Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 91: Job Requirements and Teams of Misfits

Episode Date: January 11, 2018

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How often do candidates get hired who don’t match the requirements listed in a job posting? Is it a waste for me to apply to all jobs I come across even though I only have about 1/3 of what they want? I’ve been moved to a newly formed team. I suspect the team consists of people nobody really wants to work with. What are my options in a situation like this?

It takes more than an already failed New Year's resolution to not read Twitter to be a great software engineer. This is episode 91 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Didn't last long. I'm doing okay with the rest of my resolutions, but that one did not last. Soft Skills Engineering is a podcast where we answer all of your non-technical questions

about the technical field of software development. yes and this week we'd like to spend extend a special thank you to two of our new patrons dustin coats and david steinkopf who have both pledged support on patreon.com for our podcast we very much appreciate you thank you so much yeah thank you if you'd like to join them in supporting the podcast so that we can pay an editor equipment and things like that you can find us on patreon.com soft skills eng or just go to our website soft skills.audio where you can click support us so thank you very much and please consider supporting yeah if we get enough support we can actually pay someone to do the makeup for the show which will not affect the audio quality

at all but will just help dave and i look radiant as we go about our day it might affect the audio quality i mean i sound better when i look better yeah that's true it affects you psychologically um i will read our first question this is from a listener named thomas how often do candidates get hired who don't match the requirements listed in a job is it a waste of time for me to apply to all the jobs i come across even though i only have about a third of what they want job postings always seem like they're written for mythical people yep they sure do maybe thomas is taking them all literally when they say unicorn and rock star and wizard and like i can't do any magic spells i'll never make it at amasoft google google flicks gook face flicks

yeah i can only turn small rocks into gold nobody cares about that we're looking for a rock star ninja wizard with a really long beard my sword has not tasted blood yet so i cannot call myself a real ninja i am but a trainee i'm only a fourth degree black belt yeah there are a lot of metaphors being bandied about in these job descriptions these days actually i feel like they've calmed down a little bit in the last few years there's probably like a tale i think the the air quotes cool people realize that it makes them look really dumb but there's a long tail of there's a long tail of people who are like you know it'd be great if we spiced it up a little bit what are the kids into these days pirates maybe pirates i was

thinking pirates also yeah what are the kids into we need a code buccaneer we need someone to pillage our code base that's right i can do it pillage our code base with quality maintainable code we need someone to fire quality into our code base from their pirate cannons oh man the metaphors here are endless we need someone to make the bugs walk the plank I'm pretty sure you could okay you could you could overflow back to cool again if you made it dumb enough oh wow that's true dang

it would be intentionally dumb and then it's cool that's a whole different genre of cool I think most job requirements describe the perfect candidate to the person who is writing the job description not necessarily the candidate who will end up getting the job definitely because that candidate does not exist yeah usually yeah it's like we want to pay them this but also we want them to have the skills of someone who makes 10 this

um i feel like a lot of times the job description skills how do i put it is it like they're aspirational well they're definitely aspirational but it's it's even like they're aspirational in the wrong direction like once you get into the work you look back at the list of skills in the job and and i feel like they're often very aspirational technically and very uh underwhelming in every other part of the job and they either don't list it at all or pay just kind of a little token to like and also you'll need to talk to people to do this job so maybe you should be okay talking to people when that's most of the job and if someone was a was a was a swift programmer with 15 years of experience it it wouldn't help them that much because they need to talk to people a

lot or they need to work with designers or they need to mentor junior developers or i don't know there's there's just a bunch of stuff that is your job that gets left off of those aspirational job descriptions that focus a lot on buzzwords and technical skills i feel like look if this candidate can make bugs walk the plank then surely this candidate will be able to talk to designers and mentor junior developers that's true there's kind of a hierarchy right yeah yeah that's that's the final it's not a career ladder it's a career rigging that you climb with a crow's nest at the top yes that's the cto's crow's nest the cto stands for crow okay the crow technical officer crows are pretty smart birds so i start a new job in a couple days and i never saw a job posting

until after i accepted the job and it was like okay go apply in our system and and the job posting did not sound at all like what i just interviewed for and accepted yeah so i think this is pretty common except the only difference between you and thomas the one asking this question is you thomas actually bothered reading the job description before applying no i i so i read them when i apply i just take them with a grain of salt you interviewed first and applied second i i got recruited so someone was like hey you should come talk to us and then i talked to them but i did apply to a lot of jobs and i read their job descriptions very carefully i think i think job descriptions usually i i i read them to get a feel for the experience level

