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When I (male) interviewed for a tech role at Amazon back in 2000, one of my interviewers was a woman in a sundress (it was summer), with large, visible tattoos and a nose piercing.

The men were dressed casually, in jeans and t-shirts, but seeing her able to feel comfortable as herself made me excited to join. This was at a time that Starbucks made baristas cover up visible tattoos, and many professional tech roles at large companies still required "business casual" of khakis & polos.

Not enough is said about the cultural shift that happened as a result of technology giving economic and social power to the West Coast counter-culture scene.

Interesting observation. What were the implications?

We exchanged privacy for the right to wear slacks to the office and show our tattoos, it seems.

Privacy, freedom of speech, cultural diversity, civil public discussion... And now nobody is going to the office anyways. Was it worth it?

During the first dot com bubble, dress code at Goldman was still (non-casual) business. This lead to the absurd situation that teams on the West Coast came to the office in a suit and tie, would then change into slacks and hoodie to meet with tech bro startup clients, and then change back into the suit at the office.

Around 2000 or so GS relaxed the dress code, and, to compete better with tech in hiring, even put a foosball table somewhere in their NY headquarters on 85 Broad Street. Then the dot com bubble burst, and the foosball table was gone rather quickly.

Wasn't Starbucks, the example of a restrictive culture, a West Coast counter-culture kind of company though?

I read it as that being the point - that back then even starbucks made their employees cover their tattoos. That's why it seemed like a big deal to OP that Amazon didn't.

Yes, now you can dress however you like, paint your body and hair however you like... but God have mercy on your soul if you say or think (or did in the past 30 years) something Twitter doesn't like. I'm not sure it's actually an improvement, to think about it.

Moving social opprobrium from assumptions made based on look to documented speech and action? I don't know; that seems like a strict improvement.

In any case, these seem like two unrelated changes (West Coast culture of looks-acceptance coinciding with a global telecommunications and searchable data storage networkb that feed existing culture of lack of words / deeds acceptance).

Oh it's way beyond "social opprobrium". And no, I don't think these two changes are entirely unrelated. Maybe not direct consequences of each other - tolerance of tattoos of course does not directly cause intolerance of free speech - but likely having related causes beyond mere coincidence in time.

I think the related cause is that the people with the tattoos helped build, enlarge, and improve the global telecommunications infrastructure.

But the consequent public shunning is an existing practice grown to the scale of the public being global facilitated by the global telecommunications infrastructure; it's not new and it doesn't stem culturally solely from the people who built the system. It would have been too expensive in the past to know what racist thing somebody said in confidence to a friend before boarding a plane... Now, they can broadcast it worldwide and people globally will have done extended commentary on it amongst each other by the time the plane lands.

But it's not the West Coast folks managing the commentary... They have handed a tool to the world, and this is how the world chooses to use it.

So you think you could say something counter-culture in a GS-like strict dress code environment and get away with it? Or is your point that bigoted rants would have been better accepted in a boardroom in the 90's when the old boys were smoking cigars with each other?

I interviewed for a position in a bank central. Everybody with shirt and tie, but the bad thing is that it was an open plan with more than a hundred screaming programmers. Why was everybody so loud I can't understand.

The idiot that I had the displeasure to talk to was proud of the hellish environment, hero culture and seemed to think that they had some kind of bleeding edge tech there. I needed just a couple of questions to realize that it was crap.

The recruiter had driven me there. He asked if I thought I passed. "I surely hope I didn't!!"

I started my career at GS in SLC about six years ago. I remember when the entire technology division ditched the dress-up rules. It felt like a monumental change.

I have to wonder if I worked with some of the managers you interviewed with--that sounds like a familiar phenomenon. A few relaxed people, but lots of folks who brought a NYC investment banking attitude with them to SLC.

The interviews had ridiculous questions like “why is a manhole cover round?”

That was always one of the worst standard brain-teaser questions because so many people who asked it didn't know the correct answer.

Hint: If your answer was that a circular cover is the only shape that can't fall down the matching hole, everything you think you know about the world is wrong and the term you're looking for is "curve of constant width".

The real answer is because manhole covers are mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is usually easier and cheaper than the alternatives.

Is it easier and cheaper to manufacture because a circle has no obvious weaknesses? For example most point shapes are weak structurally weak at the corners.

There are infinite shapes that cannot fall down the matching hole, but the circle is the easiest to manufacture. A circular cover is easier to manufacture than e.g. a Reuleaux triangle shaped one.

> The real answer is because manhole covers are mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is usually easier and cheaper than the alternatives.

My understanding is the primary reason is because circular covers cannot fall into the hole itself, whereas that problem exists with other shapes like squares.

The parent comment already addressed this.

Shapes of constant width (e.g. £1 coin) won’t fall into the hole either. Neither would an equilateral triangle.

Oh, and by the way in my country we have square-shaped manhole covers too :O

Equilateral triangles can fall in. You have three dimensions: the height of the triangle is less than the side length of the triangle, so it fits in near the sides of the hole.

The OP mentions curves of constant width:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_of_constant_width

Which includes circles and Reuleaux triangles, which are much more difficult to manufacture than circles. I think this can be rounded off to "circles are the only well-known shape that can't fall into a similarly-sized hole".

You’re right, I didn’t think through the triangle.

