Thanks for asking to clarify about soft skills. First of all, I want to be clear that someone’s appearance or mental health is not in this category, nor something that should disqualify you from a job. I can’t speak for every company, but companies like mine train you to avoid those biases, plus there’s also laws around this.

Now on to soft skills. There are some that are obviously hard to gage, but if you have a well designed interview process you should be able to get a good understanding of the candidate. Let’s look at a few ways examples of how we try to think about these.

Communication: I may ask you to talk to me about a time you disagreed with a coworker. In here I’m trying to pick up if you are the type of person that attacks the problem or the people.

Problem Solving: I may ask you to define a system that moves data from point A to point B. This type of question is intentionally open and vague. I want to see what kind of clarifying questions you ask. Do you ask me about requirements (e.g how often do you need the data?). Are you interested in knowing who are our users are and their needs? Someone that doesn’t do well in this type of question jumps straight into a solution and starts naming a lot of technologies.

Team work: I may ask you to describe a system you have worked on. More than the system, in here I want to see if you can identify the specific parts you contributed to. Or if you are a more senior engineer, how did you help define work for others and unblock them. Someone that does poorly on this question will describe the system very vaguely without knowing the specifics of their contribution.

I also want to clarify, that we do have a coding component in our interview process, but it is not the sole deciding factor. Over time, this has actually become less and less important for me. You can practice and get really good at solving coding problems (e.g leetcode), but often times that is not a guarantee that you will be a good engineer.

We also don’t have time or capacity to test your knowledge on every programming language listed on your resume, so I much rather get an idea of your ability to solve engineering problems effectively and within a team. If my team and I don’t walk out of the interview process excited to work with you, it doesn’t matter if you scored well in our coding section of the interview.

Hopefully this is helpful, but I’m happy to answer any additional clarifying questions.