Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy.
There are other ways to ask these sorts of questions: did you ever have a job that you dont want to go back to but would not give up the experience of? (Do you know how shitty a job can be, were you an amazon driver or a pickle shoveler)
When they dont have that much experience you want to know that they can be mentored.
> Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy.
Sure. But is "willing to talk about dealing with trauma" really a valid filter to sort potential employees by?
because we can just ask them how they dealt with with emotionally-difficult work situations in the past.
is there any work where that is not the case?
What certain roles are needed to plunge into reliving the time they were raped or assaulted? When they were a war refugee? And while reliving being assaulted to navigate a professional space??
- HR professionals deal with a ton of shit, including assaults.
- First responders, obviously.
- Message board moderators?
- Customer service of any kind. (The Karen memes are irritating, and really, really mean, but I swear I recognize every one those interactions from my years in those kinds of jobs.)
- I was trauma-dumped plenty of times during my teaching career, as well as been loudly - even potentially violently - blamed (by students) for all of the problems they're having in class (or maybe even life, lol).
Maintaining professional aplomb in emotionally volatile situations is a critical part of jobs which deal primarily with people, rather than things - and is more relevant to engineering sorts of roles than many engineers realize.
Look, I'm not defending those particular questions - and far less the particular people asking them. I'm offering an alternate point of view about why they're being asked. It'd be great to see posters on this forum suggest some better ways to evaluate the traits at which they're aimed.
Again: I'm not defending the practice. It's a really gross metric, and a really gross (in the other sense) method. I just haven't seen this thread demonstrate much understanding of what's actually going on.
You're 100% correct about crisis intervention training. I had a few sessions - of dubious worth - while I was a teacher. I worked in a group home for troubled kids for a bit, and that one included learning physical restraints - which I did end up needing. My best mentor, however, was a grizzled old waitress who took a drag on a Camel (cigarette), shrugged, and said "you just gotta let them have their say". She was a wizard at de-escalation.
Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.