that they're looking for yeah but all the rest of it is pretty fungible i have found yes on both sides when hiring or when applying but my experience with the write-ups themselves is that usually the people who write and publish these job descriptions are pretty disconnected from the people doing the hiring decisions and even more disconnected from the actual work that happens day to day like it's usually a recruiter or an hr person who writes these job descriptions and they'll they'll get sign off from some engineering person at some point like four years ago and then they'll just be using the same boilerplate yeah exactly they'll update the numbers of experience well it's been six years since swift has been out so better change that

no i haven't two and eight i think you're giving them way too much credit i don't i don't think they would even know what swift is and let alone when it was released yeah that's true um so like and every time i've read one of these even at my own company i've been like wow this is like not what we do um so i wouldn't worry too much about them so i've been intimately involved in writing job descriptions and then i go and do other work for two years and it never changes so i know what you mean i've spent a lot of time and been very careful to make it reflect the work that we do and the kind of people we're looking for and then i move on and then it it slowly drifts from reality as no one updates it so even if they're made with great care that's it's pretty

common and another thing is everyone has different like you said the people that write it aren't the people hiring necessarily so everyone has different criteria for what they're looking for and even if you put like self-starter everyone has a different idea of what that means a lot of it is seven years of self-starting experience yeah well i've been alive for 30 years so i'm super qualified yeah so so i read them to get a feel for what technologies they use i also read them to get a feel for what experience level they're looking for but i feel like a lot of the other things are are they're willing to trade and i had that experience in the job i'm about to start too it wasn't in the job description but i talked to my uh to my my new boss as part of the interview

process and expressed some concern about some of the responsibilities were things i hadn't done before and he said the perfect candidate would be an expert at all these things and they probably don't exist so we're willing to trade them off you're good at these other things so you can pick up these skills that you don't have yet and i think that's pretty common if they're if if someone seems like a good fit and a good developer and doesn't check all the boxes, it's pretty easy to say, well, that's, that'll still work for us. Yeah, I think so too. That's definitely been my experience. A few years ago at a, at a company I used to work for, I took a shot at writing a job description that would be able to stand the test of time where even if we changed languages or

frameworks or tools, the description would still work because I, I basically realized I never want to hire an engineer who happens to have the right list of specific skills that we use today you know like the skills we use today will not be the skills we use in a year or two or that we need and so rather than saying like i need three years of swift experience i said i want you to have experience developing software with at least two different languages you know and i don't care what languages those are i just want to see you know multiple languages like that for this particular job level you know and and i found that to be a pretty effective way to signal to people um look i'm not looking for swift i'm not looking for c sharp or whatever i'm looking for polyglot

experience with multiple languages yeah i can't find the source of it but i remember it so it must be true i think someone tweeted once that they looked at their job descriptions and then looked at the current team that they were on that that job description was for and realized that No one on the team would meet the requirements in the job description, even though they all worked there and did great work. So I think it's pretty widely recognized to be kind of like a, there's some degree of hoop jumping here. Oh yeah, for sure.

Which is great for you because you can be aspirational. You can apply to things that you don't think you're necessarily 100% qualified for. You should be a little qualified though. uh i definitely see a lot of candidates when i'm when i'm interviewing people that are not even close to qualified and and i mean i'm not a jerk about it but they just don't move on but people that are that have kind of the right or close to the right level of experience and some related technical skills usually go forward even if they don't meet all of the requirements in the job posting yeah for sure definitely i think like you said before looking at the years of experience

that's required is a gauge i think of um whether you're in the band you know but outside of that like no single item on the bullet list is usually a disqualifier yeah even i mean you'll see those job descriptions that say here are the things we need and then it'll be separated into here are things that would be nice to have right even those are not even those it's so funny why do we do this to ourselves so i mean it's it's just such a broken system because it's like here's all the things we need here's all the things we want it turns out the things we need are all totally negotiable and yeah and by the way the person who's doing the hiring has never even seen this list so like and also i think it the way that many companies write job descriptions

is it puts all the onus on the candidate to be amazing and very few companies take the time to say here's why we are an amazing company for you to choose to work for and given them the current labor market in the software industry it seems like it should be more like that yeah i have seen some that do a pretty good job with that have you i have and some of them come off a little arrogant and rub me the wrong way i think that's hard to do well also because the temptation is to say like look at how big our numbers are look at this money we've raised look at how many employees we have and just do a lot of chest pounding and i don't i don't know that just doesn't appeal to me personally i guess that would appeal to other people though like me and some of them yeah like

