Dont Say This in Your Next Tech Job Interview

Dont Say This in Your Next Tech Job InterviewDont Say This in Your Next Tech Job Interview As an IT recruiting firm, we hear from candidates about a lot of schwimmbad job interview advice. Or worse, sometimes we hear about a candidate putting this advice into action This feedback revealed the one thing that candidates should never tell an interviewer.Job landseekers should never say, Im the most qualified candidate for the job. This one phrase is not only bad interviewing advice, but it can tank your chances for a great job. Why is this terrible advice? Isnt it good to be confident and express interest in the job? The truth is, telling your interviewer that youre the best candidate for the job doesnt really accomplish either task well. First, telling your interviewer that youre the most qualified candidate demonstrates that you make big decisions without much thought or research . Great candidates, especially in the tech space, are looking for a job that is a good fit on both ends. This means that the candidate has all the technical skills and experience listed in a job posting. But it also means that the company and the work can meet the job seekers needs. An interview is all about sussing out whether the job is a good fit for both parties- tech professional and employer. Good candidates dont know if theyre the best candidate for the job for many reasons, especially because they dont know if the job will meet their own needs as an employee Another reason you should never tell an interviewer youre the best candidate for the job is that you can come across as difficult to work with and arrogant. Making yourself seem difficult to work with is usually the kiss of death for your candidacy. These days , communicating and working well with teams is an imperative skill in most IT jobs. Spurred by the fast pace of the internet, companies are pressured to constantly innovate and improve their products or services. They often achieve this co nstant innovation with group brainstorms and teamwork. To reach new creative heights, employers need their hires to be the kinds of employees who can play well with others and enthusiastically join these group brainstorming efforts and cutting-edge projects. (Its also just a fact that Scrum and Agile are the trendiest development methods. The day of the heads-down coder who excels in the Waterfall method has passed.)Making yourself seem arrogant can kill your candidacy for a job for similar reasons. Even if youre a renowned expert, people probably wont hire you because nobody wants to work with somebody who is arrogant. Arrogant coworkers arent open to collaboration. Theyre also tough to train, which can be important when a company has a lot of processes, procedures, and rules built into their structure. Tech employers often need new employees to have a quick, painless onboarding. Hit the ground running is a very common phrase in job descriptions for tech roles. Let your interv iewer know youll be the kind of employee who is open to new processes, open to working with others and that you know you have a lot to learn. Saying Im the most qualified candidate for this job will do exactly the opposite. So what can you say instead of this candidacy-killing phrase? Focus on concrete ways to illustrate your value to the interviewer. Being able to sharethings like this will help potential employers see that you are the most qualified candidate.When employers decide youre the most qualified candidate for the job , this is much more powerful than you, as the candidate, trying to lead them to this conclusion. So give the interviewer what they need to see that youre the best candidate for the role. It just might get you an offer Samantha Keefe is an Interactive Marketing Managerat AVID Technical Resources .AVID Technical Resources is a leading information technology recruiting company with nine offices around the country.

