If you feel paralyzed when an interviewer asks you how you see yourself in five years, remember she doesn’t want you to read the future, she wants to learn about your motivation and goals.
And yet, she doesn’t ask you “what’s your motivation and what are some goals?”. Also, she’s looking out for red-flags like “well, my mother-in-law is getting old and we might have to move back across the country next year to look after her, so I’m just looking for something in the interim”. Which is a totally, 100% legit (and compassionate, and honest) thing to tell the interviewer. But, let’s be honest: don’t tell the interviewer that, they all want to hear that you’re looking to make a long term impact working on whatever BS run-of-the-mill project/team/company they’re interviewing you for. Tell them the mother-in-law story and you won’t be making it to the next round.
Edit: Very little of this, to me, is “how to pretend you have social skills”. It covers some specific interactions with some people you might encounter in a software job, in situations that are highly-specific to software jobs and in particular (I think, from the article) junior developers.
Edit edit: I feel I have been a bit snarky. I don’t want to knock the post too hard: clearly effort and thought went into it. But I’m not sure what the takeaways are. Some of it’s “don’t be nervous in interviews”, some of it’s “I (the author) am a good interviewer”, some of it’s “understand the dynamics of working with the angry senior tech lead” (which is good advice). But… coulda been bullet points?
I agree the title is inappropriate, but for different reasons. If you could act as the author proposes in all of the four situations described, you’re not pretending to have social skills: you actually have social skills.
I’ve always hated the 5 year plan question. In interviews I’ll usually say, “Well I expect to not be answering canned interview questions,” if it’s a job I’m not really interested in. If it’s a job I want, I tend to say, “There’s no way to know what will happen in 5 years. Scientifically, we don’t even understand why we can only move forward in time. In space you can move in any six directions, but with time, we all move forward at a constant rate (unless you’re very rich and have a very fast space ship, and even then you can only slow down your time travel relative to everyone else).
“So it’s not useful to think about regrets or what you would have done. Our decisions only affect our present and our future.”
I’ve gotten job offers answering that question both ways.
In general I agree with you on this. I hate this idea that most engineers don’t have social skills. We certainly do. I’ve had to deal with clients in many different industries. Articles like this are more about teaching people to be less truthful and tell people what they want to hear to get your goals.
You don’t get great jobs that way. It’s good advice if you just need a job. Once you have a job, it’s bad advice when you’re trying to switch to a job you actually want.
Without comment in regards to how you approach answering this question, one of the reasons people ask it is that they want to know if you have a future. And further they want to know if they can be a part of it. The thinking goes that if you don’t have a future or your future won’t include them then there is no opportunity for a relationship to develop that will work for everyone. I suppose that can be said, as in the article, as “learn about your motivation and goals.” I certainly consider that framing of the question to be weak and, as you allude to, potentially disingenuous.
I don’t think the dog analogy is correct here. If one’s responsibility is to implement customer’s requirements and the process involved receiving them directly from the customer, they should never be reprimanded for implementing them.
If gathering requirements and checking them with domain expert was their resposibility, it would be another story. But if you, as a customer, tell the renovation team that you want your office walls painted in fuchsia, rather than ask them to come up with a suitable color, who esle but you is responsible for walls painted in absurd color?
The tone of this article is really strange. My expectation would be that it’s written by someone who has or at least understands social skills in order to know how to fake them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The article seems like a huge elaboration on the ‘hit the nail with a slipper or glass bottle’ story.
The takeaway here is: your job is to find solutions to problems
Nope! It’s not. It’s to make the client happy, both long- & short-term. Here we go again, reaching for the Technical Hammer when we have a People Problem.
For us, finding solutions to problems is part of making the client happy. That is why we wrote:
Like captain Spock, we combine the worlds of logical thinking with the human dimension, which may seem irrational when analyzed through the cold prisma of mathematical rationality but has its own logic and meaning. And we need to develop skills in both areas, because, ultimately, we are humans working for other humans — code is just our tool.
And yet, she doesn’t ask you “what’s your motivation and what are some goals?”. Also, she’s looking out for red-flags like “well, my mother-in-law is getting old and we might have to move back across the country next year to look after her, so I’m just looking for something in the interim”. Which is a totally, 100% legit (and compassionate, and honest) thing to tell the interviewer. But, let’s be honest: don’t tell the interviewer that, they all want to hear that you’re looking to make a long term impact working on whatever BS run-of-the-mill project/team/company they’re interviewing you for. Tell them the mother-in-law story and you won’t be making it to the next round.
Edit: Very little of this, to me, is “how to pretend you have social skills”. It covers some specific interactions with some people you might encounter in a software job, in situations that are highly-specific to software jobs and in particular (I think, from the article) junior developers.
Edit edit: I feel I have been a bit snarky. I don’t want to knock the post too hard: clearly effort and thought went into it. But I’m not sure what the takeaways are. Some of it’s “don’t be nervous in interviews”, some of it’s “I (the author) am a good interviewer”, some of it’s “understand the dynamics of working with the angry senior tech lead” (which is good advice). But… coulda been bullet points?
I agree the title is inappropriate, but for different reasons. If you could act as the author proposes in all of the four situations described, you’re not pretending to have social skills: you actually have social skills.
I’ve always hated the 5 year plan question. In interviews I’ll usually say, “Well I expect to not be answering canned interview questions,” if it’s a job I’m not really interested in. If it’s a job I want, I tend to say, “There’s no way to know what will happen in 5 years. Scientifically, we don’t even understand why we can only move forward in time. In space you can move in any six directions, but with time, we all move forward at a constant rate (unless you’re very rich and have a very fast space ship, and even then you can only slow down your time travel relative to everyone else).
“So it’s not useful to think about regrets or what you would have done. Our decisions only affect our present and our future.”
I’ve gotten job offers answering that question both ways.
In general I agree with you on this. I hate this idea that most engineers don’t have social skills. We certainly do. I’ve had to deal with clients in many different industries. Articles like this are more about teaching people to be less truthful and tell people what they want to hear to get your goals.
You don’t get great jobs that way. It’s good advice if you just need a job. Once you have a job, it’s bad advice when you’re trying to switch to a job you actually want.
Without comment in regards to how you approach answering this question, one of the reasons people ask it is that they want to know if you have a future. And further they want to know if they can be a part of it. The thinking goes that if you don’t have a future or your future won’t include them then there is no opportunity for a relationship to develop that will work for everyone. I suppose that can be said, as in the article, as “learn about your motivation and goals.” I certainly consider that framing of the question to be weak and, as you allude to, potentially disingenuous.
I think asking if you will stay with the company for five years at a job interview is equivalent to asking for marriage plans at a first date.
I don’t think the dog analogy is correct here. If one’s responsibility is to implement customer’s requirements and the process involved receiving them directly from the customer, they should never be reprimanded for implementing them.
If gathering requirements and checking them with domain expert was their resposibility, it would be another story. But if you, as a customer, tell the renovation team that you want your office walls painted in fuchsia, rather than ask them to come up with a suitable color, who esle but you is responsible for walls painted in absurd color?
The tone of this article is really strange. My expectation would be that it’s written by someone who has or at least understands social skills in order to know how to fake them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The article seems like a huge elaboration on the ‘hit the nail with a slipper or glass bottle’ story.
Nope! It’s not. It’s to make the client happy, both long- & short-term. Here we go again, reaching for the Technical Hammer when we have a People Problem.
Not happy usually, just content enough that he pays you and maybe even does business with you again.
For us, finding solutions to problems is part of making the client happy. That is why we wrote:
How do you make the client happy?