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I believe it's because it's far harder to find people with good people skills than find people with good technical skills. If you talk to people who hire/inter
by tobtoh 16y ago
I believe it's because it's far harder to find people with good people skills than find people with good technical skills.
If you talk to people who hire/interview and manage people as their primary role, you will often hear them say that the candidates attitude/people skills is more important than their technical ability.
If the candidate has good attitude/people skills, they can be taught (or will pick up on their own) good technical skills. But if they only have good technical skills, but lack a good attitude, that is something that is very difficult to teach/improve.
- igrekel 16y agoI don't think good people skills are that rare, at least no more rarer than really good technical skills. I think this perception is due that if you are hiring someone with experience in software, you already perform a selection on who will apply, you'll typically get people with "some" technical skills so the people you'll see with people skills are the ones with some intersection of both. Also good technical skills aren't that easy to discriminate in the length of an interview. Its much easier to discriminate people skills since you are putting people in a stressful situation that is all about dealing with people. Finally, a lot of the people with both technical skills and some people skills will avoid widget factories type of environments. If they started out of college, they probably got a programming job in a widget place, their perspective is the lowly ranked employee, its unlikely they appreciated the experience in comparison. Once they found a more enjoyable position, they probably won't go back to that type of environment. They won't even apply.
- findm 16y agoPersonally, I don't think you can ever teach "good attitude" often times I doubt the candidate will ever be receptive to your attempts to change their attitude.
- j_baker 16y ago> I believe it's because it's far harder to find people with good people skills than find people with good technical skills. I disagree emphatically. Good people skills are far more common than good technical skills. However, it is incredibly rare to find someone with both the technical skill and the people skill to be a technical manager.
- tobtoh 16y agoYes if you are taking about the general populace, I absolutely agree good people skills are far more common. However we're talking about BA/PMs in a technical company (at least that is my assumption given the original question) in which case there is already a pre-filtered environment of basic technical familiarity/knowledge. In this environment, good people skills and more specifically 'attitude' is a lot rarer than technical skills.
- j_baker 16y agoIt sounds like we agree except on the semantics. My point is: people skills = easy to find technology skills = more difficult to find technology skills + people skills = incredibly tough to find