Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude.
Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude.
When interviewing, particularly for technical positions, many people over value their technical preparation, and don't consider the importance of personality and leadership preparation.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
I wrote the first version of this article in early 2019. The topic is one of my favorites, and this article has provoked deep debate on social media when I’ve shared it. I decided it was time to update it, to ensure it’s at the right quality level for an evergreen article on such a critical topic.
I walked into the interview room, and an energetic young guy ran up to me and shook my hand frantically with both of his. He was interviewing for an entry-level software engineering position at Amazon. I need to immediately point out that very few software engineers are energetically outgoing.
“Hi, I’m Chen!” he said brightly. “I’m so happy to meet you! This is a dream for me to come interview with Amazon, and now I’m here! It’s so exciting!”
I was pleasantly surprised. I’d already done multiple interviews over the previous couple of days, and no candidate had come close to Chen’s level of energy. I was the bar raiser for the hiring event, and my primary job was to ensure that we maintained a high bar for hired candidates.
During my interview with him, Chen continued to impress with his enthusiasm and positive attitude.
I asked Chen to code a custom coding problem involving robots and a maze. Chen asked great clarification questions, he stayed upbeat, and was open to feedback. This was all great because he could tell that he was doing a pretty poor job with my coding question.
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I was disappointed. As interviewers, we’re not perfect. There are candidates with certain personalities where you hope they succeed. You think to yourself, “Oh please, don’t bomb this.” And while Chen didn’t absolutely bomb, I did determine that his coding was below the bar I expected.
During the final five minutes, candidates can ask the interviewer questions. It’s not uncommon with entry-level positions like this one for candidates to have no questions. And when they do have questions, it’s unlikely that they’re interesting questions. Usually, they’re some type of fluff question just so that they have a question. “What’s the most challenging aspect of working at Amazon?” or something similar.
Chen posed as many questions as he could fit in. I even let the interview run over a little because he was so excited and enthusiastic to ask his questions. He demonstrated a deep knowledge of Amazon’s business, history, and leadership principles. He explained how he would put in any amount of energy necessary to be a successful part of the company because his dream was to work at Amazon.
And I believed him. This type of enthusiasm is difficult to fake, and he backed it up by having done his homework ahead of time.
Our debrief for all candidates was later in the day. We got snacks, sometimes beers, and relaxed to discuss all the candidates.
As the bar raiser, I had to run the process. My preferred process for events like this was to do the easy debriefs first, because we could knock them out of the way and focus on the few hard decisions. Since I could see everyone’s votes, I was able to quickly skim through the votes before the meeting and determine where I felt each debrief was likely to go. I would generally take the unanimous candidates first, since they’d be faster.
We talked about a candidate where we all felt they bombed every single question, and didn’t demonstrate anything noteworthy. We briefly discussed to make certain there weren’t any particular qualities we’d noticed worth mentioning. It was an easy rejection.
We had the opposite candidate, where everyone felt they nailed all the coding questions, and was almost overqualified for the entry-level role. I spoke to the recruiter, and they made a note to allocate the candidate to a manager I knew. We were there hiring for multiple hiring managers, but I wanted this candidate to go to someone I knew would manage that new hire’s career well. I sent a quick email to the manager, telling them that we’d hired someone exceptional for them, and they should keep an eye on the new hire as someone with growth potential. For what it’s worth, I was totally right. The candidate ended up promoted quickly after being hired.
I’d noticed that Chen was unanimously not inclined, but I was interested in talking about him a bit longer. So I’d allocated him to the second to the last discussion slot.
When Chen came up, we went around the room giving our impressions. And that’s where things changed.
Every single interviewer had the same impression I had. They all said that Chen was below the bar on their technical measures. He wasn’t great at design (even for an entry-level candidate). His coding was moderately ok, but below the bar. His technical problem-solving was not great. Everything that would make a candidate an easy rejection.
Except that literally every interviewer also said that Chen was remarkably enthusiastic. He was energetic. He was self-critical about his technical gaps, and was excited to hear constructive feedback. Even across interviewers, he demonstrated a drive to improve himself, resolving problems he’d made earlier in the interview process.
We collectively agreed that by the book, Chen was probably below the bar for a hire. Except that no one pushed (unlikely for other candidates) for a decision to move on. Time and time again, interviewers brought up anecdotes of something Chen had done which had delighted them in various ways.
I asked the other development manager if they’d take the candidate. They weren’t technically hiring at this event, but they were representing the hiring manager decision at the debrief. They said they’d take Chen in a heartbeat.
They said something like, “I’m confident Chen would figure it out. And my team would be a better team with Chen on it. That guy would be such a positive presence.”
As we discussed further, we all agreed that Chen had demonstrated energy and excitement to improve, and had crushed the leadership principles half of the interview process. We extended him an offer. Last I checked (in 2019), he’d been at Amazon for many years, and had been promoted twice. This hiring decision was talked about by that group of interviewers for years, as Chen’s eventual hiring manager had said that he was one of the best candidates they’d ever gotten from a hiring event.
What did Chen’s story emphasize to me? That functional skills are easy to measure and assess, but they’re also easier to learn. Soft-skills like empathy and enthusiasm are difficult to quantify, but they also seem to be a part of people’s personalities, rather than learned behavior.