Ask a Manager update about a guy who told his interviewer during a job interview that “maybe she made mistakes as a developer but since I actually went to school for it, I didn’t have that problem.”
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I can see several mistakes in how he's handling this situation...
Oh man, that would have been such an amazing way to rescue the situation— write an email acknowledging the mistakes he made during his interview and how he would remedy them. Unfortunately, it seems like dude lacks any self-awareness or humility. Kind of a train-wreck situation to read through, honestly.
This person is clearly on the autism spectrum, as so many top-shelf devs are. But they have all the tech skills and none of the soft skills. First mistake: don't argue with your boss's boss in an interview. Admit that you may be wrong and move on.
I agree with Colter. This is a person who is on the spectrum and needs to see developing a behavioral skillset as valuable to his work as developing the technical skillset. There is training for this that he can get. But, LW will have to see it as a logical solution versus something he has to do bc people feel insulted and annoyed. He needs to see he is misinterpreting the logic of declining to hire people who say they don't make mistakes.
Oh goodness, my heart aches for this person - and those who have endured his behavior.
May he find the hole to his peg.
I managed software developers for a long time. I cannot count the number of engineers that I let go and fired who felt that they were far and away the best dev on the team. Usually this led to them demanding to see my boss. His email, the tone, everything that it implies is sadly very common in the field.
Someone needs to tell this person that the central skill in software development is the ability to fail well, something that never failing (whatever that means) will surely keep from developing.
The cognitive leaps his mind is going to – this manager has somehow decided to waste their time and energy pro-actively blackballing him – in order to avoid admitting that he may have made a mistake are astonishing.
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