IBM's Asshole Test
johnpublic.mataroa.blog
johnpublic.mataroa.blog
Little did the candidate know - we knew the driver quite well and he knew many people in the firm. More than once there would be a candidate who thought they could be rude and disrespectful to the taxi driver because ... you know... its just an immigrant taxi driver with a distinctive accent. Oops! Cost them an offer. But just as well. Avoided some arrogant jerks in the process.
edit: to clarify, I'm talking about behavior that could be interpreted in different ways by different people. If you tell a driver to fuck off, yeah; I don't want to hire you or work with you. The parent gave no example of the behavior they'd reject a candidate for, and I assume it'd be reasonable; my point is just that this kind of thing is hard to do right and I'd avoid it.
Sure, i probably could hang up, turn the other cheek, whatever. And i'm sure my responses/actions made them no nevermind.
You might be as stoic and nonplussed as you claim, but we're all the heroes of our own stories, or something.
Maybe i'm a bad person?
It seems pretty obvious to me that the premise is supposed to be that the driver is courteous and professional, and they just see if the person treats the driver decently, or like trash because they feel they're above them.
Some people really have the ability to keep their cool (for one reason or another, trained or personality-driven).
Personally, I’m with you, but, I think, making progress on becoming more like the person you’ve replied to.
Everyone has bad days, and some people are just plain assholes; that doesn't mean you have to treat them poorly, whether provoked, deserving, or otherwise.
I prefer the terms lazy and non-confrontational, myself. But no, my first response to undue difficulty isn't to lash out. Better to save my energy and time and just hang up, walk away, etc.
I'm the above in part because: I'm certainly no hero and don't expect my words to magically fix the cable industry or have some insularly bigoted person see the light of day. There are others who spend full time+ attempting to do such feats with varying success. Some may find that lack of resistance as tacit approval of the current norms, and they may be right on a subconscious level. But I simply don't have the energy or will to care 99.9% of time with so many other things demanding my attention.
I don't see myself as some paragon of patience turning the other cheek, I just say to myself "I don't have time to deal with this" and run away (metaphorically speaking. Mostly)
Similarly, I'd worry that this might unintentionally discriminate against neurodiverse candidates, who sometimes might act in ways which are perceived as impolite by others without realising they are doing so. Often, if you simply analyse the interaction and give them a calm rational explanation of how it went wrong, many of them are happy to adjust their behaviour in response, and will improve over time. But, instead, some just want to label other people as "assholes" over misunderstandings. And a significant percentage of service workers may have weaker skills at "analyse the situation and try to infer the psychological processes involved" than others with greater education do, which may make them more likely to jump to the "just an asshole" explanation and less likely to perceive other possible explanations.
I can easily agree that both situations are possible and probably happen in the real world enough to be worth talking about. However, based on my (admittedly anecdotal, but extensive) experience situation A is probably something like 95% of the time and situation B is probably something like 5% of the time. How do we tell when B is happening and can you really fault people for assuming A is happening when that is the vast, vast, majority of occurrences? Is there an easy and objective way to tell the difference? In a world where wrong hires are expensive, can you fault people for assuming A? Is there a better way to ensure that B candidates are adequately evaluated?
Well, to be honest I think a lot of "capital A assholes" actually are neurodiverse – if not in the more common sense of ASD/ADHD/etc, then in the sense of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, etc. But, there are limits to the extent of neurodiversity anyone can handle: schizophrenia is a form of neurodiversity too, but a candidate who exhibits florid symptoms of psychosis in a job interview is obviously not a suitable candidate at this time (but they might make an excellent candidate in the future if their psychosis remits). If someone's behaviour is somewhat outside the norm, but they show some insight, willingness to take on feedback and attempt to change, etc, they can still make a positive contribution to a team. If they appear to have no insight, no ability or willingness to consider the feedback of others, no ability or willingness to change or compromise or meet others half-way – it probably isn't going to work out.
> However, based on my (admittedly anecdotal, but extensive) experience situation A is probably something like 95% of the time and situation B is probably something like 5% of the time.
Do you actually know the split is really 95% vs 5%? Is it possible that, some of that 95% really belongs to the 5% but you didn't realise it?
A couple of strategies which might help: (1) force yourself to stop and think about other possible explanations, and whether you have any reason to think any of those other explanations could apply in that particular case; (2) try to gently broach the subject with the candidate, and try to see if you can get any information on the interaction from their perspective. Possibly, their behaviour may seem less unreasonable when you understand it from their point of view. Also, you can judge how open they are to receive feedback and responding to it – there is a big difference between "yeah, I could have handed that situation better" and a rigid insistence that they did nothing wrong.
I'm sceptical of intentionally putting any kind of "hidden test" in a hiring process. When the process is totally transparent – directly ask relevant questions about technical skills/knowledge/experience, soft skills, etc – I think that is fairest on the candidate, and minimises the risk of unintentional indirect discrimination–and I think lawyers who specialise in employment discrimination law would probably agree with that. I don't think that means one has to completely ignore any incidental feedback outside of the transparent formal process, but there is a big difference between incidental feedback and intentionally engineering a "hidden test". Also, I don't think one should rule out an otherwise good candidate on the basis of such incidental feedback without some serious thought and investigation.
Better question, does it matter? As you said, bad hires are expensive. We aren't talking about language barriers here, we're talking about behavior that comes across as (your words) capital A asshole. If the person is going to behave that way on the job and it drags the team down, does it matter why they behave that way? I know I wouldn't want to be stuck working with them.
> It also goes to the WASP distaste or disdain for the Jewish style of discourse. Historically, someone at IBM saying a candidate was brusque could quite easy be code for saying they were Jewish.
I have the kind of personality which likes facts, details, debate, argument, pedantry, technicalities, obscurities, etc – given that, I get on quite well with other people who have that kind of personality. I'm not especially bothered by bluntness, and though I try not to be too blunt, I probably am sometimes anyway. But I know some people sometimes perceive personalities like mine as "rude" – possibly even "assholes". When my wife and I were getting married, I got in a dispute with the church secretary over what kind of proof of identity documents we were legally required to produce. I pointed out to her she was wrong, and that if she read section 42 of the Marriage Act 1961 it should be obvious to her that she was wrong. She was very offended by that suggestion. In hindsight, I try to see things from her point of view – she's probably never read any legislation in her life, wouldn't even know where to look for it, the idea of reading legislation sounds scary, she isn't used to reading legal texts and might struggle to understand it (or worry that she would), etc. Whereas, for me, I'm the kind of person who reads legislation for fun, and of course I'm going to read the laws about marriage before getting married – and the thought that most other people aren't like me isn't the first thought that pops into my head, I have a somewhat autistic mind which gravitates to the facts immediately, and is slower to think about the impact those facts might have on the thoughts and feelings of others. Then again, the thought that there are people like me probably didn't pop into her head either, and if it did she would likely have been far less offended.
I'm not Jewish myself (mostly Irish Catholic ancestry), but I actually have an appreciation for some of the bluntness of traditional Jewish culture – Israelis often call themselves sabra, after the Hebrew word for the prickly pear, the idea being that while they do have somewhat of a reputation for rudeness and bluntness on the surface (the prickles), it hides a soft and sweet interior (as the prickly pear itself does). I suppose I have some appreciation for that cultural trait precisely because some aspects of it overlap with my own personality.
Also, I'm Australian, and Australians have somewhat of a reputation for being blunt, rude, overly informal, particularly by American standards. I remember once reading an interview with an outgoing US Ambassador to Australia (I wish I could find it now) explaining how he was a bit taken aback by this cultural difference at first but got used to it over time. On the other hand, one of my Argentine colleagues once told me that I am "extremely polite" – I think in certain ways I actually am – although I also have absolutely no clue what Argentine ideas of politeness are and how they may compare to Australian or American or Israeli or whatever politeness standards.
