Video url:

https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah if you go deep enough on an item there’s a good chance you’ll find that it was once something else.

Sellers don’t want to start over with reviews so they just take a retired product entry and change the pictures and item.

I think the point he’s trying to make is that he works on specialized network gear for enterprises and really isn’t the right person to go for IT support for your home internet issue. Not that you’re beneath him.

I kinda understand too, I have spent a lot of time in highly specialized technical domains and people often then ask me for tech support for things like their printer or whatnot that I am ignorant of.

I used to be more sensitive to feeling like other people were getting more recognition for less work.

Over time though I’ve grown to realize that usually they are just doing something that I don’t fully understand yet, and I’ve gotten far greater rewards from trying to learn from them.

Aaaand I can’t share this with my adhd spouse because they will only interpret it as me saying they are annoying.

OpenTelemetry everywhere please