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Comment by stathibus | Hacker News Reader

Person-to-person interaction is an important component of most jobs. If a candidate could not conduct a verbal conversation as part of an interview, I would have a lot of trouble fitting them on any of my teams. Siloing with independent projects is an option, but I think would only be sustainable in larger orgs.

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I think your post (and unless I misunderstand, your intent) kind of assumes far far too much context to be helpful. A job interview is a very specific set of conversations, whereas the function of a job at a company can have a very wide array of responsibilities that may or may not be related. If a person has a speech impediment/stutter/something like tourettes syndrome, that problem may only impede one's ability during a high pressure, synchronous conversation. Those symptoms may be totally mitigated by lowered pressure or asynchronous communication. To categorically say that someone that has difficulty communicating in high pressure, synchronous communication situations is unfit for "most jobs" is, to me, a huge miss. Especially now, where remote work is such a big deal, and so many conversations are just-Slack or just-email. If you can have a disagreement over Slack without causing adversarialism or frustration, you're far more valuable to a remote employer than someone that can communicate well over Zoom but poorly in text (I think).

I would say, if a person is able to write clearly and thoughtfully, and is competent at their role, they're very well suited for lots of jobs that aren't sales related. The meritocracy that gets touted so frequently (but is actually never upheld) should reward those that are competent at their advertised skills, right? If you're a really good programmer you should be able to find employment as a programmer, right?

I was only speaking about my work environment, and was trying to avoid making broad generalizations, but it seems I didn't try hard enough. I'm sure there are other work environments where verbal collaboration isn't so important.

I think the "Most jobs require" comment was what made it seem to broad. There are lots of jobs that require interview-style communication, I totally agree. For my friend's specific case, it was a dev at a remote company that specifically prioritized working alone and not communicating with teammates 99% of the time, to which I thought it kind of a perfect fit for someone with verbal communication difficulties.

Thanks for clarifying!

Understandable. At the same time, if you have a deaf candidate apply, you and your coworkers have the opportunity to learn some of their non-verbal communication strategies for collaboration.

I'd personally be more than fine with someone who didn't want to ever verbally communicate, as long as they had excellent written communication skills. Especially if it's a remote job. For example, I'm sure there are many deaf people that excel in software engineering roles.

I can see how it'd be a major challenge to be deaf or bad at speaking at an in-person job where everyone else is speaking, though.

I'm much better at writing than speaking, myself, and find it much easier to convey complex ideas in writing (real-time or asynchronously). Especially writing vs. speaking through a conference app like Teams, where the latency can sometimes make things awkward.

I think you mean face-to-face communication? Because written text is person-to-person communication. In my experience, and on the jobs I've worked, writing has been a much more important skill than talking.

Last I checked a developer can update jira, upload patches, review code, deploy code, and chat to slack without verbal communication.

Might want to consider broadening your horizons a bit. I'm sure this is a good description of some software jobs (especially remote), but certainly not any that I've ever held or managed.

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