The guy from the carbon fiber + silver tape titanic sub had super people skills. But if you don’t want to be crushed in a submarine by a 10.000 feet water column, you’ll rather have the clumsy/awkward/jerk guy with superb tech skills leading the project.
This is the stuff with which I struggle the most. I'm an introvert, and "my journey" sounds so insufferable and egotistical to me, I physically cringe at the thought of having to talk about this kind of stuff.
At the end of the day, I just want a paycheck and to work on at least marginally interesting problems. I'm not interested in having to lie about how passionate I am about what company X is doing, nor am I a salesperson that feels comfortable hyping myself up. It feels so fake it becomes a distraction during the interview, which causes me to freeze up and start floundering.
I work hard and I take pride in what I produce, I have plenty of hobbies and get along with others well, and I thrive in environments where I get to mentor and be mentored by others. These are the soft skills that are actually important for working on a team, but they're the most difficult to convey in the traditional interview format.
If you're trying to cultivate a chill workplace with colleagues you enjoy having coffee with, that's a different objective from building software which works correctly.
Right now I'm trying to watch Book of Boba Fett on Disney Plus. When I cast Disney to my TV and hit play, it shows the animated Disney logo and sound for about a second, pauses/buffers for a couple of seconds, and then skips to the start of the next episode (and so on, until it runs out of episodes). I can temporarily fix it by turning everything off and on again, and starting the episode on my tablet before hitting the cast button.
Maybe they have a really strong team, I dunno.
Based on an experience of never seen the relevant skills tested, and never been able to test for them as an interviewer, I really, really doubt that.
