Comment by austin-cheney
6 months ago
This sounds incredibly autistic. You assume the failure is something about your personality for absolutely no reason. Second, you assume lying about your personality during an interview will get you a job or keep you employed.
I have an autistic child who goes through this. They have absolutely no idea why they could be annoying and just assume they are otherwise awesome.
I am not sure that abysmally low social intelligence due to neurodivergence can be fixed. But, you can improve your capacity for nonverbal listening and ask for feedback.
I didn’t say I wanted to lie about my personality. I said I wanted to tune my personality so that I do better in interviews. It’s subtly different; I wanted advice on putting my best foot forward, and I was wondering if people had ideas for doing so.
It’s not just about this one job, obviously it’s impossible to know what a single employer’s reasoning is for this stuff; I have just noticed a pattern of me being pretty bad at interviews, and being declined enough to where I probably need to make some kind of change. I am not asking for one simple hack to make friends, it’s fucking interview prep. I don’t think I have low social intelligence in most cases, I have never had much issue making friends or anything like that. I don’t dispute that I am probably annoying and I don’t think I am awesome.
It’s not like interviews are anything like actual human interaction in any meaningful sense, and clearly a lot of people must agree because there are dozens of specific “interview prep” services out there.
Employment is all about being a good fit for the employer, not about being a good developer. I am often not selected because I preference things that scares the shit out of most developers even if such things are hugely beneficial.
Interviews are just talking to people. Its not the same as a casual conversation, but its also not a hostile police interrogation. Nonetheless, its still just a conversation. If you imagine it to be something different then something different it becomes.
Yeah, I don't think I disagree with anything you said.
I was a little upset when I created the Ask HN, because I was pretty convinced that I was going to get this job and accidentally started getting preemptively excited. I try not to count my eggs before they hatch, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Easy to get into your own head and hate yourself a little when you feel rejected and frustrated.
My wife (who is awesome and supportive and cool) gave me a bit of a pep talk and it actually did make me feel better and I'm more or less alright now.