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> Your ability to write

Be careful also of the environment you plan to enter, because there exist ones in which people (or some people) cannot read past the "John eats an apple" level of complexity. You need to be able to calibrate.

You could say being good at 1 and 2 with people who are worse than you at 3 is basically a guarantee to success in almost any field. That's the kind of person who diffuses to the top, even if they are just slightly above average at 3.

I am afraid we need to mention the dark side, as a warning:

convincing people will "climb".

That, in bad environments of people of little judgement, includes the worst: high convincing skills but low or rotten substance. Some people are just pure climbers: it takes an environment of clean eyed people to prevent their damage.

> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation.

I imagine for a lot of positions this is true, but surely not every position is like this? Like say, at an HFT firm/hedge fund/etc. -- if you can make people ridiculous amounts of money, they'd be insane to turn you away just because you're socially inept. They would just give you a room to do your thing solo and make everyone rich, no?

Very few jobs work like that, though. I've worked with brilliant engineers who are bad at collaboration and communication: this can be bad enough their contribution becomes negative.

A shared social history, which over many years cements in place a set of common habits and bonds, is what determines a good collaborative fit within the mainstream of a given field.

That isn't an inherent skill to be 'naturally' good or bad at, as it's the holistic result of an entire social existence to that point.

Those engineers may (or not!) have been especially brilliant at collab&comms, when interacting with people very like themselves - had there been any present.

This might be the case in some examples, but I've found that for certain personalities/collaboration approaches putting like with like is potentially the worst outcome (and I've heard of researchers studying personalities and teamwork deliberately doing this during studies in part just to watch the fireworks, though this is just apocryphal anecdotes).

That's a fair point.

To clarify my angle, I'm asserting that the effective collegiality shared by people who are successful in those areas begins far earlier in life than university or career.

The dominant factors are socioeconomic.

This kind of job is one in a million. In all other jobs you are expected to work in a team and if the interviewer thinks that you're lacking the basic interface for that - i.e. being able to articulate your thoughts in a concise way and not being annoying to work with - they just cannot hire you.

There are some jobs where you can still be paid a pretty penny even while you are completely socially inept.

In the vast majority of jobs however, being technically competent only matters to give you a chance of getting the job. Being more technically competent increases your odds.

But what will be the defining factor is the evaluation if "Can I like (or at least tolerate) communicating with this person on a daily basis?"

Even at companies where you have multiple rounds of leet code, there will be a couple of behavioural interviews in the mix. Those are definitely not fluff.

Even if you work for a HFT firm you need to interact with other people and work with other teams tp get things done. There's very little "solo" jobs in the corporate world.

I worked at an HFT firm and initially they were focusing on hiring people like MIT grads and programming competition winners. But eventually they realized their social skills were often not the best and went for a more well-rounded candidate.

I worked at another firm in the finance space that hired a PhD with poor social skills who had to be let go because he would try to aggressively “checkmate” other people by proving them wrong and say that they were dumb. It got so bad that other people refused to be in meetings with him.

I read this as basically an expanded form of "just know someone who's hiring" or "know someone who knows someone who's hiring". That's all you really need.

You don't get to "know" people that way though if you're not at least somewhat socially functional. Having a contact on linkedin who's hiring doesn't really count in that scenario.

> Having a contact on linkedin who's hiring doesn't really count in that scenario.

Darn!

It is a valid assumption but I would have expected the article to provide such details. And why would you not want to hire a socially awkward person, if I do that for my business I just want results and awkwardness doesn’t matter much in technical positions.

Have you ever tried to hire such a person? I can guarantee you it is not as easy as you might think to get something useful out of them. Normal smart people simply can't deal with others who have severe Asperger's (or any Autism spectrum disorder for that matter). The only place I could see for those people is in a back room in some university where they get to research whatever they want with no teaching duty. But these positions are ultra-rare and you basically have to be super accomplished before you are even considered.

There are other cases, and it can be very valuable to be able to get something out of someone with a lot of technical ability but poor collaboration, but I do agree it's something that will reduce their value to most employers substantially.