dave i like dave likes a good chest pounding i think some of them too i mean if you're applying to like microsoft hopefully you know why like they're a big company with smart people and or any of the giant tech companies do i guess i don't read their job descriptions do they sell very hard in that i don't know i think i don't know i'm not like i like you said i just kind of stopped reading job descriptions yeah i know recruiters sell but i don't know if job descriptions too yeah i think this just comes down to the difficulties in hiring too that it's such a vague process that a job description that is true would be like we need someone to do good work we don't know what that means or looks like can you show us in 20 minutes in an interview yeah

please help i think i think it would just be really vague to the point of uselessness help so they're trying to narrow it down somehow help wanted we don't know how to interview or find people we want we don't even know what we need are you good we'll find out maybe but maybe we won't find out oh i remember what i was gonna say yeah you you said a lot of them focus on these list of skills um i i think a better process and a thing you could put in the job posting is we want to find out what you are the best at and see how that lines up with what we need and that's my friend track works at a company that says that's their interview process they they kind of do it differently for each candidate to try and identify what they're strongest at

okay it's not necessarily do you know these lists of this list of gotcha questions but like find out what they're good at explore how good they are at that and then decide if that's a thing you need or not do you know this python trivia because if you do yeah exactly then clearly you'll know how to build usable software that's right but again that's that's very vague you can't really write that down as a concrete list of skills in the job description so yeah i think again that goes to try to convince in your job description try to convince candidates to apply and then try to have a method for bringing out i mean now we're getting into interviewing but yeah we've switched sorry thomas yeah we helped you

apply to all of them because they're all very vague yep and they're fungible and you have stumbled upon a great truth of the software job process which is that basically job requirements don't really mean much and yes you should probably go ahead and apply anyway this is a well no i'm not gonna say that never mind have we answered the question i think so all right good luck thomas all right would you like to read our next question dave i would this question comes from another person named thomas who says hi first of all i love the show and always look forward to new episodes thanks thomas i am a junior software engineer in europe a few weeks ago i was put into a newly formed team where my scrum master is my former development mentor and my good friend i

suspect the team consists of people nobody really wants to work with since the other scrum masters repeatedly complained about every one of them oh no i hope i was placed here because of me being mentored by my scrum master friend but i'm worried asking for a team change is out of the question sadly and i can't really ask if we are being made into a freak show what are my options in a situation like this oh okay good news you have a rich tapestry of children's sports movies to draw upon here about misfit teams rising to success mighty ducks bad news bears remember the titans miracle little giants those are just the ones off the top of my head but they're probably more always this ragtag group comes together usually there's like a rich well-funded

opposing team that they have to defeat and uh and they do so you can do it you just need to find like the unique quirks and and they all have to work together perfectly so set aside about 10 hours this weekend to watch these movies yeah do some study i remember little giants has a scene where they need to intimidate the opposing team it's a football movie and the opposing team is much bigger than they are so all the kids on the offensive line take alka-seltzer or like anti acid tablets or whatever they put them in their mouth and they just start foaming at the mouth and they say intimidation and then they uh they score the touchdown that works on software teams as well yeah so yeah you have to do weird stuff to intimidate the other teams and if they ever

wondered if you were the freak show you're gonna put all those questions to rest yeah you just but you then you just say scoreboard whenever they complain scoreboard that means look at the scoreboard because we are winning that's true why not just like really lean into the freak show thing come to work in leather cat suits you want a freak show you got it yeah the dress codes are remarkably flexible in software but not enough people explore them in the freak show way why do you know that all the other scrum masters complained about everyone on your team that seems weird to me oh man this guy has next level soft skills figured out a way to like well i mean it just it just sounds like they're all gossiping about people on the team which is okay i was

thinking maybe he was a confidant like oh okay yeah well that's true maybe you are in with all the scrum masters but i think it's more likely that they just complain a lot in front of other people about people on their team which stinks yep shouldn't do that don't do that but if they do you know what to do with the alka-seltzer you're just standing at the water cooler and you start to foam at the mouth casually oh tell no way what an interesting story that would be a good way to get out of boring stories that people tell about like their weekends just casually have them in your pocket and just put the hand in there the mouth yeah and then pop

yeah i like what you said about leaning into the freak show thing that sounds great i actually worked with a a guy who was hilarious um i can't remember his name oh dang it i should i probably shouldn't say his name anyway okay he was so funny um just a real crack up and uh he got put on this team that was doing job a job uh that i didn't quite i guess it was kind of a ragtag group with not a super well-defined charter and he adopted the team name island of misfit toys from from the claymation rudolph the red-nosed reindeer movie yeah and uh it was really funny like it got it got some traction he's like they were like we don't know what we do why we're doing it or what our charter is for the island of misfit toys no one belongs here so he leaned into

