or you won't be considered a team player or a good cultural fit.
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I really have no desire to do nothing but sit in meetings all day.
That's what's meant by a position that's not a "dead end". You get promoted up into management where you no longer do technical work anymore. You need those "social skills" because those are the only skills you end up using.
My first tech manager quit his manager position in order to move on to a purely tech position.
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I disagree. When you're CEO, you now have a big golden parachute. So you can quit at any time and live an extremely comfortable lifestyle in your mansion and/or on your megayacht, and not have a care in the world about having to go without. That's not a dead end, that's a pot at the end of the rainbow.
Everyone else has to worry about saving enough for retirement so they aren't eating cat food when they're old.
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Really what I want is a staff canteen, and an HR department that will respond to complaints of overwork. Going out with colleagues for beers once in a while is nice and so is interesting work but that should be as well as rather than instead of a healthy work-life balance.
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Gotta ask: why? Are you not capable of getting paid more than $20/hr elsewhere? Or did you just want the extra hours/income? If any employer ever asked me to work more than 50 hr/week for more than 2 weeks in a row I'd probably take my ball and go home.
It's more nuanced than that (Score:2)
Meritocracy:
1. government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability.
2. a ruling or influential class of educated or skilled people.
"skills" or "ability" don't just mean "technical skills," or "technical ability."
Personally, I find that in many tiny companies you actually see the opposite of "social skills" -- they become so deeply, desperately, dependent on the particular technical genius of one or two people that those people can basically do everything and anything they want
A what? (Score:5, Insightful)
>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.
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How is a meritocracy not just another type of clique?
It lacks the exclusivity component of the normal 'clique' definition, in the sense that achieving merit in some field (not necessarily in a given one, though) is in everyone's power. Unless you want to argue that professions are cliques and we're somehow back to a time of medieval guilds.
How is hiring people for their excellent social skills not a meritocracy?
If the job description has excellent social skills as the main requirement, then by all means, it is. If it's a and by the way, you should be able to fit in our group requirement on the last line, then ... well, perhaps lee
Mmm...no. (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks, I'm good.
IT workers (Score:3)
Barking up the wrong tree (Score:1)
"Cool"? No. Nerds often want to work for an interesting and technically challenging start-up, NOT a "cool" start-up. Craig Newmark's approach is more to my style than say Twitter.
It's unhip, bland, outdated, but will probably outlast other sites, seeing how the herd transition from MySpace to FaceBook to Twitter to BorgFace (or whatever comes next) steps on the prior one. Craigslist is like Latin: it can't go out of style because it was never in style (in the post-Columbus era, at least). He has mooned and
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My social skills suck. (Score:3)
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. :(
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The impediments are only impediments if you treat them as such. If you want to talk to people, do. Social skills are social skills, and if you're a genuinely interesting person to talk to, people will accommodate.
It may help to just talk (and talk and talk to exercise the speech path) and try to normalize your speaking to aid comprehension, but if you're some
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People says I have really poor social skills in person compared to typing. They prefer to talk and hear, but it is easier for me to communicate in texts like online.
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Impediments are impediments. They impede people. People can work around them, but that's treating them like impediments. If I had a habit of pretending my impediments weren't, I'd likely be dead by now.
Besides, you know nothing of GP's impediments. What you're saying may work if they're minor, but not if they're too serious.
Since we're discussing social skills, did anybody tell you it's rude to make assumptions about people and tell them what to do without asking further?
Or wait for the Government to start a project (Score:3)
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.
Take your own advice, Mr Headline (Score:3)
Want To Work For a Cool Tech Company? Hone Your Social Skills
I think you meant "hone your social skills please."
This is a common misunderstanding (Score:1)
Social skills and teamwork ability are great things to have, but when these words are used in relation to a job, they invariably mean submitting to existing hierarchies. If I refuse to be a paid slave that doesn't make me an antisocial egotist.
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Social skills and teamwork ability are great things to have, but when these words are used in relation to a job, they invariably mean submitting to existing hierarchies. If I refuse to be a paid slave that doesn't make me an antisocial egotist.
No, but your demeaning description of how 95% of the world earns their living kinda does.
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Wrong. It's the companies that need to do that. (Score:3)
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.
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Do you at least agree there's a kernel of truth? Having social skills > not having social skills when it comes to successful interviewing. You don't have to look like "rich frat boy", but, like it or not, it helps if you don't come across as "neckbeard with bad hygiene". The fact that corporate American also has huge problems doesn't change that.
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There's people whose job it is to make things or change them, and people whose job it is to interact with other people, to simplify outrageously. So, why is it that, when the doer and talker don't get along, it's the doer's fault? A manager should be willing to work with somebody with good technical and poor social skills, because part of a manager's job is to make their people productive.
a thought (Score:4, Interesting)
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You obviously don't work in Belgium. Here we see maybe $300 of that $1000 raise.
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The only thing you can do here as a tax benefit is give employees a company car. Which is still taxed, but less than getting the monthly lease money in cash.
Our company actually had to stop providing a 1-hour per week free gym visit (which nobody used) because after an audit they saw that as a taxable perk.
So we would have to pay taxes on something we never used in the first place.
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Instead of the stupid pool table, I'd like to be able to spend the $1K or $700 on things to make me more productive. A company with a pool table suggests to me that they aren't interested in getting stuff done.
bullshit (Score:2)
fuck you, i have awesome social skills and i'll break the face of anyone who says otherwise!
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Dude... If you truly believe that tripe, you have some serious issues.
Contribution to the Steam Age AND to a greater extent the Information Age has been pretty much independent of one's specific plumbing as determined by the number of X and Y chromosomes you have. Where there has traditionally been male and female dominated careers, the contribution of both has not been one sided. I'd be careful claiming "male genius" as something better than the female kind because it is not.
Full disclosure... I'm a hap
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