Anyway, my point is, sometimes "drags the team down" may be because a person really is behaving in an objectively problematic way, other times "drags the team down" may actually be because the existing team has insufficient awareness of cultural and personal diversity, and is being overly judgemental of someone who is different from them. I'm sure both sometimes happen.
This isn't being blunt, this being a straight up dick. I hope you went back and apologized for acting out later. If this is your definitions of bluntness and is standard fare for your behavior, you are actually the capital A Asshole the comment chain is referring to. It's not about the truth of the matter, it's the total lack of empathy in your entire comment about this interaction.
I have no empathy for her? So, when I said "In hindsight, I try to see things from her point of view...", that isn't an exercise in empathy? And did she have empathy for me? When I said "the thought that there are people like me probably didn't pop into her head either" – isn't that pointing to a gap which likely exists in her own empathy?
Have you ever heard of the English autistic researcher, Dr Damian Milton's, "double empathy problem"? Autistic people are commonly said to lack empathy, but actually most non-autistic people have at least as great a lack of empathy towards the autistic. I think it is relevant here, because I very much can see my own autistic traits at work in the situation we are discussing.
Finally, where's your empathy for me in your comment? I can't detect any. If a "total lack of empathy" makes one a "dick" and a "capital A asshole", what does that make you?
Empathy is a skill high-functioning people on the spectrum can learn. I spent a lot of time in therapy as a child pretty much solely focused on learning empathy. Your behavior showed a complete disregard for her emotional well-being and _her feelings_, which is synonymous with a total lack of empathy. That you are capable of commenting on Hacker News and getting married means you could learn the skill too; everyone has to learn it, like any other skill, and it doesn't come easy to people on the spectrum.
I understand the double empathy problem and I do not agree with it whatsoever. My exposure to adults on the spectrum who wear their autism as a badge of pride or disclaimer in conversation do so as a means to dodge responsibility for their part in a social interaction because it makes them uncomfortable.
> Finally, where's your empathy for me in your comment?
Doesn't feel good to have your intellectual / personal short comings aired out in public does it?
> What does that make you?
Speaking how you speak to others, but to you. As a narrative decision.
Also, you weren't actually there, so you don't know exactly what I said or what she said–I mentioned the gist of the message, but no details on exactly how it was conveyed–which obviously makes a significant difference. You are drawing a lot of conclusions based on very limited information.
> Empathy is a skill high-functioning people on the spectrum can learn.
Have you actually learned that skill? Of course it would be unfair to judge you on the basis of a single interaction – but you aren't demonstrating any of that skill here.
> Speaking how you speak to others, but to you. As a narrative decision.
I don't go around calling other people "dicks" or "assholes", especially not directly addressed to them, but to be honest I don't even use that kind of language in the third person. (I suppose I did suggest that maybe your abusive language directed at me could possibly be better applied to you, but I said that more in the hope that you would see the contradiction and withdraw it, rather than because I think you actually deserve to be called that). Nor am I prone to draw conclusions about other people, such that they have a "total lack of empathy", based on their brief descriptions of social interactions which I didn't personally witness, and hence couldn't possibly have a complete picture of. I think the way you and I speak is actually quite different, and a lot of the flaws which you are accusing me of having, your own behaviour actually exhibits them much more than my own.
I have the sense things I have said have triggered an emotional reaction on your part, and a lot of what you are saying is really more about your own emotions than about anything I have said.
> I have the sense things I have said have triggered an emotional reaction on your part, and a lot of what you are saying is really more about your own emotions than about anything I have said.
You're so very close to getting it. This entire interaction has been incredibly frustrating to you, because I engaged in it in bad faith from a place of (supposed) irrational emotional anger, same as you described. I called you out on a personal failing, and it caused you some level of frustration or hurt. Even when I have over-emphasized the point and flipped the tables, you're still not getting it. You treated that poor lady horribly, more horribly than I have treated you (unless you really think a random curse word on the internet is more devastating than being told in as many words, to your face, that you're too stupid to do your job, which is what you described your interaction as) and you're ready to back out of this interaction. The tables are reversed and you think I'm an asshole. What do you think that lady thinks about you?
You claimed before that "She did not consider that you might not follow the same social contract as everyone else" – but isn't your own (self-confessed) bad faith engagement here a violation of most people's social contract, and especially the social contract of this site? (Read the Guidelines.)
> unless you really think a random curse word on the internet is more devastating than being told in as many words, to your face
You are making assumptions. Was the interaction in-person, via email, via phone? I haven't said. You can't really judge an interaction you know nothing about except a very brief description. Our interaction here is as much "to your face" as any email exchange would be–given which, your ideas about what differences exist between the two interactions are very questionable.
> that you're too stupid to do your job
How is it telling someone "you're too stupid to do your job" to point out they've got the facts about something wrong, and that you've got concrete evidence to substantiate that?
I mean, if a colleague tells me I'm wrong about X, and shows me something which proves I'm wrong – I don't interpret that as "you're too stupid to do your job". My response is "thanks for enlightening me". In fact, just a few weeks ago I was telling people "Cassandra can't do X" (I forget exactly what X was now) and one of my colleagues said "no you're wrong" and sent me some blog post pointing out how to do that thing with Cassandra. I was thankful to him for correcting me, I didn't take his correction as having any implication on my own intelligence or ability. Sure, being shown to be wrong feels somewhat uncomfortable, but adults should be able to handle that feeling. And it wouldn't matter if it wasn't a colleague – such as a customer, or a complete random stranger.
> The tables are reversed and you think I'm an asshole.
As I said, I don't like language like "asshole", I generally avoid it. But, what are you doing here? You think I behaved inappropriately in a situation – possibly you are right, possibly you are wrong, you don't really know enough about it to actually judge – and so you think that by behaving inappropriately to me you are going to convince me of something? Whatever you are trying to do, I don't think it is thought through very well, and I'd question its compatibility with this site's Guidelines.
> What do you think that lady thinks about you?
How would you know what she thinks? You've never met her. I've actually spoken to her quite a few times in the years since that event, and (as far as I can tell) the interactions have been positive, and (other than that one occasion) I can't remember her seeming upset about any of them. (None of our subsequent interactions have involved anyone disagreeing with anyone else's facts, for what it's worth.)
>> In hindsight, I try to see things from her point of view – she's probably never read any legislation in her life
with a real understanding of yourself
>> I know some people sometimes perceive personalities like mine as "rude" – possibly even "assholes".
And an understanding of the friction...
>> the thought that most other people aren't like me isn't the first thought that pops into my head yet it is full of love and care for another person.
Thank you for taking the time to write this in response to my post.
I don't believe we have to classify ourselves as autistic just because we like "facts, debate, argument, pedantry, technicalities..." in fact, my entire culture thrives on exactly these things and it's been fairly successful if you consider surviving mass genocide for thousands of years, and surviving current hatred for our existence right here and now, to be a form of success. I just had a long conversation with my girlfriend tonight about this. She left an extremely repressive evangelical home in Texas at 17, moved to Chicago and ended up knowing a lot of Jewish people, but her mind works the same way. She said it's what you learn, and I said no, it's a kind of formatting. It changes how you learn and what you learn. It apportions different spaces and relationships on the hard drive. It's not a religion, to me, I'm an atheist. It's a type of questioning, seeking, which is consistently going to be offensive to people who want to defend the status quo. And - skissane - you're a mensch, because you didn't want your wife to be hurt and you asked yourself if you'd put her through unnecessary stress. It's gotta be coupled with an understanding of people's limitations and making them feel OK. That's why I said you have to know what culture you're dealing with. What I'm describing here isn't "Judaism", and very religious Jews would likely disagree because they're hardliners. It's the liberal western freedom-loving offspring of a very old religion that argues constantly but looks for accord, and humanity. I find the same tolerance, forbearance and questioning mentality in Sikhs, Druze, and Irish Catholics, all people who are too jaded to take religion literally, who also (1) loved debating the written word, (2) have been seeds of rebellion, and (3) borne the brunt of genocidal oppression. A very specific cocktail. But you can find it here and there in the rebels in every culture. The only one which elevates tendentiousness to the highest form of merit is Judaism, by a process of elimination.
