17 ms·
I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning. We interviewed him and mad
by linsomniac 5y ago
I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning.
We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great!
After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorrected typos... It got so bad that we had to have someone review all e-mails he sent to customers.
We had regular "improvement plan" meetings with him, but after a year of paying him, we had to let him go. As part of the exit interview we went back and looked at his interview e-mails, and compared them with his current e-mails. So we asked him:
"During the interview, all your e-mails were great! Why was that?"
"My wife wrote all of those."
I guess we should have hired his wife!
- giantg2 5y agoMy (professional) written communication is a strong point for me. What kind of job has mostly sending emails as the work?
- ct0 5y agoHR
- giantg2 5y agoInteresting, but I guess they don't get paid well.
- petesergeant 5y agoRecruitment
- giantg2 5y agoOk, thanks
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NikolaNovak 5y agoIn my team, Duty Managers / Service Delivery Managers / Operations Managers. Communication in every which direction is #1 skillset I look for in the team (as well as being organized, disciplined, eager to learn, sense of ownership). A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-ordinate, plan and inform. Customize medium, format, length, message for each group to enhance understanding. Develop spidey sense of paranoia against assumptions, misunderstandings.
- giantg2 5y ago"eager to learn, sense of ownership" Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie your hands means one is given all the responsibility without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because of that. Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.
- justin_oaks 5y agoI once was a team lead for an team of outsourced software developers. It was the worst part of my career. The whole outsourced team was awful. Wholly incompetent. I had the responsibility of delivering a product, but I didn't have the authority to fire these folks who were a net negative on the project. I would have been happier with implementing the whole project myself, which I mostly did. I too was unmotivated, but the stress of being responsible was unbearable. Perhaps some people disagree that "most organizations" give responsibility without authority, but I've seen it happen a several times in my career.
- EsotericAlgo 5y agoI’ve left positions for similar reasons. Another strain of this is forcing some COTS application to work via a million hacks and integrations (usually via consulting resources) when a fundamental architecture or application change is needed. Responsibility coupled with the resource and authority to execute is stressful in its own way but it at least allows one to more easily own their failures.
- linsomniac 5y agoWe were a Linux System Administration consultancy. The product wasn't the e-mails, but nearly everything we did for our clients was designed/planned, scheduled, organized, and documented in e-mail. Yes, sometimes we would work on things with the client on the phone, those were usually followed up with an e-mail about what was done. These e-mails were copied to our internal mailing lists so that they could be peer reviewed and someone else could be cross-trained on it in case the primary wasn't available. Also, every task we did had a one sentence description written up that would be shared with the team, again as a kind of peer review.
- giantg2 5y agoOk, thanks. All my Linux skills (which weren't many to begin with) are basically gone since it's all cloud now.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoWhat's running in the cloud if not Linux?
- giantg2 5y agoIf you run "serverless" It's all hidden from you.
- beamatronic 5y agoNot to mention it's all deployed with Terraform now. You can stand up and configure thousands of servers without the command line
- cperciva 5y agoFreeBSD!
- robofanatic 5y agoany customer facing job I guess. like sales, marketing, support, PR?
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoProduct/Software support. Above the Tier 1 level, at the stage where you're talking with the Dev team directly. Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need someone who can understand either the code or the developer's comments, but can then put it in layman's terms. Edit: DevOps, too.
- giantg2 5y agoI'm in a DevSecOps role and hate it.
- giantg2 5y agoWhy downvote my experiences?
- macintux 5y agoI didn’t, but I suspect people were hoping for something more substantive. What about it don’t you like? Is there something specific to this thread that relates to your role and reminds you why you hate it? Your comment did nothing to further the conversation or take it in an interesting direction.
- giantg2 5y agoIt was a direct reply to "DevOps too". I asked for examples. I replied to that response stating that I'm already DevSecOps. Not sure what else they would be looking for. If they had additional info, maybe they should chime in.
- op00to 5y agoTechnical Account Management.
