My level of stress in a technical programming interview is usually in the 6 to 8 range. Even recently negotiating with my boss for a raise (which I know he was positively predisposed to because he is the one who brought it up) was a 5, which is significantly more than any regular meeting.

You need to be more zen about this. More laid back, relaxed, confident, or something like that.

You've probably been raised with the idea that job interviews are Very Important. Let go of that idea. It's just a chat with another programmer who's equally ill at ease with the situation. Imagine you're just having a coffee, or maybe discussing something at a seminar or something. He's not the boss; you're equals. When he asks the wrong question, let him know. Suggest changes. Discuss what YOU want to discuss instead of letting him dominate the conversation.

Of course it's still possible that he's inflexible about it. That tells you something about your prospective co-worker, and possibly the corporate culture.

For one, actually becoming more relaxed in confrontations is not something that has been achievable merely by asserting that I want to be -- instead, the only thing that seems to work is being in confrontations enough more often to reduce the stress level of such an environment. While this works to some degree, it raises the anxiety or stress level of the rest of my life, and is thus completely antithetical to most of the other things I do to make my life better. If I can instead just avoid situations which raise my stress level, and in which I would perform less well, that seems more conducive to overall happiness.

For another (and this was somewhat already implied), making changes to one's personality often has other effects on one which may be undesirable. Being more assertive might make it more likely that one bullies others (unintentionally). I've noticed this in myself as my assertiveness waxes and wanes: if I'm feeling especially confident, I'm more likely to say things without qualification, and say things that I would normally stop myself from saying. Later, I wonder if what I said came across as asinine, since that's how I would take such statements.

I sympathize quite a lot with the original poster, because while I'm a pretty good developer (at least, some others praise my skill highly), I'm really, really bad at interviewing, sales, talking to clients in a situation where I actually depend on their response, etc. (A previous commenter was quite right when he compared interviewing and sales -- they raise the same confrontational anxiety). When hired for a previous job, I was told months after the hiring that the interviewer was quite astonished that I'd turned out to be an intelligent and very capable developer, since I'd interviewed terribly, and the only reason he'd hired me at all was that he was having a fight with HR, and had announced that he would hire the next person he interviewed to show them how that worked out. That worked out poorly for his argument, but well for me and the team. :)

What positions would require you to prove the technical capability of your company at this level?

I've been working for a consultancy for a few years now. I can't recall a time when a client asked me to describe a closure or what I thought of !important. If I'm on a development team, the conversation with clients is generally about the time and effort required to implement something, or the options we have for delivering the functionality. If I'm pulled into a sales meeting, it's usually high-level architectural discussions.

I'm not an employee of the consulting company, but I COULD be if I asked, and in that case I would have been in that exact situation. I just prefer my contracting status; the upshot is that, not only did I do an interview like that, but I did it for free, on behalf of this company.

That might just be contracting with the government though.

If you are using the same interview process for technical folks and for sales folks, you are doing it wrong. (I mean, unless your technical folks are also sales folks, in which case, whoo boy. people who are good at both exist? but they are in high demand, and they are rare to begin with, so... good luck with that.)

some jobs... more than others. If an employer can find a programmer or sysadmin who can't get a job elsewhere because of poor sales skills, well, it sounds like they could either pay less or get someone with better technical skills than they could otherwise.

(That and my personal feeling? the guys who are 'always selling' are hard to deal with. I can handle maybe one day a week, if that, dealing with those folks.)

Seriously. Not everyone needs to be the team lead. The kid in the corner who is really good technically, who solves technical problems has a lot of value even if his or her social skills are poor.

I mean, sure, they'd be /more/ valuable with social skills, too... My whole point is that you can't get the perfect candidate. Quite often it makes sense to take a hit on social skills if it gets you someone who is better technically. (and sometimes the converse makes sense, too.)

I'm just saying, there is a place in the workplace for the introverts who don't interview or argue well. As an employer, if you only hire technical people who can get dates, well, you are limiting yourself.

Yes and no.

If it's just about being socially awkward, that's something that can be dealt with. But at the same time that socially awkward kid can potentially cause conflicts on the team.

But what I see far more often is someone who has poor communication skills. If I tell someone to do XYZ and they come back with XAB because they didn't quite understand and were too shy to ask for clarification, then I've just wasted time and money because they couldn't talk to me.

And I think it's very rare for someone with good communication skills to not have basic sales skills.

I guess I have yet to meet the perfect introvert with poor social skills who can understand everything that I ask him (or her) to do, who gets the work done quickly.

Honestly, I think that the myth of the really awesome social introvert/recluse is far more rare than it would otherwise appear. And that the costs of working with people like that may actually be higher than the benefits in a lot of cases. I say that as someone who previously was one of those social introverts, but who decided it was valuable to learn some social skills.

The moral of the story is that it's valuable to learn how to talk to people. And how to get dates.

Well, if you are looking for perfect anything, you are bound to find much disappointment.

I suggest that your inability to communicate with introverts has as much to do with your own communication style and abilities than with theirs.

Personally, I have the opposite problem. I can handle introverts; interacting with extroverts is where I screw it up, usually. I'm not terrible at it, by the standards of my people, but I'm not good at it. (I am terrible at it by the standards of a normal person.)

Obviously, the manager needs to be able to communicate with the programmers, so yeah, if you can't deal with introverts, you probably shouldn't be managing them. But recognize that you will be paying a lot more money, usually, for a lot less programming skill, if you go for a more extroverted and confident looking programmer.

>The moral of the story is that it's valuable to learn how to talk to people. And how to get dates.

Nobody is arguing with that. my social skills massively inflates my bill rate. Even very rough social skills and very rough confidence can dramatically increase your salary. If you can level up in that arena, it will benefit you greatly.

I'm just saying, on the manager side? with effort, you can get people who are dramatically better than me, technically speaking, for dramatically less than you'd pay for me, if you are willing to work around their communications and confidence issues. The pay and skill difference is sometimes quite dramatic, so just like most programmers can do well to learn how to deal with extroverts, most managers would do well to learn how to deal with introverts.

Sure. But do I want to work somewhere that has such a broken policy? Why haven't they fixed it? What other areas of the company have a similar lack of attention?

Interviews go both ways. The candidate and the company only get a small glimpse at each other and have to extrapolate from there. What I extrapolated was not positive.

I'm not convinced that this is true. Poor hiring doesn't mean that the company does other things wrong, but hiring determines what kind of people work at the company. Running into a hiring process that you believe won't select good coworkers can be a major problem.

The first impression the company gave him was "we have a bad process" for arguably one of the most important tasks they do - hiring. If they're broken about interviewing, why should he think that the people they do hire are going to be people he wants to work with? Or that any of their other processes are going to be less broken?

My current job (site reliability engineer) gave me a take home programming assignment, and one of the engineers did a code review face to face after I turned it in but before they gave me an offer. The quality of his review was a big factor in me taking the offer - I was impressed that they cared that much about code quality from a non software engineer.