Anyway, I've lived in Australia (not rude by American standards), and Argentina (assholes, but I love 'em), and have family in Israel (just completely uncontrollable, uncouth, wildly rude like Italians or Spaniards, where I also lived) - in the grand scheme of things, all these places respect intellect. Places which don't respect intellect, per se, but prefer submission, are like Thailand. I love Thai people, don't get me wrong. But they are in fear of their hierarchy, and gripe about their place in the world. Go over to Vietnam and everyone thinks freely, works two jobs and goes to university and learns three languages; if I had to bet on the future of authoritarianism in those two countries I would suggest that Thailand is doomed and Vietnam will be the third major democracy in Asia along with Korea and Japan; a Vietnamese revolution is a half-generation away, because they're formatted to think independently. Partly thanks to France and America; and knowing they beat both in a war.
By the same token, America is totally fucked. Because the people here who look for liberty are authoritarians who've never lacked for it, and the anti-authoritarians in this country apparently have decided that liberty is dangerous and anathema to their agenda. This leaves me as an American Jew in a perilous situation, a mere 50 years after IBM routinely discriminated against my people for being too talky, and what, like 75 years after IBM built the mechanical calculators for nazi germany to tally up dead Jews.
So, sorry for the horribly long ramble. But I wish I was still in Oz, you sound like someone I'd really enjoy a pint with. Sorry if I'd talk your ear off. But your story was quite well written.
As someone who views most psychiatric diagnoses (autism/ASD included) as being primarily cultural constructs (with the science behind them being quite weak, far weaker than most people think), the suggestion that some of these things labelled as “autistic traits” are really just traits which some cultures (especially mainstream Anglo-American culture) disapprove of, is one I have a lot of sympathy for.
I come from a culture where directness and argumentation are valued over deference to seniority or authority. In some contexts, or by some people, this can be mistaken for rudeness, when really it's just a mode of solving problems.
It's important to know what culture you're dealing with and act appropriately. I might bite my tongue or code-switch if I know I'm dealing with a very conservative/authoritarian culture where it's less important for me to be myself or solve a problem than it is to have people like me. But having other candidates like you rather than solve problems is not usually the main point of a job interview, so creating unwritten tests like this with parameters involves some deceit.
It also goes to the WASP distaste or disdain for the Jewish style of discourse. Historically, someone at IBM saying a candidate was brusque could quite easy be code for saying they were Jewish.
It's wonderful if you can weed out a person who treats others badly, I really can't see why it would matter if it's because some real or imagined condition causes them to be an asshole, or because being an asshole is allegedly okay in their culture.
Indivual persons can't be "diverse". Only a population can be "diverse".
Ive worked retail for quite some time but broke out into IT. But the abuse is expected in retail. Managers are paid minimally more to deal with it - and that's to prevent customer complaints to corporate.
Pretty much everyone, at some time, has flailed out at restaurant or retail staff. It's terrible, but part of the expectations.
I read somewhere that our "obnoxious American tourist" stereotype came from some time in the 60s when rich tourists started flying across the Pacific, showed up and and started demanding service like they did back at home
I suspect it is this dynamic more than tipping culture that gave rise to the stereotype of the ugly American. In small numbers people in foreign lands try to stay quiet and unseen. In larger numbers they feel safe and, maybe because they feel free from consequence or maybe as a stress reaction, they become worse than their normal selves. It isn't just Americans. But for a period in the last century Americans were the folks with sufficient money to show up in other people's countries in tour groups.
Also, the people who create the stereotype are the ones who are noticed. If there are lots of foreigners blending in and a group of them who don't, it's the ones who don't who create the reputation for the rest.
Still, you could be right that tours select for rude tourists. The large, rude groups were more likely to have designated organizers. The rude Americans on the train didn't.
Being identifiable (appearance, langauge), significant in number, and crossing some threshold of observably obnoxious behaviour tends to leave impressions.
Within the US, you'll often find neighbouring-state stereotypes: "massholes", Texans (particularly in Colorado), Californians (Oregon), New Yorkers (city, everywhere), Yankees (the South), Southerners (the North), city slickers (country), country hicks (cities).
Much of this is inherent tribalism and not matching local patterns of speech, behavioiur, specific local knowledge, and the like.
It's this kind of inference that doesn't belong on a hiring committee; you likely don't have enough data to support this kind of conclusion about a person. The parent comment made a similar assumption about racial animus. I just don't think spying or eavesdropping is an effective way to evaluate a candidate.
In the interview room, any candidate will be on their best behavior since impressing those people "matters" greatly. Same for the behavioral lunch sessions that many companies also use. If I have any sense, I'm going to recognize that this is still part of the "interview" even though we may be at a restaurant offsite discussing anything from the job to the Yankees pitchers.
The argument, that I tend to agree with, is that gathering info from the taxi driver is a better indicator of true character. I don't expect the taxi driver to deliver a full psychological report but I would like to know if they felt mistreated in some way.
Doesn't make me rude, just makes me normal.
Would I be an asshole according to US standards? Probably. Doesn't mean I am a shot person, just unaccustomed to new normal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
>I don't see how this behavior is relevant to the job; and evaluating it on a hiring committee invites all sorts of "cultural fit" biases that generally making the hiring process inconsistent and discriminatory.
I don't see how not doing this, really changes anything. The process is already inconsistent and discriminatory. The only thing this really tests is integrity.
That makes about as much sense as saying that you shouldn’t be held responsible for stealing office supplies because no one informed you that there were cameras installed.
If you treat cab drivers and other service personnel badly, that’s because you’re a shit person. It’s really that simple. I’ve been in extremely stressful situations in my life involving lots of travel and I’ve yet to “take it out” on a third party.
Life is littered with cases where people thought they understood each other but didn’t. If there’s a chance you’ll be misinterpreted, you’re not communicating well and need to take steps to correct it, just out of general empathy for those who don’t have the exact same knowledge as you.
Some discussions are not serious, and are destined not to be really productive anyway. Dating advice falls into that category.
Is ignoring context like this your idea of being a "helpful contributor to discussions?" Because I don't see who's being helped by this.
Then you could have said as much from the beginning.
>Is ignoring context like this your idea of being a "helpful contributor to discussions?" Because I don't see who's being helped by this.
You communicated poorly, in being (almost deliberately) unaware of what context others might lack. That error followed a pattern that others often make. I pointed out why it is an error so that you, and those others, can avoid it. And then, in doing so, I got you to reveal context your original comment needed.
Yes, I absolutely feel like I contributed here, and that you made the forum just a little bit worse with your original reply and contempt for discussion quality. Do you see why I might think that?
That attitude seems the same one that judges service workers. IME, and based on what I know of humanity, people act badly because they feel vulnerable; they are scared or anxious. It's still bad behavior, but they aren't 'shit people'.
If bad behavior damns us, then we all qualify. The mistake is judging others, and lacking empathy and humility.
