[QuercusMax]

I had one fairly-junior teammate at Google (had been promoted once) who was a competent engineer but just refused to make any choices about what to work on. I was his TL and I gave him a choice of 3 different parts of the system to work on, and I was planning to be building the other two. He got his work done adequately, but his lack of interest / curiosity meant that he never really got to know how the rest of the system operated, and got frustrated when he didn't advance further in his career.

Very odd. It was like he only had ever worked on school projects assigned to him, and had no actual interest in exploring the problems we were working on.

[mikepurvis]

In my experience, curiosity is the #1 predictor of the kind of passionate, high-level engineer that I'm most interested in working with. And it's generally not that hard to evaluate this in a free-form interview context where you listen to how a person talks about their past projects, how they learn a new system or advocated/onboarded a tool at their company.

But it can be tricky to evaluate this in the kind of structured, disciplined way that big-company HR departments like to see, where all interviewees get a consistent set of questions and are "scored" on their responses according to a fixed rubric.

[watwut]

That does not even sounds like a problem? Like when people are that picky about what exact personality the junior musr have that good work is not enough ... then there is something wrong with us.

[QuercusMax]

When presenting the three projects, I gave pros and cons about each one, like "you'll get to learn this new piece of technology" or "a lot of people will be happy if we can get this working". Absolutely no reaction, just "I don't care, pick one".

This guy claimed to want to get promoted to Senior, but didn't do anything Senior-shaped. If you're going to own a component of a system, I should be able to ask you intelligent questions about how you might evolve it, and you should be able to tell me why someone cares about it.

[watwut]

I am honestly totally fine with person like that. Sounds like someone easy to work with. I dunno, not having preference between working on three parts of the system is not abnormal. Most people choose randomly anyway.

Just pick the two you like the most.

[johnnyanmac]

>not having preference between working on three parts of the system is not abnormal.

I suppose it depends on the team and industry. This would be unheard of behavior for games, for example. Why you taking a pay cut and likely working more hours to just say "I don't know, whatever works?". You'd ideally be working towards some sort of goal. Management, domain knowledge, just begin able to solve hard problems.

Welp, to each their own I suppose.

[ryandrake]

Yea a lot software developers I’ve worked with, across the full spectrum of skill levels, didn’t have a strong preference about what code they were writing. If there is a preference, it’s usually the parts they’ve already worked on, because they’re already ramped up. Strong desire to work on a specific piece of the code (or to not work on one) might even in some cases be a red flag.

[QuercusMax]

What I'm talking about is like asking "do you want a turkey sandwich or a ham sandwich" and getting the response "I don't care" - about everything. Pick something! Make a choice! Take some ownership of the work you're doing!

[johnnyanmac]

Why would having an idea of where to direct their career be a red flag?

[ryandrake]

I didn’t say anything about career direction. I’m talking about what project or part of the project. I have worked with developers who insist that they only want to work on this very narrow section of the code, and won’t consider branching out somewhere else, and that kind of attitude often comes from people who are difficult in other ways to work with.

[mikepurvis]

I don't think it's beyond the call of duty to expect someone to acquire context beyond their immediate assignments, especially if they have ambitions to advance. It's kind of a key prerequisite to the kind of bigger-picture thinking that says "hey I noticed my component is duplicating some functionality that's over there, maybe there's an opportunity to harmonize these, etc"