[wheresmyusern]

i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with my personality and charisma. i have absolutely zero intuition about what to say to other human beings. conversations with me are always like chewing sandpaper, unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine. conversations that are very focused and intellectual always get a good response but i seldom meet people who want to have those even among engineers. 99 percent of the people i meet, even among "tech" people, i am rejected. i guess ill just scrape by.

[Afforess]

>conversations with me are always like chewing sandpaper, unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine.

Basically, that's the problem. In order to establish a repertoire, you need to have more than dense interests. It's cool to be passionate about one or two hobbies. Lots of people have none, and this makes conversation dull. However, it is vital you can maintain ordinary conversation on lay topics too -- It's strange to not be able to talk about the local flair, family or relatives, hot vacation spots, annoying ordinances, and neighborhood politics. If you can't maintain a casual conversation about some the above, you are quickly deemed "dangerous", as you failed the "same species as me" test.

This is not an indictment of you. Just plain fact.

The good news is that it's straightforward to learn. Plain osmosis works. Find some meetups which you won't find totally repulsive (say, boardgames, movies, etc) and just listen to how conversations between normals work. You can literally copy and paste these and pass the "am I human" Voight-Kampff tests with this information.

[BurningFrog]

I have a slightly different advice:

> unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine.

I think OP's problem is that "other people" are not an interest of his. If it was, he'd never run out of things to talk about with these other people.

I also think that's a main reason people find those who can't keep up a conversation disturbing. They sense that you're not interested in them, and that makes you potentially dangerous.

[ElatedOwl]

Spot on IMO. People think they need to be interesting for people to care about them, but really you just need to be interested.

[Aeolun]

I think the problem is that most casual conversation just isn't relevant. If we're having a conversation to have a conversation, what's the point?

I happen across a lot of conversations where people are just blabbing at each other, but don't actually listen to what the other is saying (or are clearly not interested in what each is saying), but still continue to have a conversation. I don't get that...

[jerf]

"If we're having a conversation to have a conversation, what's the point?"

You're actually halfway there with the question. Indeed, the point is not conversation, or at least not the literal contents of the conversation.

When I was younger, I had a hard time understanding this stuff too. I'm not 100% sure why (I'm not convinced I'm even slightly on the spectrum, but it's not out of the question entirely; it's also just possible that I was simply too different as a kid from the other kids), but one of the steps to resolving it is just to realize that yes, there is logic to almost all of what is going on, and it isn't actually that complicated of a logic either. The biggest impediment to not being able to understand these interactions is the belief that you can't understand them, or that there's some sort of virtue in not understanding them. The second-biggest impediment is the belief that these things are essentially irrational, in the older sense of "essential" as meaning something like "inseparable from the whole"; there is actually a level on which this is all shockingly rational behavior. Once you get over those ideas, and accept that the surface levels and what's actually going on in the relationship between two people is not the same thing, it doesn't really take long to figure out what's going on.

(There's... a few other ideas you'll find you may want to discard. For instance, while politically incorrect today, there are reasons to be initially distrustful of people not in "your group". If you can't believe that's true today, it was certainly true in evolutionary terms. So there are instinctual protocols for determining whether someone is "in" or "out", and there are reasons for them, and there are reasons why they involve difficult-to-forge signals like simply knowing some in-knowledge from a culture, or burning time on seemingly-inconsequential conversations. And these things operate at instinct level; it doesn't matter if you think they are wrong, out of date, or politically incorrect; they do what they do anyhow. Start putting a few of these things together and it all starts making much more sense. There's reasons why these things exist and persist.)

[Aeolun]

Unfortunately, I don't really think I got what you were intending to say with this message.

You basically said there 'is' a reason for inconsequential conversation, but then only proceeded to hint at it's existence outside the last paragraph, and that was described as a different idea I might want to discard.

As such I can only hope that I'll eventually figure it out as I get older. So far the only thing I'm finding out as I get older is that humans are indeed irrational, and that often you just have to deal with that.

[aretaic]

a lot of time it is to signal interest and create so called social lubricant. It is not about the content of the conversation, but more about having a conversation with someone from the group.

[indemnity]

I’m a little bit on the spectrum, but what’s helped a lot for me was to go on drinking sessions with people from widely different backgrounds (teacher, lawyer, businessman, trainers, other types of engineer, social workers).

I was lucky in that these were instigated by my more outgoing brother, but I picked up a lot of the patterns which smooth these interactions, to the extent I can have decent conversations. Helps to be able to code switch as well. You’re not necessarily going to have a deeply intellectual discussion every time, and that’s fine.

[paxys]

This is what is generally referred to as "soft skills" in the industry, and is given way too little importance by engineers until it is too late. Obviously technical knowledge is important, but at the end of the day shit only gets done if people are collaborating and working well with each other.

[ryanobjc]

I mean, what other magical field allows otherwise difficult to get along with individuals to have a full time job? There’s tons of leeway for weird socialization in tech. While the soft skill requirement goes up year over year, it’s still not the same as many other fields. I guess night time clerk at a gas station...?

anyways all these social skills are learnable. But only if you think they are, truly believe it, and only if you try. It might be hard. But hey.

Also consider therapy. Consider it a way of learning how to operate your mind.

[kamura]

Its definitely an important quality to be able to sweet talk and create pleasant relationships with the other colleagues.

But for myself it becomes really hard to do so with people, with whom my relationship might have downgraded, which in a working environment can have a serious impact in your progression, your evaluations and how much respect other people actually give you.

On the tech side, I have also felt that most people don't want to talk about anything related to tech, or when they do it's rather vague and blank, without properly backing up there convictions.

It would be nice to be able to share experiences with other employees regarding their favorite programming languages, opinions on the new X/Y/Z language, what could be done to improve our project, and so on. But most conversations don't evolve to any of that, it's mostly making fun of each other (on a nice way), flirt, sports and gibberish.

I am currently trying to gain knowledge after work on different topics such as: Docker, Kubernetes, services exposed by Cloud Providers (Azure on my case) and how to manage/deploy them, but I don't think anyone from my team would ever be interested in talking about it, which simply makes me feel like I am on a place where I don't belong.

[wallflower]

Have you checked out your local meetup groups? Whether you are located in the city or the suburbs, birds of a feather like to flock together.

[itronitron]

You sound like a good fit for tech actually. Every company is different, and even within companies there is much diversity across groups. Part of why networking (and interning) is important is to find people that you can easily talk with. There is much less risk if you are accepted into the tribe before you hire on. From my perspective personal hygiene is more important than social skills, I care less about being offended than I do about getting sick.

[kbar13]

social skills can be learned

[gregorymichael]

Agreed. "how to win friends and influence people" changed my life here.

[nunya213]

Change the way you think about it. Gamify conversation. Don't try to learn intuition about conversation flow, teach yourself through observation which I'm sure you are probably very good at.

[delaaxe]

Go talk to more girls