> I’ve been in extremely stressful situations in my life involving lots of travel and I’ve yet to “take it out” on a third party.
We all act badly sometimes; if you really think you don't, you are not seeing it. It's not ok in the situation, but it's ok in terms of our humanity. Apologize and work to do better.
really depends on the candidate and the situation. We dont have the context for neither here. If a truly senior candidate who has deep domain knowledge interviews, they may not be dinged as much if they gave a service worker a low tip or complained about the smell of the car.
But sure, for some college candidate in a yearly hiring spree that are all from top schools, maybe that is the little bit of a filter needed to make a difference.
I did have a coworker cheat on their spouse. I certainly lost respect for them, avoided working with them whenever possible, and cut off the non-professional aspect of our relationship.
Otoh, not clear what gp means by “rude”. Someone could perceive sad/neutral silence and “thank you, goodbye” as rude-ish too.
I think where this might get dodgy is with the possibility that some of the candidates might have tipped this driver, which puts us in the position of asking for an opinion about several candidates from someone who might have been compensated by some of them.
I always find it interesting how i'm perceived. I didn't intend wage-theft as part of the idea. Also it is possible that there's people who are qualified to do this work (passenger/commercial endorsements on their driver's license), good character actors, and generally ethical.
I took it all as a thought exercise, anyhow. Having been on the hiring side of the table, i'm not the "team fit" or "social" interviewer. Technical and creative questions. I let people in their fields deal with how their interviews go.
So all told i wouldn't be in the position to hire someone to filter potential hires.
If you end up with people who ass kiss those above them, abuse those below them, backstab and/or sabotage the competition, focus on empire building, and misrepresent things for their benefit then your best staff will find elsewhere to work. Those that stay will fight among themselves and will only help the company or it's customers when it happens to overlap with their other goals.
Sounds kind of like the Dilbert comic now that I think about it.
What's lacking from this conversation is any definition of what behavior we're actually talking about, and the conclusions (understandably) vary wildly. This is a similar dilemma to what a hiring committee would face when reviewing a second-hand narrative from a contractor about a candidate.
I don't think a company interested in having a healthy culture should spy or eavesdrop on people.
You may be conducting reducto ad absurdum here, but this is unironically one of the biggest shifts of the Overton window from millenial to Gen Z. It may not be your search history, but they sure can check your Twitter/Facebook/etc. going back years to weed you out. It was kind of awkward for my demographic of late millenials, but gen z candidates entering the workforce may very well have their entire life online to see.
It's honestly a bit chilling, but I think the lines have been set in the sand here.
As an aside, I'm always shocked at what people will start saying in a taxi/uber, particularly I'm thinking of talking about confidential work stuff. My personal view is you never know who the driver is and loose lips sink ships, don't say anything in front of him that you wouldn't say in public. But I know many don't see it that way.
Also, when you're making hiring decisions, why are you trusting the opinion of a taxi driver who isn't even on your payroll? They certainly have their own prejudice, and if they know they have weight in hiring decisions, they could very well just be feeding you lies.
It's a bit like psychological or sociological studies. All the time, for ethics reasons, the researchers must tell the subjects than they are part of a psychological or sociological test. But, the test is generally not exactly what is said to the people. For example by testing something hidden or by using actors. See for example the Asch conformity experiments or the Cognitive Dissonance Experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
https://explorable.com/cognitive-dissonance-experiment
In this case the people where told than they where tested, no surprise here... That said, is it really ethic to trick people by telling them than they are tested on "something" but in reality testing them on something else ?
I may have agrees 15 years ago. But in a day and age where one random tweet of personal opinion can cause a PR disaster to an entire company, it seems inevitable that they want to make sure a candidate isn't going to potentially go off the rails.
For better or worse, many people are connected worldwide for a signifigant part of the day, and have accounts that are easy to cross reference. e.g. a twitter account has the same name and location as a linkedIn profile.
----
with all that said, I'd be surprise if it was anymore than what was described; an ability to interact without unneeded hostility in life. I don't think you're gonna be dinged for failing to count change correctly and have that impact your eligibility despite whiteboarding your practiced algorithms to perfection.
But, seriously, I feel like if you're using a potential employer's services, you should assume they're taking that into account when they're hiring you.
Hello, how are you. Thank you. Yes, water please. Have a good day.
I think I asked once for a pillow (usually on Redeyes they hand them out)
I've never had a fight attendant decline my request, or complain about it...
it'd be a tight squeeze through the aisle if it were possible, but I could make it work in my chair.
Are the cc ads part of the safety video, or on the life preservers?
(I ended up taking a seat in the rear for a bit & riding it out until a slightly smoother portion. Still had to bend the rules a bit. I owe you for your patience, flight attendant…)
Although, on one flight, there was a child behind us, real young (not really yet old enough to "know better"), listening to a tablet that was playing the ABCs song. But the tablet had to be stowed for take-off (apparently). She forced the parent to take the tablet from child. Child threw a tantrum. I'm eye'ing the attendant like "you caused this. ABCs > bawling kid, and takeoff with the tablet would have been fine"
(Please note that I’m not arguing that’s it’s a reasonable requirement, just that FAs likely don’t have the authority to ignore violations.)
If I had very young children, or needed special accommodations, I might have a different opinion. The SWA preboarding process doesn't seem very generous.
I switched to Delta, and I'm much happier.
All commercial airlines are pretty much awful. I've flown first class on one or two occasions and--while it's relatively more comfortable than flying in the main cabin--on an absolute scale it's still an uncomfortable, terrible experience. Flying sucks and airline management is the reason why.
Granted, I've a lot less miles flown with Delta, but that's because every ride has been bad… (also, I ended up flying less miles with Delta on one of the horror shows because it seemed like they weren't actually interested in fulfilling their end of the bargain, and switched to a different airline: Southwest!)
And be careful what you say at the bar.
But in my experience job interviews can also be successfully concluded in similar places on occasion, although perhaps more often started.
US agencies but private corporation's data on people, such as the CDC recently, on mobile phones.
With livingrooms bugged via smart TVs, and virtual assistants(alexa, etc), leaving the house may not be necessary.
Stories like this also remind me of the "Magical Negro" trope where a simple but helpful black person offers sage advise or magic to help the protagonists out of a jam. These "The taxi driver was your real interviewer" stories don't (necessarily) have a racial element, but it's the same, magic wisdom of simple lower class folk idea.
When two people don't get along it's hard to find the objective truth by talking to one of them. Maybe the candidate didn't talk to the taxi driver because he was nervously thinking about the interviewer and that came off to the driver as aloof or arrogant. Maybe the driver didn't like the candidate's race, gender, experience, age, etc. Maybe something was said that was misunderstood by one or both parties. Point is - it's a very weak test.
That would be indeed implausible. But not every transaction happens between undeferentiated cogs.
A specific person organises the interview logistics from the company. Let’s call him Joe. When they agree with a candidate on an interview date Joe picks up the phone and calls the hotel to book a room. After that Joe calls George the trusted taxi driver they always work with. He lets him know who needs the ride and when. They exchange pleasantries. George also lets him know that the one on Monday cussed him out when he thought George was not driving fast enough. Joe laughs, and tells George that that’s crazy since he is always on time if not early. George feels good about that. He likes that Joe noticed that he is always punctual. They say good byes . Joe makes a mental note to not hire the cussing candidate.
What is implausible about this?
> How frequently are people so rude to the taxi driver that they are disqualified from consideration?
Have you met people? Happens all the time.
> Does the taxi driver get compensated?
Yes. He receives a steady supply of rides and the company pays him for that.
> Why is the taxi driver doing this?
He is a human being and those in general don’t like it when someone mistreats them. They let others know when it happens.