Still, as I’ve said, there are square-shaped manhole covers too.

http://manhole.co.il

Would a square-shaped manhole fall into a circular cover?

Also in some countries manholes are not always round but also square (hinged to the road to avoid falling).

Manhole covers are round because manholes are round and manholes are round because pipes are round. Even in America there are plenty of square grates and covers on the ground, it's just that they're not covering pipes.

The pipes used are also mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is also usually easier and cheaper than cross-sections with other shapes. Obviously there are other important considerations like the ease of tunnelling and the strength of the pipes when buried underground as well.

However, one thing that none of this depends on is a circular cover being the only shape that can't fall down the corresponding circular hole. That was the standard answer that way too many companies that used this particular interview question wanted and it was wrong.

The real answer is they aren't - they are sometimes round.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rectangular+manhole+cover&t=brave&...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=triangular+manhole+cover&t=brave&i...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+manhole+cover&t=brave&ia...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=oval+manhole+cover&t=brave&iar=ima...

And so on... Now a great - though a bit unfair - question would be to ask about circular ones, listen to the standard pitch, and then show these photos and ask - so what's going on here? Are all these people idiots?

A good software engineer knows there are rules, and there are reasons for the rules, and there are reasons why sometimes rules need to be different because the situation is different. If you just learn one single "right" answer, you'd end up trying to fit a round manhole cover into a triangular opening.

Just a detail, but there is no such thing as a "red dress shirt." You might have a red button-down shirt, but that would definitely not be considered a "dress shirt" nor would it be appropriate for a workplace where people where suits and ties. Not even "business casual." Such a shirt would only be ok if it's the kind of place where jeans are ok.

     The environments were small open rooms where developers 
     had computers lined next to each other. You would bump 
     elbows with each other.

I always struggled to work in environments like that but always blamed it on ADHD etc. But, there's a lot of evidence that increased CO2 levels have negative effects on cognition, so maybe it wasn't just me.

     “why does a tennis ball have felt?”

I know the correct answer(s) because I'm a tennis player but this feels like a really weird interview question. I understand the (highly dubious) point of these brain teasers - it's less about getting the "correct" answer and more about observing the candidate's thought process. But this one feels worse than most because I'm not sure how you could reason about it unless you're already pretty familiar with tennis.

I do like open-ended, "I just want to learn more about the interviewee's thought process" questions in general; I just prefer them to be a little more relevant. Such as,

- how would you troubleshoot particular problem XYZ?

- how would you design the database schema given the following set of requirements?

- what's a controversial/unpopular software development opinion you have?

- what's the best project you ever worked on, and why?

- what's one thing you'd change about $TECHNOLOGY_RELEVANT_TO_THE_ROLE_THEYRE_APPLYING_FOR ?

- etc.

I've never played tennis in my life but I have a general idea how it works from pop culture so let's see if I can reason it out.

The reason must have to do with either judging or playing the game (otherwise, why bother?). I'm no physicist or aeronautics engineer but I presume the fuzz is relatively negligible on ball speed over short distances, so it's probably not related to how the ball flies. It also doesn't seem realistic that it interacts with the racket or the court. One not so serious thought is perhaps it's got to do with net dynamics but that seems like an edge case I professional play. I haven't really watched tennis but I imagine most volleys end in balls bouncing out of bounds or a player not being able to return a hit. A little excessive to add fuzz for that. I also considered that maybe it's a means of having something adhere to the ball (like if it bounces on the line) but they have high speed cameras and line judges for those sorts of things. Guessing it's not that.

If it doesn't affect the dynamics of the ball or the adjucation of a play, it seems to me that it's instead a more general indicator. You touch the fuzzy ball before every serve and feel the fuzziness. You have a finger sense for a good ball and worn one. If the ball is fuzzy enough, it's good enough. Therefore, it seems to me it's a quality indicator for players to know when to switch out.

And I looked it up, it turns out I'm quite bad at physics! Won't spoil it any further for others trying to guess.

Some of these are right and some of those are wrong. But far more importantly if I was an interviewer forced to ask you this question, I would really love your thought process there - I particularly like the way you ruled things out. Excellent work.

I'm not really familiar with tennis aside from playing a couple games in high school gym, seeing a game or two on TV, and reading an essay from David Foster Wallace.

My approach would be to take what I assume the properties of felt are in terms of how they relate to a tennis game and assume that those properties are selected for. So, felt is probably a little cushion, giving the ball a little more durability as it gets whacked by rackets or off the ground. The felt provides grip, without which, a tennis ball may bounce off the ground in ways that are impossible to return. The color of the felt makes the ball easier to see (though of course you could color a nude call too).

Something like that.

My response to you is nearly identical to what I told a sibling commenter. Some of those things are right and some of them are wrong, but far more importantly I really like your thought process.

I don't want to give "real" answer/answers, in case anybody else is having fun speculating!

But I will also say that the "real" answer/answers are somewhat debatable. In the sense of: the players utilize the properties of the felt in particular ways. So, are the balls fuzzy because the players utilize those properties, or do the players utilize those properties because the balls are fuzzy? (Which came first, the chicken or the egg?) The answer itself is fuzzy, because the reality is that the ball and the players and the game have evolved steadily over ~100 years.

> One dude was super chill but everyone else had a stick up you know where.

The ass?