- arbuge 5y agoThat sounds to me like it would meet the legal definition of fraud. A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Out_of_Characte 5y agoWriting your own emails or resume isn't required or expected. Some people have assistants that do a lot of work by proxy of you. Its just very awkward that it becomes noticeable in a negative manner in the workplace.
- Unklejoe 5y ago> or expected That's news to me. I have always assumed the resumes I have been reading were written by the applicants themselves. I guess I was wrong.
- throwawayboise 5y agoResume preparation services are common and easy to find, and though I've never used such services I am sure many people do and I would not view it as unethical as long as the resume accurately summarized experience and qualifications.
- vineyardmike 5y agoMany college hires will use their college's resume writing workshop, and there are also commercial options. Also, friends and family. Why wouldn't you get the single most important document in the application process reviewed and rewritten?
- democracy 5y agoI hope it was carbon black ink on papyrus ))
- 5y ago
- intpx 5y agoI recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoDear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.
- reaperducer 5y agoSounds a lot better to me than live coding on a white board.
- jrumbut 5y agoYeah, it's a super relevant skill and something that doesn't go away (for me) in the interviewing environment (the way technical skills sometimes can).
- raxxorrax 5y agoI would take the coding on a white board instead of answering fake mails to be honest. But the job doesn't sound too attractive if correspondence is mostly with customers. Internal mails are way more informal and quicker to write.
- lazide 5y agoSounds like that type of job might not be a good fit for you? You’d always be anxious!
- 908B64B197 5y ago> "My wife wrote all of those." There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file. Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.
- pmarreck 5y ago>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
- okeuro49 5y agoI don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.
- hraedon 5y agoWhatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit." The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?
- thex10 5y agoI have a relative who is severely dyslexic, whose spouse will revise/rewrite/advise on written communication extensively. But they know better than to take a job where written communication is a large, critical part of the work!
- nicodjimenez 5y ago> I guess we should have hired his wife! Classic comment.
- gus_massa 5y agoIf it's an important email, my wife will review and fix it before I send it. If you need good writing skill, you should definitively hire my wife!
- ibi5 5y agoI do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done. I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy. Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction. I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
- linsomniac 5y agoSounds like the real value play for your employers is to keep you in the communications side and add a zero to your paycheck. (Someone who has jumped on airplanes to both keep and lose clients)
- maccard 5y agoIf it's external & important, I get a proof reader.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThis is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and not just 'point them at the Github'.
- mikewarot 5y agoOr stuff that's so old, it predates Git, let along Github Here's some code I wrote back in 1987/88, for example. http://www.retroarchive.org/swag/MISC/0153.PAS.html http://www.retroarchive.org/swag/MISC/0153.PAS.html
- boulos 5y agoThere's a spelling mistake / typo: it should be ensure not insure. > This procedure allows the programmer to insure
- nradov 5y ago
- ryeights 5y ago...source?
- fxtentacle 5y ago
- hlbjhblbljib 5y agoThis why I've had to deal with very regressive HR on-boarding processes. I'm sick of companies treating new employees like their data doesn't matter and they can be required to sign up to any service no matter what the ToS is like.
- ibi5 5y agoI do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done. I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy. Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction. I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
- brimble 5y agoI guess this is like when companies try to use correctness and formatting of a resume for proof of attention to detail or communication skills or something like that—but people just pay for professional proofreading and formatting instead. (it's proof for a certain kind of social and professional awareness, rather, I'd say, which is true for quite a few hiring norms, really, but doesn't mean you can expect a new hire to compose really good documents on the job...)
- aaron695 5y ago> "My wife wrote all of those." Of course. You would never ever send an important email without getting it checked, or having someone write it, if it's not your thing. I do like the way the replies to this seem like they are frankly, retarded. I get you are single but if you don't understand how relationships work this might be a good start at retrospectively thinking about it. Relationships are about teams of two putting the best of either forward. This does not make you twice as good, it's somewhat exponential. It's even more powerful when you decide to do it for life. (And single people use friends, this is exactly how you apply for jobs, with the help of others if available)