> Does anybody vet the taxi driver's personality testing ability?
Yes. It is called a personal connection. The driver behaves like a decent human being and only rarely say that someone was rude to them so the hiring manager believes them when it happens.
I think the reason you find this story implausible is because you are thinking on a different scale. A team of hiring managers managing 500 interviews per week for a megacorp can’t do this. They won’t have the mental bandwidth, they won’t use a specific driver, they won’t have the personal connection. Not every company is that size. Some company might only interview a few people a week.
It's also bizarre to me that the company would have a "trusted taxi driver". A trusted driver for executives or something might make sense, but a trusted driver who isn't employed by your organization that you specifically route candidates through? It just doesn't sound like the type of thing that happens much to me.
Finally, on the subject of people being randomly rude to taxi drivers, never having been a taxi driver I don't have real first hand information. I did ride a public city bus multiple times a day for years though and the number of people who I witnessed being rude to the driver, who were not visibly drunk or homeless, is zero. It just doesn't fit with my experience of humanity to think that, in a typical daytime taxi ride you're going to get much absurdly inappropriate behavior - i.e behavior that would rise to the level of disqualifying the candidate. Maybe if the taxi driver were a woman I'd believe it, but I bet the vast majority of people would just say where they wanted to go and little else.
People... talked before phones were invented?
Why is it so hard to imagine that the guy from the car service you always use might exchange some small talk when he drops someone off? Sometimes a friendly relationship develops between people who regularly interact
Even a couple of years ago on a business trip to Spain, the guys at the company there had a taxi driver they knew who they got to take me to their facility. Then I just organised with him to pick me up each day at a certain time when I paid. Beats me having to get the hotel or the company to keep having to call for cabs and beats him having to wait for fares.
Finally, I'm very surprised that you can't imagine somebody being rude to a low-wage worker...
Many years ago, in the days before Uber and Lyft, I lived in an apartment complex in Campbell, CA. There was a nice Ethiopian family a couple of units over from me. I would often smell the delicious food they were cooking, and they probably smelled the coffee I would roast in my Gene Cafe. I mostly roasted dry process Ethiopian coffees (and still do).
When I had a minor medical procedure scheduled that would require light sedation, I thought to myself, "I need a way to get there and back." I was going to call a regular taxi, and then I realized I'd been seeing this Green Cab parked in our lot a couple of spots over from mine.
I had a feeling it might be one of my neighbors, because I'd often seen Ethiopians driving Green Cabs.
So I left a note under the windshield wiper: "Hi neighbor! I see you drive a cab. Would you happen to be available on such-and-such a date and time to drive me over to San Jose and then back a couple of hours later?
He called, we made arrangements, and we sure had a lot to talk about between Ethiopian coffee and food and life in general.
You never know what kind of connection you may make with someone who is "just a taxi driver."
Perfectly sensible service to out-source and something that you want to work each time or have responsibility to arrange someone else to do same thing.
Heck, one of my neighbours is a taxi driver, and Im not in the office very often maybe 1 or 2 days a week, so for me having him drive me is cheaper, faster and less "Viral infectious" than paying for the commute on public transport.
I've arranged for him to pick up and deliver everything from people, dry cleaning, and packages in a pinch.
One thing about Dublin taxi drivers, they love to chat if given half a chance.
(Also it might have been a "car service" and the term taxi was being used a bit liberally there)
OP can report back on what the bar was, but I doubt people were getting rejected simply for being aloof or untalkative. And it's unfair in the opposite direction to try to apply the "Magical Negro" trope to anyone with a blue-collar job. By that bar -- it would be better to completely ignore the driver and treat them as a nonentity, which we (hopefully) know is wrong.
Use whatever resources are at your disposal to vet candidates.
This story is supposedly about an actual taxi driver, not a plant from HR. It's absurd to trust this person like this.
sounds like both
what do you mean when you say "Maybe the powerless person is a homophobe" ?
> what do you mean when you say "Maybe the powerless person is a homophobe" ?
The taxi driver may cause conflict with gay passengers. Or female passengers, or whatever else. Then they would blame their own victim for their reaction. The taxi driver's personal biases and animosities would become a vector for corporate discrimination.
There is a reason that corporate bureaucracies take such care to look out for this kind of thing. If you let ordinary people just go with their gut on things, you end up excluding a lot of people based on stereotypes and bias. It's not some theoretical possibility, but empirical fact.
> It's absurd to trust this person like this
If your friend told you "man, my last customer was a jerk" you would distrust that?
If a homophobe was working for HR (in 2022) they would hide it, even to the extent of making sure to hire some percentage gays no matter what they thought personally.
> If your friend told you "man, my last customer was a jerk" you would distrust that?
My personal friend? That's the standard we're expecting from a giant corporation's bureaucracy? It just has its personal friends that it trusts.
That kind of thing is just gross, is my point. Maybe it's how everything works, welcome to the real world, etc. But it's nothing to be praised or admired.
The corporation should vet its "personal friends" at least as closely as its official HR personnel. Otherwise they're an unaccountable source of bias in the hiring process.
Observing how people behave around nominal subordinates is not a new trick or one that is gross. It's an interesting data point. This is unusual as rather than a receptionist or security guard, it is someone who doesn't work for the company.
That you think it's impossible to trust someone without formal vetting is really interesting to me. It suggests that formal vetting by Big Corps is useful but knowing someone from a significant number of interactions/conversations is worthless. I don't buy into that at all, I'd argue pretty strongly the inverse is true and vetting is garbage and interpersonal interactions are useful.
A similar way is to take the candidate out and see how they deal with the waiter.
This actually happened in my workplace, I recognised a coworker as gay long before he told me, just from his vocabulary.
Also, wouldn't the taxi driver also have to know about these clues?
With all respect, I think the scenario "Taxi driver planted/used as an interview prescreen is openly anti-gay and sniffs them out." is a bit contrived.
The comments above talk about punishment for bad behavior, which happens all day every day. Nobody cares about giving the candidate a 'fair shake' because if you know and trust someone enough to listen to their opinion then "hard pass" is all you need to hear. You've decided the taxi driver was savvy enough to make this call long before this specific incident.
Not true! Yesterday I walked out of a Home Depot with an unpaid drill bit in my shirt pocket (my hands were full). I discovered my error when I reached the car. I went back to pay, and got a 20% discount for being honest!
An (absolute, not relative) reward for good behavior — i.e. a positive-ROI outcome for doing the right thing, vs. not doing the right thing — would be, for example, if you came back and told them you didn't pay, and so they gave you the drill bit for free and also gave you a nickel. Any less and it'd just be "no reward, no punishment."
To be clear, theft isn't theft (legally or ethically) without mens rea — if you accidentally walk out of a store with something, you haven't done anything wrong.
And if you later realize you now have possession of the thing, that doesn't mean you're suddenly guilty of theft, either. Theft is an act requiring mens rea, not a state of someone who possesses something that was at some point illegitimately dispossessed from its owner. (If the latter was true, then most people who buy anything from pawn shops would be guilty of theft, because those things were often stolen from someone at some point.)
You might, separately, see there being positive ethical value in returning an item to its owner; but this ethical value should be considered independently from the ethical cost of having stolen (or not stolen) the thing. If you think there's positive ethical value in returning things to their owners, then you'd likely feel an ethical impoetus to e.g. "steal" stolen bicycles from those piles you see on the front yards of flop houses, and bring them back to the people who own them. (Even though those people have probably bought new bicycles already, and won't know what to do with the returned ones. Even though the stolen pile of bicycles is likely just a pile of rust due to lack of maintenance.)
