I understand the need to fake overwhelming optimism to get by interviewers with mindsets similar to yours. Too much honesty can be bad in this industry, especially at higher levels, where diplomacy and soft skills are very important.
I have that optimism and it certainly is not fake. I love what I do. Yes, I bring experience to the table but not bad energy.
WTF would you want to hire someone who poisons the well? It doesn't matter what the job/industry is, in what situation would that be remotely desirable?
If you say so. But just as you doubt the vigor of the “somewhat pessimistic” candidate (in your words, you didn’t say they were toxic), others will doubt the sincerity of your overwhelming optimism. So is life.
When we discuss these types of candidates, that is always the tone of the discussion.
It's good to discuss the pluses and minuses of an approach, we encourage this in our architecture section of the interview loop and during the initial screen when discussing line items in the resumes.
It's having a general negative attitude... bad mouthing past employers, being negative to a tech stack (and literally not couching it with any reasoning what-soever when we try to dig in), being negative to past arch decisions by co-workers without providing what are better solutions, things like that. Sometimes it's implied, sometimes it's more direct, but it there is a distinct lack of social intelligence that seems to happen more w/ older candidates that just suggests someone is burnt out. Wisdom should bring skill, not attitude.
Forest from the trees here. You pay someone to bring value to the team. That is not valuable to anyone. We're not running charities.
You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range, but younger candidates seem to get more of a pass than older ones (or perhaps because the senior candidates have more rope to hang themselves with). Over negativity about past employers is indeed a warning sign (though some negativity is fine, like if you ask the question “what did you dislike about your past employer? “), but pessimism in small quantities shouldn’t be taken as an automatic negative. I would definitely be suspicious if all the opinions a senior candidate had were positive. If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it.
"You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range"
But this is specifically an issue more prevalent in older candidates, and is in large part the reason for a pass. We pass on younger candidates as well for this reason, but most prevalently for skill.
"If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it."
I literally just said we consider this a positive and that we specifically dig in for this. It seems like you're willfully misinterpreting the message here, which is underscoring the point I'm actually making.
Really, what you are saying is 100% spot on, but seems to be misunderstood for some reason.
If presented with a difficult problem, there are people that go "nah, that can't be done, here's a long list of reasons why".
There are also people that go "That's going to be difficult, but maybe we can try A, B or C and I recall reading about this cool new tech that could perhaps help"
Be open to change and open to accepting that new things could be good and interesting.
I'm 43. Hiring engineers. Working with some 50+ engineers that are the absolute best I've ever worked with.
This is 100% correct. As a hiring manager, the attitude of candidates was probably equally important as their skills when it comes to the decision of whether to hire. The baseline of is this someone I would enjoy working with every day? Is this someone my team would enjoy working with every day? If it's not a solid yes I'm going to pass on you.
This must be some kind of cultural difference in the purpose of jobs. Where I come from, the purpose of work is get things done, put food on the table, and hopefully not make the world a worse place in the process. Enjoying the company of everyone you work with is not a significant consideration.
You might be missing out on a lot of great people because of your high first impression bar. And I don’t mean good workers but bad social skills, but people who are actually really chill to work with even if they don’t show it so quickly. This is why most culture fit filters really don’t work well, people have a wrong or too narrow impression of who they would enjoy working with everyday.
