Education Level

[brandonkick]

It never ceases to amaze me how many managers seem to value expertise above all else and absolutely, positively refuse to acknowledge that lack of "soft skills"/"people skills" is very often a deal breaker.

As much as I hate the cliche, "He/She is not a team player," if that is, in actuality, true and he/she is insufferable, they're a liability, not an asset, no matter how sharp their IT skills are.

It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
~ John Andrew Holmes

Those who really "don't play well with others" are of very limited utility.

Bingo

I've worked with some folks who where either very skilled, or had a lot of strong domain knowledge that few others or no others had but my lord were they just plain awful to work with. I'm talking like.... they had an ability to just plain out make people uncomfortable almost immediately. Vividly, at least two I will never forget. One was so obnoxious and arrogant, that they deployed dev branch code to a production environment to prove a point they were dead wrong about and in the process caused serious damage to the prod level systems. A senior engineer no less. Even if they WERE right, it was a silly insignificant thing to squabble over and in turn caused down time and serious damage to a prod level environment. And even more amazing, they didn't get fired for that.

In almost every single case, it doesn't matter how good a person is at what they do... if they are that impossible to work with they are going to end up being a net negative and will likely destroy the team and derail the initiatives.

 

[brandonkick]

Not being a team player in IT is a hard game over too.

So much of what we do is a process, progressing to a goal post often so off in the distance we can't see it. If you're not capable of communicating correctly so that others can pick up the torch... very bad things happen. That's why I'm so vocal when I see people off course. It's making a huge mess for tomorrow to clean up that is expensive, bankruptcy inducing expensive!

This is one of the arguments that supports some sort of College degree though. Doesn't have to be IT related, you cannot earn a degree from an accredited institution without being exposed to other humans for a measured length of time. This process tends to develop those soft skills.

I know IT people are geekish sometimes, and heaven knows I'm about as subtle as a nuclear detonation most days but dang... I can't just let myself regress into the tape on glasses geek stereotype, no matter how much my natural tendencies can push me there. It never ends particularly well.

I'm going to have to remember the butt in seat time... Because that's also quite a thing. If you've been doing the exact same thing for two decades, you're probably not good at it. Tech moves, evolves, it's alive in many ways. If you're moving with the industry you're NOT stagnant.

Kinda. But the spirit of "ass time" in this case is all those "X years of experience needed" in "X" category or companies who give out job titles based upon YOE. Oh... you've been coding for 5 years now.... then your a senior engineer. Um. No? Not how this works?

Years of experience measures the amount of time you've spent sitting in a seat. It's not nearly as direct of a correlation to skill level as it seems to be implied.

I know engineers who've been doing this for 20+ years that can't code the most basic things or effectively work on anything other than the same web app they've been working on the last 10 years. And I know folks with 2-3 years of experience who can build nearly anything you need.

I laugh extra hard when I see "X" years of exp needed for "X" technology and that technology isn't old enough for that to even be possible.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@brandonkick Yeah, ye old HR doesn't have a clue due to tech changing too darned fast for anyone outside the department to properly know.

 

[britechguy]

ye old HR doesn't have a clue

I don't lay this at the feet of HR. I've been in meetings where job descriptions for ads are being discussed, in the IT department, where this sort of nonsense gets bandied about.

That's why I've always applied for any position I wished to apply for. The "what we're seeking" description is never what the seeker is going to get. It virtually never happens that someone leaves a job to go to another that's exactly the same job elsewhere. For most folks in IT, there need to be some pretty clear "known unknowns" in a new position to make it interesting.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I don't lay this at the feet of HR. I've been in meetings where job descriptions for ads are being discussed, in the IT department, where this sort of nonsense gets bandied about.

That's why I've always applied for any position I wished to apply for. The "what we're seeking" description is never what the seeker is going to get. It virtually never happens that someone leaves a job to go to another that's exactly the same job elsewhere. For most folks in IT, there need to be some pretty clear "known unknowns" in a new position to make it interesting.

The problem is these days that what they are seeking drivel is literally the software gatekeeper reducing the applicant pool. If you want your resume read by an actual human, you have to pad to get through that irrational BS.

 

[britechguy]

@Sky-Knight

I have no doubt that what you say is true. I still stick by the foundation of my assertion, and that is that it is not HR that writes the "what we want" descriptions for virtually anything except positions actually in HR. I was in the corporate and public sector worlds for decades, and HR is the "paper pusher" (and an important one), but when it comes to "what do we put in the advertisement" that generally is solicited straight from the hiring department, and the hiring manager specifically. So blame where blame is due.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@Sky-Knight

I have no doubt that what you say is true. I still stick by the foundation of my assertion, and that is that it is not HR that writes the "what we want" descriptions for virtually anything except positions actually in HR. I was in the corporate and public sector worlds for decades, and HR is the "paper pusher" (and an important one), but when it comes to "what do we put in the advertisement" that generally is solicited straight from the hiring department, and the hiring manager specifically. So blame where blame is due.

I suppose, doesn't change anything though when the C level or whomever cooked up the mess only sees people that survived it. And worse, when they relax the language? They're BURIED.

Anyone hiring right now is doing all they can to limit the applicant pool, because you have 1 opening and as soon as you post it you've got 1000 applicants. You have to sift them somehow.

 

[britechguy]

you have 1 opening and as soon as you post it you've got 1000 applicants. You have to sift them somehow.

It makes me long for "the good old days" when applying required more effort (as did sifting, but the number to be sifted through was limited by the effort required to apply).

The days when it was considered questionable to "paper the world" with your resume is long gone, and people will shoot off applications electronically that they really have no business applying for. It's just too darned easy to "click and send" without due consideration. Effortless, in fact.

 

[Sky-Knight]

It makes me long for "the good old days" when applying required more effort (as did sifting, but the number to be sifted through was limited by the effort required to apply).

The days when it was considered questionable to "paper the world" with your resume is long gone, and people will shoot off applications electronically that they really have no business applying for. It's just too darned easy to "click and send" without due consideration. Effortless, in fact.

Some places I know have resorted to simply never posting openings. This makes the process worse. It's good for the employer because they can control how many applicants they process. It's bad because well... now you're getting job offers because your resume is padded with keywords and the employer is searching them up on Indeed.