What if, instead of the same day, it had been the next day when you noticed you now had the drill bit, long after you brought it home? Would you still think you had an imperative to return it? Would it still feel like deliberate theft?
How about if you didn't notice that you had it, and it fell out of your pocket at some point on your way home, and then you realized the next day that that had happened? Would you feel an ethical wrongness that could only be righted by retracing your steps to find the store's lost drill bit, so it could be returned? Or would you accept this as just a series of accidents with neutral ethical value — like e.g. goods being damaged in shipping?
What if, instead of a drill bit, you found after you walked out of the store that you had a $5 bill stuck to your shoe? Would you feel the need to walk back inside and ask who lost the $5 bill?
When a salesman gives you a squeeze ball or a bottle of scotch, it’s not a “bribe”. It’s an artifact that provides an excuse to talk, and perhaps anchor the conversation positively.
Likewise, the store policy of providing a discount is intended leave you with a positive memory that reinforces your action.
“Wow. I made a mistake, caught it, and the nice lady at the counter thanked me and gave me a discount.” That’s a powerful feeling.
Of course it's not an instant reward like it is for children but good behavior is one of the things I can point to that led me to be in the position I am now.
The last two thirds of my so far 38 (next month!) year career have been "call Doug, he knows this particular topic and he is a great team player". Most of those from people I never worked with, but they were asking friends for recommendations.
So yeah, good behavior has fueled the two thirds of my career where I earned about eighty percent of my income.
So yeah, my experience lines up with yours.
There are plenty of "asshole filters" around https://cafebedouin.org/2019/11/10/the-asshole-filter/
I have an admin, and people who treat her poorly pop up all of the time. She’s a trusted person who can wield whatever authority I have in many scenarios. Treating her poorly is rude and gross, but also self-destructive (hint: who actually manages the budget?). Plus, she won’t be an admin forever, and it’s a small world.
I worked in retail sales in college and encountered all sorts of people. You get a sense of people when you work with the public. When somebody chooses to exert power over someone where that person lacks agency to respond, that’s a character trait worthy of future consideration.
I've heard the comment multiple times that everyone should work in a restaurant at least once in their lives so they have a better understanding of what the employees go through. I tend to agree, and I would probably add retail in there as well.
I was a motorcycle mechanic for six years before going to college. Some customers where a joy, you looked forward to seeing them, most were just average Joes that needed work done, and a very small few were arrogant self entitled jerks, but it was a job, and you had to deal with it.
Some of the nicest people I know have had retail experience in their life.
In this case just knowing the driver well enough to ask them "Was that person nice to you?" when they drop a candidate off gets you another very useful signal when the response isn't neutral. A lot of the time it'll be "they were OK", but occasionally you'll get a positive "they treated me like a human being" or a negative "no, they were rude".
If you just get an "OK" then you're back to hiring as normal, without the extra data. If you get a positive or negative signal that can amplify what you see in the rest of the hiring process. For me, a tick in the "nice to people you don't have to be nice to" box is a good thing. I like to work with people who have that trait. If I can find a signal that indicates a person has it then I'm going to use it when I'm hiring.
That's the whole range eh?
Missed this first half of the sentence.
- They were OK
- They treated me like a human being
- They were rude
There's no room for "We had an interesting conversation" or "They gave me some good advice" or "I think I made a new friend"? Not even "They seemed like a good person"?
The maximum is "They treated me like a human being" which is somehow above "They were OK"?
My original point, however, was to highlight the fact that "They treated me like a human being" was given as the example of a positive interaction.
Which is absolutely absurd. And I don't think I'm taking that too literally.
I get the impression everything was relatively informal in the process they described. In forums like these, it's about looking at the spirit of what they were trying to say and get across.
2. Have you interacted with many human beings?
We'd all love it if being treated as a human being were the bare minimum, but quite a few people didn't get the memo and fall quite a bit below it. You really do want to filter out those folks in your hiring process. Unfortunately, here on HN, some commenters view any sort of hiring filter, much less one like "don't be an asshole", as a personal attack.
2. Yeah... You're not wrong.
Sure. Everyone should be sad about that. There are plenty of people out there who don't have any willingness to treat people in service jobs like driving a taxi with any sort of humanity. Too many people will just ignore the fact that these people are living, breathing human beings with feelings of their own, and treat them as if either they don't exist, or that they exist to serve them. It's quite appalling.
Treating someone like a human being means having kindness, respect, and empathy for them. It means not expecting them to demean themselves just because you're paying them to do something. It's treating them well even without knowing them.
It's quite a high bar apparently, and a lot of people out there don't manage it.
It's not a high bar. There's just a surprising number of people that are really good at playing limbo.
here the treatment of a person of actual lower class is included as a point of reference in the interview process. it is implied that previous iterations of the hiring process failed to weed out people who were rude when the thought they could get away with it. what are you thinking is the implied purpose of such a strange test?
Need new batteries for my pager? Done! Would like some updated business cards? Done! My desk phone needs replacing. Done!
I very much doubt that the taxi driver in this story had hiring veto powers. But as a "does this person act as an asshole" test, with possible results of "yes" and "maybe" is still very valuable - you get to remove the (apparent) assholes from your selection pool, and focus on those that might have enough decency to not be assholes in public.
And often enough that's all you need. If you are always polite and respectful in public, but secretly get off on feeding baby chicks to your pet snake... that's weird, but not a dealbreaker for working together. As long as there's no spillover into your public life, I'm not here to judge.
what is worse, this, or the guy under severe stress taking a taxi and not “engaging” because he has other shit on his mind?
Stress is a reasonable excuse, but it's also reasonable for many jobs to require a minimal level of curtesy even under stress, especially in a highly collaborative environment
What's next? sending a fake date during probation to evaluate how they behave with their spouses?
Dave Barry
Eventually I ran out of time, having written no code on the whiteboard. I asked my interviewer "ok so what is the algorithm for solving this" and he admitted that he had no idea.
At the time, I thought he just meant that he had no idea what the solution was; but in hindsight I wonder if the real test was to see if I would crumble under pressure and write code I knew didn't work.
(I got a job offer, but turned it down to start Tarsnap instead.)
But also, it's a basic interview technique to explain your thinking out loud.
As for giving talks that way, I would not say that qualifies as a high stakes environment. Your likely worst case scenario is that either your code or some bit of technology involved doesn't work right, so you laugh it off and explain what was supposed to happen.
The worst case scenario in a talk is that I say something stupid and get really dogmatic and defensive about it, leading the hundreds of people watching the talk to conclude that I'm an ignorant jerk, which, well, I can be, but I'd rather they didn't overestimate the frequency of that! I could lose face.
The worst case scenario in an interview is that the person interviewing me says something stupid and gets really dogmatic and defensive about it, and then they and their company lose face.
Oh, and they could decide not to offer me the job. But that's never been much of a problem, and it's certainly no big deal — if you're only interviewing for jobs you're almost sure to be offered, you should probably interview for more advanced positions. Not being offered a job is far from "losing out on a big opportunity", as you said in your other comment. A job gives you money enough to live on, but if you're a programmer jobs that pay a living wage are plentiful.
(But less plentiful if people go to your talks and decide you're a nincompoop or a scumbag.)
Oh, and if you look like a dogmatic jerk in front of an audience, there's nobody in the back row waiting to make a mark on your permanent record as a result, just so you know.
But, back, now to interviews. I've been in I don't know how many interviews (hundreds, easily, if we count both the ones where I was the interviewer and those where I was the candidate), and I can tell you for a fact that time pressure, performance anxiety, and every single other thing I've mentioned impacts people's interview performance, and does so in such a way that it wouldn't be relevant on the job. I could even cite research to that effect if you like.
