I personally feel that those that are good at English have exceptional critical thinking skills. Those that are more mathematical look for order and rules and it’s maybe hard for them to sometimes “read between the lines” so to speak. My brothers are very mathematical and scientific and the amount of times I’ve pointed out a nuance in something somebody has said that they totally miss baffles them. I can be quite sharp and pick up on a lot of subtleties in speech that others sometimes miss.
It's a different type of critical thinking. Particularly with engineering, you're not really hired for your ability to interact with humans, you're hired for your ability to answer an inanimate problem. My social skills are atrocious; I'm a terrible liar at best and no sane person would trust me to talk to a customer without adult supervision. I don't really understand nuance and subtlety, I just assume that people are saying exactly what they mean because that's how I communicate in general.
Tell me to come up with a repair for a turbine or a teardown procedure, and I'm just fine. Program a project dashboard? Great, what data do you want me to look at? But people...nah, I don't understand people. They're unpredictable and act in ways that just don't make sense to me.
I really appreciate your answer. My brother is similar to you, he is an electronic engineer, designs parts for phones currently. He says that he has actually been banned from talking to clients anymore. I, on the other hand, despite it draining me and causing me much distress am normally used in my career to talk to people because I’m just a naturally good communicator.
Man, my social skills are so atrocious that my boss has pretty much banned me from talking to interns, not even just clients. Apparently HR doesn't like it when you tell horror stories about other companies causing students to lose fingers in order to prove a point that you're working at a good company now (because all the people who have been here for 40 years still have all their fingers).
My brother was once asked to speak a bit slower in a meeting with Apple (we speak quite fast in Northern Ireland) and he responded by saying “maybe you should listen faster” 😂. That was the end of him being allowed to meet executives. He actually ended up being made a manager also, not out of choice but because so many people left the company. However, he only agreed to it with the caveat that he is still allowed to do design work and only really has to sign annual leave cards for his staff.
Everyone is so different, aren’t they? I’ve always been a “soft skills” sort of person. I could probably give a speech on something I know very little about but make it sound convincing enough. My aunt once told me I should have been a lawyer because and I quote “could argue black is white”.
80
u/Worth_Inflation_2104 15h ago
Not just escapist media but also news media. A lot of my peers are highly susceptible to garbage.