On how to understand and be kind to the people you dislike

On how to understand and be kind to the people you dislikeOn how to understand and be kind to the people you dislikeImagine a world devoid of hope - a world with an end in sight not an end that compensates by carving an edge of meaning into the story but an end that is brutal and destructive and soul-wrenching. Such is the world drawn by Cormac McCarthy in The Road.Its a story of an unnamed man and an unnamed boy - father and son. They live in a post-apocalyptic reality in which some unnamed catastrophe has destroyed the civilized world. There are only a few pockets of menschengerecht tribes left, most of whom are willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure their own survival. Lawlessness and cannibalism are the norms.The boy is born to the man and a woman sometime before the story begins, right around the time of the catastrophe. At some point, however, the woman, realizing the futility of existence in a such a world, takes her own life, leaving only the two of them to fend for the mselves.The only thing the man and the boy know is that they are going south towards the sea so that they can escape the harsh winter. They dont make long-term plans, they dont talk about the inevitable, and they have strict rules - rules that negate the pretense of any innocence in the boys life - regarding what to do in case either of them ever gets caught by the others.Throughout the novel, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. McCarthy stretches the imagination of the reader to a place he or she wishes they never have to go again. The good and the beautiful - namely, the love between the man and the boy - is blurred away by the ugly.The only redeeming thing in this world is the boy himself. Even the man, hardened by the circumstances of his life, has a beaten-down soul, one that is fast to distrust and slow to care about anything beyond what it takes to keep the two of them alive for as long as he can.There is a scene in the middle of the book where they run into an old er and even more cynical man. When they first catch a glimpse of him, he looks like he is near death. The boy wants to help him. The man doesnt. After a brief argument, they do as the boy hopes, and they invite the older man to spend the night with them, sharing their food.When the time comes to part ways, the three of them have a brief exchange. This exchange tells you everything you could want to know about the core of each character and how they respond to the world around them.In the morning they stood in the road and he and the boy argued about what to give the old man. In the end he didnt get much. Some cans of vegetables and of fruit. Finally, the boy just went over to the edge of the road and sat in the ashes. The old man fitted the tins into his knapsack and fastened the straps. You should thank him you know, the man said. I wouldnt have given you anything.the old man Maybe I should and maybe I shouldnt.the man Why wouldnt you?the old man I wouldnt have given him mine.the m an You dont care if it hurts his feelings?the old man Will it hurt his feelings?the man No. Thats not why he did it.the old man Why did he do it?He looked over at the boy and he looked at the old man. You wouldnt understand, he said. Im not sure I do.IIThe ethics of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant can be summarized by a single sentence he once wrote about them Act as if the maxim of yur action were to become, by yur will, a universal law of nature.It is one of his famous categorical imperatives - a statement he believed could be used to dissect the motivation for each of a persons actions. According to this line of reasoning, something is good and right if you wouldnt mind every other person in the world acting in this way, too.Like much of Western philosophy, Kant welchesnt a fan of contradictions. He was an absolutist, so in his moral worldview, there were no gray areas. If you dont want other people lying, you should never lie yourself no matter the circumstances. If you thi nk laziness is undesirable, then its your job to make sure you are never contributing to it.Except, in real life, its never that simple. Humans are complex creatures, and life is often covered by shades of color that arent black and white. Like the philosophies Kant was rebelling against at the same, his, too, was a little too rigid for a world in which every single moment is produced at the intersection of more variables than we can ever hope to count.The foundation for Kants belief, however, is what interests me, and I think its a strong one. He made a point to distinguish between what we do out of inclination and what we do out of duty. Inclination is what is comfortable - it is the impulse of every animal in nature to be self-interested, to do what is easy, and to think only about here and now. What makes humans different, he argued, is that we are capable of overpowering this inclination in the name of duty something that is good as a means in itself.A man working long hours h is whole life so his family has better opportunities than he did is committing to an act of duty. An innocent prisoner of war accepting punishment on behalf of someone who is in worse shape than she is is committing to an act of duty. A boy insisting that his father share what little food they have with a stranger is committing to an act of duty.It is this gap between inclination and duty, this agency - the freedom to choose to do the hard thing - that gives humans their spark. By valuing something for what it is and acting against our impulses, we are able to shine a light of moral goodness in this world a light that illuminates the hearts of other people, so that they, too, are willed to do the right thing.One of the core strengths of this line of reasoning is that it accounts for the fact that human beings are mimetic in their drives - much of our behavior is influenced by what we observe in our surroundings. Kants categorical imperative tells us that once the light is on, it will spread itself. If we see other people do good, we are more likely to do good ourselves.Much of philosophy is esoteric and difficult. The old trope of the men and women sitting in their ivory tower telling the rest of us what to do holds an ounce of truth. But, at the same time, there is just as much philosophy that is highly underrated relative to what it can and has done for us.If you peel back the right layers, its impossible not to see the how important Kant has been to the history of our species how important he still is today. His work is there for the taking. What we do with it is up to us.IIIOne of the climaxes in The Road occurs near the end when the boy, again, wants to help someone. Except, this is someone who has wronged them. The man, naturally, refuses. The boy persists, arguing that the person on the other side is just as scared and hopeless as they are.In this particular instance, however, the man prevails, and they continue without extending a hand. When he late r tries to penetrate the boys wall of anger, the boy asks a simple question Are the stories true?By the stories, he is referring to the comforting tales his father has been telling him all his life about how goodness always gets the better out of evil and how they, in fact, are the good guys and that there is hope in the world. The man says they are. In a moment of quiet but raw intensity, the boy asks Why, then, do we never seem to help anyone who needs it in real life?The first time I read this scene, I felt a strange heaviness - like a truth had made itself known to me, a truth not found in any condensed string of sentences but a truth that could only ever be experienced. Was McCarthy trying to pass on a profound, Kantian moral lesson in his fiction? Im not sure. Some part of me would like to think so, though.Each of us is a hero in our own story. Your life is a narration, one that concerns itself with you, that centers itself towards you, that has supporting characters around y ou, that is good or bad or right or wrong as it relates to you. We are all, of course, aware of this self-centeredness, but we dont openly talk about it. Its unbecoming uncomfortable, even.The mere fact that we dont talk about it, however, means that we also let it delude us. We convince ourselves that we - the hero - are always the good guys and that anyone who is in our way, or who disagrees with us, or who has wronged us in some big or small way is by definition the bad guy - that they dont deserve the same empathy or kindness or understanding that we would expect if we were in their position.We forget that the human condition is diverse, that different people have different belief templates, and that most bad guys dont think of themselves as bad guys most of them, too, think they are doing the right thing, the noble thing. Even when they arent, they - like you - are flawed human beings, shaped by billions of variables, many of which they had little control over, that may no t have provided them with the luxury and the comfort to do the right thing at each and every moment in their life.You dont have to look much further than the current political climate in the world to see an illustration of the problem Im talking about. We have become so comfortable hating each other that it completely escapes us that the point of having these conversations is to better understand each other. In the process, we have become exactly the kind of people who do and say things that actually merit the label of the bad guy.I dont have a perfect solution, and Im not here to espouse the virtues of Kantian ethics as a path to a Promised Land. What I do think, though, is that maybe - just maybe - we can all take a tool out of the boys toolkit that maybe - just maybe - if we, ourselves, lived in accordance with the stories we tell to inspire our children, we could live more honest lives.There is a certain naivete you have to engage to accept the idea of selling kindness as an antidote to complex issues of disagreement and hostility. But negativity defeats itself, and Id rather be naive than cynical.Want to think and live smarter? Zat Rana publishes a free weekly newsletter for 30,000+ readers atDesign Luck.