For whatever reason, you're now so out of touch that it's absurd. I had a whole point by point refutation of every single thing you wrote here, because for the average individual, it's totally wrong, and it would cause them harm if they tried to incorporate what you wrote into their world view.
Maybe you truly don't feel the same type of anxiety in technical interviewers that most people do. Fine. The fact that you're (a robot, a Zen master, financially secure enough that having a job doesn't matter, a 99th percentile 10x programmer who crushes technical interviews with both hands behind your back and using the whiteboard marker in your teeth, or whatever it is that makes you feel this way makes you not qualified to give advice on the matter to typical, average people.
TL;DR: No. Just no. I can tell you're not going to convince me of anything, and I suspect I can't convince you of anything, either, but my conscience just won't let me let this go unanswered.
It's true that many people get anxious about programming job interviews. Except in rare cases, it isn't really rational. But people get even more anxious about giving public talks, which, as you point out, often isn't rational either.
It's true that people sometimes create artificial time-pressure deadlines. Those people are manipulative schmucks who deserve no quarter. In reality, time to market is a huge competitive advantage, and when a business's site is down it generally loses money every minute; getting it back up allows the business to start making money again. Similar, but worse, when customer systems are broken because your software broke them.
When you're giving a talk at a conference, you're forming part of a community. You have a reputation in that community. That reputation can be good or bad. Having a bad reputation hurts you in myriad ways, even without anyone in the back row making a mark on your permanent record.
You're confusing your limited experience of reality with reality itself, and consequently you come off as dogmatic and defensive, which could limit your learning. I think everyone would benefit from incorporating more aspects of reality into their worldview.
And regardless it was an interview structured with a whiteboard, cameras (digital or not) had been things for a while, the company could gave provided one.
It makes it easier to reason about the code. It's the difference between typing out the answer from Stack Overflow, v.s. copy pasting it. At least for me, writing the code down at the speed the candidate does triggers the error checking part of my brain.
(Admittedly this is all years before my time.)
It's also easier to write your own notes down this way too.
Thanks to co-pilot, these are approaching being one and the same (:
Then you might actually be driving a lambo now too ;)
I don't get why people are so upset at my comment or why that should warrant ad hominem attacks.
I merely mentioned that parent could've had a job at Google and benefited from it. He made it sound like it was a power move, it really wasn't. My argument is only that he took on even more risk by not taking advantage of Google's offer and growing stock prices to fund his passion. He doesn't seem like the type to get distracted by a day job either.
It doesn't warrant ad hominem attacks, but hardly anything does.
Wouldn't Google then own all the code he wrote, even on his own SaaS sideproject?
With that money you could've funded any side project that generates recurring revenue.
I don't get why you should quit your job, take on tremendous amount of risk for a highly improbable outcome with heavy survivorship bias.
For someone like you? I'd say you shouldn't. The correct option for the vast majority of people is to stay at a stable, low risk high paying corporate job and live a comfortable upper-middle class life.
For other people...it's not that much risk if you're good at fundraising, hiring and executing. For those people, the sky is the limit.
Do you know each other or is this a judgement of character based off the few words in the above comments?
What they wrote sounds like good sense in general. A bit materialistic and generalizing perhaps, I wouldn't want a dino juice sapper and I have a lot of trouble doing pointless work let alone outright manipulative like adtech (but that's just me, evidently there's plenty on the other side), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be generally smart to accept a 4-day work week offer for presumably a high salary in addition to starting something with a high failure chance. But we don't know about savings or aspirations or industry knowledge or investors cperciva might have had, hence it's a bit generalizing, even if it's generally sensible.
> The correct option for the vast majority of people is to stay at a stable, low risk high paying corporate job and live a comfortable upper-middle class life.
Building any size of a durable business is not for everyone. Well-resourced, intelligent, trained people fail for all kinds of reasons, and that's while working on it full-time.
Unless it's not important to you that it ultimately succeeds (and it's essentially a hobby production), eventually, your business will be subject to competition and market pressure -- to gain and retain market share.
What odds do you think you have of building and holding on to that if you're trying to squeeze it into your down time from your full-time job that presumably already requires your full mental energy 40 hours a week? Why put that energy into something that is going to fail in what is ultimately a competitive market? Why not just put those resources into an index fund or real estate?
Until you have significant experience bringing new products to market (and even then), achieving any kind of a durable go to market success with a new one is never trivial, whether you're building a niche product or a venture backed scaler.
It's pretty foolhardy to tell people to go out and gamble and brush off survivorship with vanity. Back to the original parent's comment, they could've easily taken that Google job and continue development of their side project which didn't raise any money and grew organically, anyways.
1) either do a side project purely in the spare time of one's bigco job and surviving
2) go full-time into a company whether one may fail (and ultimately starve) or not
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional social media influencer.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional musician.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional basketball player.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional politician.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional founder.
But plenty of people do.
What you're talking about as being "so risky" can really be as mundane as becoming a competent mid level manager at a large tech company. One do have to make certain moves in one's career to prepare for management, and there's a certain level of progressive, targeted professional maturation that has to take place before one can be put in charge of others in some kind of a management capacity and not mess the whole thing up completely. But it's ultimately something which can be (and commonly is) trained for. Moreover, it is something most people can accomplish in their lifetime with training -- not that it means it's something most people should do or would enjoy doing.
It can take 6-10 years of practicing how to find and get into the top 1-10% startups to get any good at it. Or to get the skills one would need to run one. Or to find the right colleagues to build a network of peers and mentors one likes.
But if someone puts the full time in and don't get even decent (never mind best in class) results, they probably need to be more patient, and/or they screwed something very specific up, which they could probably fix; it's not because they aren't capable of it.
So it may require a different much more personal playbook than one may be used to, and if one has not fully developed theirs yet, it may seem delusional or unattainable. But much of that, if that's in the case, would be in their head. It would be like saying "I can't be a manager." That's probably not the case. What is likely more the case is "I like being an IC more than a manager" and "I prefer the working environment of established big companies over small startups."
People tend to prefer what they're good at, and they tend to be good at what they prefer. I don't see anything wrong with that.
I don't know what "horizontal" RSUs are, but they were options back then, and every year, you got a bigger (more value) pile of them. My total comp doubled without me getting a promotion in roughly 5 years.
Today: $2500
Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment.
According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.
Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.
Reminds me of that :)
edit: Here's a slightly more colourful telling of the story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble...
Does anyone happen to know which two problems Dantzig solved? Don't seem to be having much luck on my searches
Or perhaps when you don't know it can't (yet) be solved.
"In 1951, David A. Huffman and his MIT information theory classmates were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. The professor, Robert M. Fano, assigned a term paper on the problem of finding the most efficient binary code. Huffman, unable to prove any codes were the most efficient, was about to give up and start studying for the final when he hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient.[5]
In doing so, Huffman outdid Fano, who had worked with Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. Building the tree from the bottom up guaranteed optimality, unlike the top-down approach of Shannon–Fano coding."
When we started grad school, one of the professors introduced themself and said they thought it was interesting that adaptive optics was being used in astronomy and maybe the same idea could be used to improve microscopy and 7 years later a new phd was born doing exactly that!
This is giving me vietnam-style university flashbacks.
I am reminded of this Feynman story:
https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
Funny as it is, I would like to think that someone famous for his role in the investigation of the Challenger disaster would never flippantly say that a dangerous situation doesn't matter because "people … could easily be trained to do it safely." The fact that people can be trained to do something properly doesn't mean that trained people won't still sometimes do it improperly.
Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.
