Interviews

Basically any resource about how to get a leg up on job interviews will list a few common interview questions, and the ones I see most often are like, "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" or, "What's your greatest strength/weakness?"

I think these questions are misguided.

First of all, what could someone possibly say that's going to mean anything? People are really bad at self assessment. The Dunning Kruger effect is real. You don't know what you don't know. Impostor syndrome is real. Incentives to be honest are skewed during an interview, to boot.

If someone tells me that they're good at pool, I have no idea if they can run hundreds of balls in straight pool, or if they have pretty good aim but couldn't control cue ball position to save their life. Chances are you had no idea before right now that controlling the cue ball's position after a shot was a thing that could even happen, and I guess that's my point. Two random people's perspectives on what it means to be good at something are basically never going to align 100%.

Being able to sink difficult shots will make you feel like you're good at pool, but the thing that counts and wins games is having enough cue ball control so that you don't have to. A good player is thinking about the flow from one shot to the next, and several shots ahead. How to make their next shot straight on enough that it's easy to sink, but not so straight on that they'd transfer all of the cue ball momentum and not be able to get to their next target position.

I could also talk your ear off about conservation of momentum, and elastic and inelastic collisions, the "speed" of cloth, vertical tip position and english, cue shaft, ferrule and tip materials and all those things that matter to pool players, but I'm lucky if I can sink 10 in a row in straight pool because I haven't practiced in years.

Assessment aside, I don't really believe in strengths and weaknesses, largely in the same way that I don't believe in good and evil. I think that people have attributes or tendencies, and depending on the context, they can have a positive or negative effect, but it absolutely depends on context.

(Just as a brief aside, I think that giving yourself the moral highground and labeling yourself as good and other people as evil is precisely the context needed for "evil" behavior. Because fuck the rights of those subhuman evil SOB's, right?)

A person can be very focused, and that can be a good thing, but in a situation that's chaotic and unpredictable, heavy focus is a liability. Sometimes you need a flashlight instead of a laser. Likewise, without good prioritization, strong focus is useless.

If I have laser focus, I can't tell you that's a strength of mine unless I know that someone else in management is very good at looking at the big picture, and knows how to direct it, which I have no way to know when I go to your interview. Absent that, it means I'm less likely to spot things that are causing problems that are non-obviously related. It means I'm less valuable to a company that has a more horizontal organizational structure.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to how you round out a team, looking for complementary attributes to get a robust unit that can collectively handle whatever situations come up. There's nuance in everything, and I think asking people about their strengths demonstrates a lack of understanding of that.

Incidentally, I had written previously that I'd committed to posting once a week, but I hadn't really thought it through, past the idea that I want to write more. The fact is that I don't always have something I want to say, and sometimes things don't line up so that I can make a post about something I'm working on because I'm still figuring it out.

Also, sometimes, the things I've been thinking about are outside the scope of what I want to publish, maybe.

I started playing Destiny a few months ago, and the most recent expansion has a 3v3 PvP mode that I find strategically pretty interesting. The mode opens up every weekend, and every weekend, I've been writing up a little to my friends about what I've learned and what I think is best in terms of strategy and tactics, so we can all do better.

Given that I originally started blogging as an extension of writing e-mails to my friends, I guess I'll clean that up and post it, too.