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Holy tortured reasoning (riddled with insults), Batman! Do you actually believe any of this? I like how you ignore where I respond to a prior comment, describe

by ruggeri 14y ago

Holy tortured reasoning (riddled with insults), Batman! Do you actually believe any of this? I like how you ignore where I respond to a prior comment, describe the commenter's arguments as fair, and then address them one by one. Maybe you notice where I don't insult the guy who disagrees with me? You've now written 500+ words of arrogant moralizing premised on a single rhetorical question which you intentionally misconstrued. > Now, it should be clear that there is nothing irrelevant about an overlooked weakness that exists in a speaker who is busy arguing that people who are unprepared to discuss their weaknesses are either lazy or dishonest. In point of fact, it is clearly irrelevant. Let's be honest: like everyone, I surely have many failings I am blind to. Probably these including massive, debilitating personal failures. And still, I am aware of at least some of my many flaws, and I'm willing to talk about how I am trying to improve with an interviewer. Perhaps not the weaknesses which you would impute to me, but other ones. The question is not to correctly identify an applicant's greatest weakness (how would the interviewer verify this?), or for the applicant enumerate every weakness. It's to discuss one weakness. So whether I'm oblivious or idiotic or anything else you call me has nothing to do with anything, except as an expression of your own incoherent anger.

alexqgb 14y ago
Rest assured, I was neither ignoring nor overlooking anything. Here's what you said up top: "Why do people hate the greatest weakness question? I have never minded receiving it, and I often ask people the same." After receiving an answer, your story changed a little. Now it was about "one" weakness. And a bit further down, you complete the reversal by asserting that asking about the greatest weakness is pointless, since people's answers can't be verified. So you often ask a question you don't ask because it's silly. Got it. I think what this exchange demonstrates is that you don't need to explicitly ask "what's your greatest weakness" to get some idea about the problems you may encounter in working with an individual. Indeed, you can get solid information about a person from a conversation about the whether if you're paying close enough attention to what they actually say. Conducting the interview at a restaurant and watching how they treat the waiter is an especially good way to to get a reliable quick-read. Observations like these won't tell you who is perfect for the job, but they will tell you who is to be avoided. The key to these revealing moments is that the person you're considering isn't feeling on the spot at the time. That's why anxiety-producing questions are so unproductive. The interview situation provides enough nervousness on its own. Far better to relieve some of that pressure, allow people to be themselves, and just see what happens next.

by ruggeri 14y ago

alexqgb 14y ago

Rest assured, I was neither ignoring nor overlooking anything. Here's what you said up top: "Why do people hate the greatest weakness question? I have never minded receiving it, and I often ask people the same." After receiving an answer, your story changed a little. Now it was about "one" weakness. And a bit further down, you complete the reversal by asserting that asking about the greatest weakness is pointless, since people's answers can't be verified. So you often ask a question you don't ask because it's silly. Got it. I think what this exchange demonstrates is that you don't need to explicitly ask "what's your greatest weakness" to get some idea about the problems you may encounter in working with an individual. Indeed, you can get solid information about a person from a conversation about the whether if you're paying close enough attention to what they actually say. Conducting the interview at a restaurant and watching how they treat the waiter is an especially good way to to get a reliable quick-read. Observations like these won't tell you who is perfect for the job, but they will tell you who is to be avoided. The key to these revealing moments is that the person you're considering isn't feeling on the spot at the time. That's why anxiety-producing questions are so unproductive. The interview situation provides enough nervousness on its own. Far better to relieve some of that pressure, allow people to be themselves, and just see what happens next.