Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would you rather work side-by-side with a technical whiz who is an ahole all day or do you want the person who can be trained in the technical components but you really like?

You forget - people see more of their work colleagues than their kids or spouses.

I've never understood why people say this; it's so not true. Even before work from home, I saw my husband and kids way more than my coworkers.

Awake?

At the point where you've gotten to an in-person interview, the people doing the hiring have already determined you have the technical skills to do the job. (Unless there's something else in play like being golf buddies with the hiring manager)

No competent organization is going to waste their time giving interviews to people they don't think have the ability to do the job. What this means is that essentially all in-person interviews determine is "out of all these people who can do the job, who is the person we most want to work with?"

When you think of it like that it makes perfect sense why personable people get jobs over others who may technically be more qualified. They may not have the same level of skills, but they crossed the baseline and people would rather work with a personable person who may need to learn a thing or two than a more qualified expert who smells like cheese and will scream at you for un-alphabetizing their pens.

My experience working in the fed government is that most positions are preselects, and hiring managers are just going through the motions with many of the interviews.

It doesn't bother me much because I've benefited as a preselect several times. I would like to know which jobs are preselects, though, so I don't waste my time.

Anonymous wrote:Would you rather work side-by-side with a technical whiz who is an ahole all day or do you want the person who can be trained in the technical components but you really like?

You forget - people see more of their work colleagues than their kids or spouses.

I've never understood why people say this; it's so not true. Even before work from home, I saw my husband and kids way more than my coworkers.

I’m really great at interviewing, but kinda lazy and “work to live.” Find the quickest/easiest/least amount of effort required to do my job. Always use my earned time off. I talk a really good game and my job is a mix of soft skills and understanding the technical stuff. I work with the actual technical experts (they have PHDs from T25 schools) and can always bring them in to do the heavy lifting on the quant side.

I keep getting raises and promotions, so clearly I’m doing something right. I freely admit that the technical experts ARE smarter than me, so I don’t really care what they tell their egos to sleep better at night. I’m still making more than them and getting more recognition while they obsessed over their citation ranking 🤷🏼‍♂️

I was just on a hiring committee and knew that all the candidates we interviewed could do the job well (either through experience or training). If we had to choose between two candidates, I always brought up the "do I want to work with this person?" factor. As somebody mentioned above, we spend more time with our coworkers than family sometimes. If I know you will be technically competent in the job, I want to make sure you will fit in with our group and be a pleasant person to work with.