It's harder to deal with emotional kids than it is to deal with incompetent engineers. Maybe that's why those non-technical HRs might not be as useless as you think.
It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.
And that's a risk that could potentially be spotted by a competent HR.
> It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.
Maybe, but juniors are (unfortunately) seen as a commodity by the market. Commodities are about uniformity and adherence to some standard, rather than uniqueness.
It's a risk that could only be spotted be HR, don't know about the "competent" part. There would be no emotional-kid risks to speak of if it weren't for useless HR.
> Maybe, but juniors are (unfortunately) seen as a commodity by the market. Commodities are about uniformity and adherence to some standard, rather than uniqueness.
It's making even less sense now. If we are commodities and it's all about uniformity and standard, why do we see senior engineers complaining about this, too? It also makes no economic sense to spend so much time and effort on elaborate bullshit on "commodities". I don't mind being a commodity if the standards that you speak of exist, and I don't want to be unique. But guess what? It's the HR that wants us to be the unique commodities.
Someone without the required technical chops can be useless, which isn't good, but these people can be worse than useless as they can derail and/or demoralize an entire team. I've seen it happen; it's not pretty.
This isn't unique to younger people, but in my experience the risk is quite a bit higher in younger people. I say this also as someone who, in hindsight, was quite difficult to work with when I was younger for various reasons. As I've grown older, I've learned a thing or two and I think that now I'm actually a fairly nice person to work with (I hope so, anyway...)
Everything else being equal, I'd rather take someone with a 9 (out of 10) on soft skills and a 6 or 7 on technical skills, than someone with a 3 or 4 on soft skills but a 10 on technical skills.
I agree, I've even had to reverse my own team's policy on this at work : I used to think the technical stuff was the most important and pushed my team towards hiring exclusively the technically smart people, but I have been proven wrong over and over again by those "smart" engineers I vouched for.