it yeah that started as a joke but the more you talk about it the more i think it's a good idea because a really easy way to unite teams is to have a shared culture and i mean being a little more serious you don't want to make it this us versus them adversarial thing because that can be a little dysfunctional but but some amount of like no one believes in us but we can do it even though we're weird and quirky okay i think that could bring a team together in the right context yeah another thing i have learned is that people often perform to expectations and if you expect them all to be screw-ups that can't do their job right um that'll leak out that's a hard expectation to hold and keep internal to yourself and not have it reflect

back to them some ways i mean people people know if you think they're all idiots i don't think anyone is good enough at thinking someone's an idiot to have no one know challenge that's a very advanced soft skill so i think you'd want to be careful here about not complaining right back to all the other scrum masters about how horrible your team is and how dumb everyone is and how much of a freak show they are because that'll that'll make it back i mean it made it to you when they complained yep about your teammates so yep that that would destroy trust and an important part of being on and forming a team is is trust within the team for sure at least you have a friend on the team

right yeah that's that's actually really good news for you i think um uh you got this friend you can trust i guess who's been a mentor to you and um maybe maybe you could raise this concern with him and say hey why was i put on this team you know what can we do to make the best of it and uh how do we go from here and collaborate and you said you can't really ask if we are being made into a freak show but you could ask your friend in confidence you're being made into a freak show yeah i think you do have one built-in ally and it's hard to know exactly what the team is like from the description if if it really is just all the people that we can't fire but that we hate

and would like to fire if we could i could see that as being hard to make work but even then there's still you could still get better work out of this team than with positive thinking and trust and and and not i don't know the rest of that sentence um then you would get by just saying everything sucks and everyone on your team is a moron yeah yeah i i totally agree with that and this is actually something i really struggle with so i'm kind of coming not coming up with some great advice here because i i think in this situation i would really try to change teams i'm not saying that i recommend you do that and since thomas clearly said you can't but um i just wanted to empathize a little with you because i would feel really i think scared and uneasy in this kind of

a situation like why am i here what's going on you know yeah uh i guess i just worry a lot about what people think about me and maybe that's not great either but i think you're great i don't worry what you think about me jameson okay i worry about what real people think about me people that matter by the way you're doing a really good job at that thinking i'm an idiot but not letting me know thing thank you that's one of my skills i haven't been on like a freak show team like you say but i have been on teams that i think are the the less cool team there's definitely been a cool team and and a less cool team and when i first got put onto that team i felt a little sad because i would look over at like the cool kids at the cool kid lunch table

and i don't know they just always look like they're having so much fun but throwing their heads back and laughing yeah yeah laughing and and typing on each other's keyboards in a show of camaraderie and but it wasn't it was great i guess that was the summary i i was worried it was going to be kind of the the misfit team and it wasn't at all there were talented people they they didn't know each other as well and the stuff they were working on was um less uh visibly cool but it was actually way more important to the company so i i found things to really enjoy about that team um and and we did kind of pull together as like the how do i put it we we were like the backbone of the company you know um so there was some some culture that grew

up around that i i do think some of that is a joke but you do have an opportunity to create a unique culture on that team that that uses the quirks for positive reasons or for positive outcomes if it is really a disaster it's just horrible everyone on your team except your mentor is bad uh you will learn a lot that's from that experience that is a really good outlook yeah consider yourself like an embedded reporter you know on the front lines of of some great calamity and it's your job to record document and remember what's going on yeah and and not just you don't want to just remember and say boy that sucks but i mean this is an opportunity to think if i had more control what could i do to fix this or if i see someone like this person in the future what

would motivate them to work better or how would i get along better with this person who i just really don't get along with or even if it's just so messed up that there's no saving it right now it can still help you in future situations yeah totally that's that's always the silver lining i think on any bad situation at work is as as thin as the silver lining may be you can always say what am i going to learn from this for next time you'll get some good stories out of it yep yeah that's true all right has the question been answered i think it's been answered yeah good luck and uh you can order alka-seltzer on amazon i think yeah that's true well where can people go if they want to get their own questions answered jameson

they can go to softskills.audio that is our website and on there it has a a button for asking a question uh you can also ask us on twitter we don't get as many of those anymore but we still check our dms check our our notifications so if you want to share it that way if you enjoy the show please please share it with other people too just tweet about it tell other people about it we would really enjoy your support that way thank you so much thanks everyone