Like what? And how do you get something that you want out of somebody who doesn't care or understand what you want? He may see you like a fat gorilla asking Einstein to fetch more bananas. Or maybe you can't even hold his attention long enough to formulate your desires. Most people have never interacted with this kind of Autism. In any result oriented environment where the results are governed by others, this person is essentially worthless to you.

> There is only one reason you can fail from that point

Really? You make a rather harsh, specific point. Where's the evidence? I'd wager competition and suitability for the job would also weigh in, especially after such a superficial introduction.

> To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,

Yeah, that's meritocratic wishful thinking. Criteria obviously missing are: good looks, and a good network, which includes rich or otherwise influential parents.

I only have a second-hand experience with PhDs looking for jobs. It seems very similar to programming jobs market: it's saturated with worthless applications and the filtering on the receiving end is completely broken. I don't have numbers and wouldn't know how to measure it, but it feels like most applications never get assessed by relevant experts at all. Basically, no matter what you put in your resume it goes straight into the garbage bin.

So, your professor's rules are no longer relevant. There's nobody to speak to, no matter what you write it's not going to change anything. Thinking isn't a priority either.

You need to know people. That is all.

Anecdotally, I had this happen to me. For the context, I'm moving back from the Netherlands to Israel. I've been looking for a job in the Netherlands before giving up and leaving. Despite maybe a hundred or so applications that I've sent, I've never heard from anyone. I think, Dutch law requires a timely response to the application and so I would get template rejections most of the time. Sometimes seconds after applying.

Back in Israel, I also applied through LinkedIn and Indeed. But I also happen to be on the file in some HR agencies which supply candidates to the programming jobs. I've received an invitation from such an agency to interview for a job with a company I've already applied to through LinkedIn (and was promptly rejected). I've landed an interview, and when asked about my job hunting efforts in the Netherlands, I jokingly described the application through LinkedIn and the likes as futile, as nobody reads those applications.

The interviewer start beating his chest assuring me that they would never... I decided to withhold from them the fact that they actually would. I'm still at the... third interview with them now. So, we'll see how it goes.

Anyways. My larger point is: the automation brought to job hunting is very disadvantageous to the junior workforce. Connections always played a role, but now their role is exaggerated. The article describes it as decreased job mobility (nobody quits, so there are fewer jobs to hire people into). And while it keeps the appearance of low unemployment, the problem with it is that it's the same people who are unemployed all the time. Our unemployment model isn't prepared for this. The idea behind social security unemployment compensation is that you find a job relatively quickly and only need a few months to get by before you do. This doesn't work anymore, as unemployment lasts years.

This is bad on many levels: it lowers the number of professionals entering the field, it leads to the loss of expertise as older workers retire w/o having trained a replacement, the effort spent on acquiring expertise is wasted by the young workforce as they are forced to change direction.

It's not only about juniors and not only about Netherlands. There are no jobs and there is(are) war(s). If you lose your current job there will be no next one. All money in the economy is funneled through military, "AI", and healthcare directly to oligarchs/elites and it doesn't translate into military, healthcare, or AI milestones or achievements, except death. We are slowly transitioning into a war economy.

I had a little reply to another commenter about my experiences, but that was when the Vietnam war had recently ended. Afterward, paying the piper took longer than the war and cost more. Something about compound interest and the government being in deeper debt to fund the war IIRC.

> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept.

Harsh words for someone you've had no social interactions with. To me this statement says more about you than Jack Weis.

That's pretty stereotypical. In order to be successful, you need to find yourself in places where you can convince others that it's worth giving opportunities to you. Social skills help. Being extroverted helps. Being neurotypical helps. But many other things help as well, and the world is a really weird place.

A PhD always involves a huge random element. You commit to working long term under the close supervision of a person you don't know, often in an unfamiliar place far away from home, in a project that may not lead anywhere. And you may not even know if research is actually something you want to do and your personality is suited for. Most of the time things ultimately work out, but for many people they don't. Most of the latter manage to find something else, but there are always some unlucky people who don't. (And who may be scarred by the experience.)