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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of it but not this:

"Interviewees are often told to use “I” to get credit for work done, but “we” is probably a more realistic depiction of how work gets done."

I've had too many candidates talk about "we" and the general project, or what the team they were on did. But when I try to get at what they specifically did I get nothing. Sure we need team players, but not just cheerleaders. Take credit for your work!

The weirdest was one guy who I could tell probably did a lot of good stuff but wouldn't say so. It was like he was coached to always talk about the "we".

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I am not from the states but my IT career involved working on teams with US clients and also working in the US for a few years.

I find it very hard to say "I did X" for anything except for personal projects that I did myself from start to finish.

In typical work projects even the best of ideas always need to be bought by rest of the team and also executed collaboratively by the team. I would be dishonest if I were to say "I delivered this project on time/under budget" even if I did play significant part in keeping the project healthy and on track.

> I find it very hard to say "I did X" for anything except for personal projects that I did myself from start to finish.

I come from a culture that has a similar approach, where taking sole credit for team efforts is typically viewed negatively. Took me a few years to get the hang of lying on interviews and taking sole credit for team efforts.

And ironically, it only dawned on me when I became an interviewer myself. That's when I realized everyone lies on interviews. Especially interviewers.

When everyone is playing the same game, it's a fair ground.

You don't have to lie to talk in "I" form. You don't have to take the sole credit.

Just be clear about what your influence was on the project.

Not everyone lies on the interviews. I have absolutely never lied, and I can still use the "I" form.

I usually make proportions of my involvements clear.

For example if I start and architect/design the project, I will say so and then I will say I successfully onboarded others to the project and guided them successfully to achieve X results.

If I didn't start it, I will describe it like "I worked on the project X, with 3 other people. My responsibilities were A, B and C. etc".

>> Just be clear about what your influence was on the project.

God, stop being grandiose and talking about the project and deliveries. Did you implement a specific feature? Squash a a bug? Find a solution to a specific problem? If you didn't do any of those - specifically by yourself (or mostly so) I don't want you. Those are the key deliverables of a software developer.

Reminds me of the thing where apparently every guy adds two inches to their height on dating profiles, whereas I deducted an inch because of poor posture.

Apparently I was born with no guile (probably an exaggeration), which means in a world where nearly everyone tells what they consider to be harmless little lies, I’m actively damaging my own career prospects.

I think everyone has their own definition of deception, and mine is the act of allowing (by making no attempt at intervention) someone to go away believing something you yourself know to be false. Which seems to be quite a strict one from what I’ve seen.

If you had the idea and you convinced others of the idea, that is a good story in of itself, because it highlights both very important skills, ability to brainstorm solutions and ability to persuade and sell others on this solution.

So you say: "I had this idea A to solve problem B, but not everyone was initially onboard, so I had to do C to convince others. I was able to convince everyone and I led the project to fruition with D results.

If you were in a leading role, it will be more impressive the more people and the higher levels you had to convince or lead.

I realized in an interview that I have a "bad" habit of talking about my projects in terms of "we" because I naturally want to give the team credit even for projects that are almost entirely my work.

Personally it comes from my experience that really talented, passionate people work together they tend to share credit since the real goal is to accomplish great things. For me, over focusing on "this is mine" can be a bad sign of a candidate that is just there to get theirs and get out.

However I have been on the other side of the interview process only to realize that not everyone is driven by passion and excitement for the problems. I have had candidates that listed numerous things on their resume that they clearly only heard about during meetings and couldn't describe the most minor of technical details.

Which to me means the real solution isn't to enforce better phrasing of "I" vs "we", but dive into the technical details. People that are truly active contributors will understand every detail of the inner working of a project, whether they built it themselves entirely and just like to share credit with a team or they worked so closely with another it's impossible for them to disambiguate who did what.

I have this problem - I am one man hardware department for almost a decade. I am interviewing now and people don’t want to listen to this. I designed everything and own everything. So I started lying having imaginary colleagues who co-designed the these things. Then interviews went okayish again. Some toxic places do not want teamwork. It is called here “spoon feeding”.

> I've had too many candidates talk about "we" and the general project, or what the team they were on did. But when I try to get at what they specifically did I get nothing. Sure we need team players, but not just cheerleaders. Take credit for your work!

I had this conversation with a co worker when he was made redundant. I reviewed his CV and he didn’t put any of the stuff he had worked on.

He said he didn’t add it because it wasn’t something he did by himself. It was a team effort. So I asked. Did you do X on project? “Yes”. Did you do Y on project? “Yes”.

It sounds like you contributed to those projects. If you get asked during an interview, you can absolutely take credit for working on those things. That’s your contribution!!! Yes it was a team effort that got the project over the line and made it successful. But you contributed to that effort and you should be proud and take credit where credit it due!

He was a bit taken back. He thought it would be lying or stealing to put those projects on his CV.

more relevant in States. rest of the world isn't as obsessed with managing their egos

This is highly regional, both within the US and throughout the rest of the world. In some cultures, you always downplay your own contributions, and listeners inflate them; in others, you always talk yourself up, and listeners adjust accordingly.

When you work in a large, heterogenous organization, it is important to pay attention to these differences, or else you end up either assuming someone did nothing or is a useless braggart because their culture doesn't match your own.

I see you've never been to Europe then, or just don't realize how worse it is there? I'd rather take the "ego management" of the US than the crazy rigid hierarchies in Europe.

At least you can take credit for your own work, which is better than never being able to get into management (say, become a "cadre" in France) just because you didn't go to a certain school, no matter how good you are or how much experience you have built up. Ivy league elitism exists in the US too, but it's not even close to how prevalent it is in a country like France. To me that's a much worse form of ego brain rot than America's.

grew up, living and working in Europe. no opinions on France though. somewhat bad experience working with Germans, somewhat good experience working with British. but the cultural differences that of States is something completely else - I feel like I'm expected to chant "team team team" 24/7. mix in prevalent religiousness, strong opinions on racism I know near nothing about and it's just never ending crawl through the minefield. all is not lost though - I dig the rooting for underdog attitude.

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