Everything You Need to Know About Payroll Deductions

Everything You Need to Know About Payroll DeductionsEverything You Need to Know About Payroll DeductionsNeed information about the payroll deductions you see on every paycheck? Knowing what they are and why they exist is important for your understanding of your compensation. Payroll deductions are either mandatory or voluntary. Knowing the difference and why these deductions exist will explain why your salary is not the same as what you are paid. If you have additional questions after reading through this information, your Human Resources department is your best resource. They can answer your questions about your compensation, paycheck, and payroll deductions. Mandatory Payroll Deductions The employer is required by law to withhold payroll taxes from an employees gross pay prior to issuing a paycheck to comply with government regulations. Employers who fail to follow the law on mandatory deductions are open to lawsuits, fines, and even, going out of business. As an employee, you just need to understand whats going on. unterstellung are the mandatory payroll deductions for taxes Federal income taxState taxesLocal (city, county) income tax withholding in some areas. (Other local taxes can include school district taxes, community college taxes, state disability or unemployment insurance, for example.) The second set of mandatory payroll deductions are for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) taxes that include Social security taxes andMedicare tax withholding. Depending on your state and locality, you may have very different tax rates. Federal tax rates are the same across states for all taxpayers. Voluntary Payroll Deductions While the law does not require an employer to take voluntary deductions from payroll, most employers do. In some cases, voluntary payroll deductions are convenient for the employer. In others, voluntary payroll deductions are convenient for the employee. Voluntary deductions from gross pay include items such as charitable contr ibutions (for example, United Way) and the employees required contribution to the employer-provided healthcare, dental, or vision insurance coverage. They also include Certain retirement voluntary deductions can also be paid through the employee paycheck. These include several common employer-sponsored 401(k) plans, with or without an employer match, which are paid pre-tax and a Roth 401(k) that is paid after tax. Another common voluntary payroll deduction is for additional employer-sponsored life insurance. Many employers pay for a basic life insurance policy for employees. But, employees can elect more coverage for themselves, their spouse, and family if they choose. To take mandatory and voluntary payroll deductions, the employer must first determine the employees salary, called gross pay, that was earned during the time period. The employer then subtracts the mandatory and voluntary deductions from this total pay to arrive at the employees net pay. Because the US tax laws are co nfusing and penalties are avoidable, employers will want to talk with their state Department of Labor and their employment law attorney when they begin hiring employees. It pays to know what is legally required. Your business accounting firm is also another expert in matters relating to payroll taxes and deductions. As an individual, hopefully, you have a better understanding about why your net pay can be so much lower than the wages that your employer is actually paying you (gross pay) - and where that money goes.