> The two problems that Dantzig solved were eventually published in: On the Non-Existence of Tests of "Student's" Hypothesis Having Power Functions Independent of σ (1940) and in On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson (1951).
They shook their heads and admitted that as best as they could tell there wasn't a solution but they wanted to see if they missed anything. I got the job.
The interviewer responded with "hold on", and grabbed a colleague, pointed at the whiteboard, and the colleague said "yes! that'll fix it!" and ran off.
I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. I often wondered how many candidates it took them to fix their bug.
Out of curiosity, why?
Sometimes I do give candidates examples of real challenges we're facing. The purpose is not to get anything for free, but rather to see if they're good at coming up with new ideas.
It also gets boring asking the same questions that may or may not have leaked to the Internet over and over.
AITA?
Umm, what?
void merge(int* d,int const* a,size_t za,int const* b,size_t zb)
{
size_t zd = za+zb,ia=0,ib=0;
for(size_t i=0; i<zd ;i++)
{
if(ia < za && ib < zb)
{
if(a[ia] < b[ib]) d[i] = a[ia++];
else d[i] = b[ib++];
}
else if(ia < za) d[i] = a[ia++];
else if(ib < zb) d[i] = b[ib++];
else abort(); // should have i==zd now
}
}
void msort(int* d,size_t z,int const* s)
{
if(z==1) *d = *s;
if(z<=1) return;
size_t h = z - (z>>1); // round up
int* x = malloc(h * sizeof *x);
if(!x) abort(); // out of memory
msort(x,h,s+(z-h));
msort(d+h,z-h,s);
merge(d,d+h,z-h,x,h);
}
// not that this is any *good*, but it does *work*
Nah. You only have to remember the central idea (if you have two sorted "runs", you can merge them into a single sorted run). You draw a quick diagram to explain the idea, you go ahead and write code that does it.
Then you apply recursion, and write down the overall algorithm (subdivide into runs until you can use some other method to sort it, then merge recursively).
Bonus points if you can explain the circumstances when this is useful (when you want to sort data that is a lot larger than your main memory, but you can write it on disk or tape). Which is kind of obsolete today, unless you are again dealing with BIG data (everything old is new again...)
When I do come to having to decide on a sorting algorithm, I can refer to the code and algos and then decide. All I need to be able to do is understand the algorithm when I see it not memorize the differences between quick and merge sort. I’m actively working with multiple Olap and regular db solutions and my teams responsible for keeping 100 billion row tables in the most queryable format and it’s never been possible for me to make such a choice, only on whether I use spark or redshift or snowflake. So what exactly would you achieve by asking this question? The irony is I was rejected by 5 companies for not being technical, accepted by 1 where I’ve been thriving for years now at one of the most technical roles in the org.
It's a real shame in tech with its (past and present) history of open source work and contributions that can be interpreted as such, especially with many projects nowadays being maintained by billion dollar coporations that can certainly pay a candidate for contributions. But that's a huge beast to tackle.
follow up note: I'm not sure if this[0] comment is parody or unironic, but situations like this are exactly what gives the idea such a bad reputation.
These "new ideas" are things you should be paying them for.
Any code problems we present to the interview candidate are _clearly_ made-up examples. Though one of them was simplified from a real-world project we had years and years ago.
You had to solve it on a blackboard, with chalk, and the intent (I later learned) was not necessarily that you got the right answer, but how you worked through it. Did you just lock up? Did you get frustrated? Did you ask the interviewer to clarify with more data? They wanted to see your thought process.
I was able to answer it (not everyone that got hired did), and when I was done, I looked at the interviewer and asked "Do you write code this way, here?". He laughed and said 'no, no no no'. I told him, I wasn't sure I would want to work there if they did. We both laughed. He ended up being my first supervisor at that company.
Hello Dan! (If you happen to read this...)
Nothing's more interesting than finding out what people are really up to.
Like is the story even true? How would anyone connect the real person to this post? Is anyone even reading this?
Genuinely curious about anyones thoughts here.
Also like outright lying, given what happened next. Not exactly the best company culture.
Because they have to transcribe it anyways, and because it's hard to read blue on white, or green on white in a photo.
Also, if some part of your handwriting is illegible, or you've made some ambiguous errors, or whatever, the interviewer can ask you what you meant, instead of having to make an after-the-fact assumption, long after you've left.
The position I interviewed for was something along the lines of datacenter operations. I did my interview from a local Google sales office and interviewed with three other employees via video call. This was around the time that Skype was fairly new, but whatever software they were using was clearly internal to Google.
Anyway, I ended up talking with 3 engineers. The first one asked me about stuff on my resume, my Linux experience, some hardware, software, and network questions, etc. He seemed pretty nice and I thought that session went well.
The second guy was a different story. It started off well enough but then he asked me how I would go about repairing a server that wouldn't boot. I asked him a few preliminary questions (does it have power, did anyone touch it recently, does it POST, etc) and then talked about which components I would swap out and in what order and why. After every piece of hardware, he would say, "it still doesn't boot, what do you do next?" I ran out of hardware to think of swapping and he eventually got visibly annoyed and began to lecture me on the troubleshooting process. Now, I was young but I wasn't green and probably got flustered and defensive in response. I'm certain that cost me the job or at least my chances of advancing to the next round of interviews.
The next guy I talked to noticed my military record and only wanted to talk about airplanes and helicopters. I humored him while attempting to steer the conversation back to the position but he wasn't having it. I'm sure he knew the previous guy gave me a strike against and was just killing time.
A few days later I got an email from Google saying that they had passed on me. Which as it turns out was probably a good thing because A) Google turned into a much different company in the years following that, and B) they never actually built the datacenter that I would have worked in anyway.
Realistically if i was in datacenter ops and a server wouldn't boot i'd unrack it and rack a new one and let the dev/ops whatever team reprovision. Heck, i did this when i was just a cloud engineer, unracked from a local (non-cloud) facility and brought back machines to the office, to be RMA'd, just to help out.
I get the idea that the interviewer had a very specific problem in memory and wanted that answer. After all, if there's some issue with the motherboard, it doesn't matter how many parts you swap out, and an issue with the motherboard could be in the infinite range from "tin whiskers" to "bad capacitor" to "cold solder joint".
A service outage can be a lot more expensive than new hardware costs. The team can troubleshoot the hardware later, offline, when they have time.
He never told me and I was too flustered at the time to ask. Which was agonizing because I replayed that damn interview in my head for weeks afterward wondering where I went wrong. (Aside from slightly losing my cool, obviously.)
I didn't get the sense that the answer he was looking for was, "find someone else who can help," or, "bin the whole server and rack a new one," because I remember it being either stated or strongly implied that the hypothetical server did have some problem that could be resolved by a tech at my level. But I could be mis-remembering things, it was a long time ago.
But like I said, in the end it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't get that particular job. At least the interview itself was a very valuable learning experience and I'm grateful for that.
The question server repair question served 2 purposes:
1) can you identify a minimum bootable state / repeatable failure case? Can you think of obscure corner cases like the metal tray that all the components sit on being the problem?
2) How quickly do you give up and ask for help from humans / other sources.
Both were core to the role. Changes in hardware and firmware often resulted in issues needing to be escalated back to manufacturers / internal platform team. The volume/scale of work also meant that being able to concisely convey what you had observed / tested and hypothesised helped the team identify trends / larger issues that were occuring. Datacenter automation and tooling was very much in its infancy.
Around that time, the org was growing rapidly (doubling in size yearly) so most people ended up doing interviews. Not everyone is cut out to interview so sorry if your experience was sucky.
Side note: I once spent most of an interview slot talking to a candidate about snowboarding. Turned out to be one of the best hires we made (thankfully the other interviewers actually asked some role related questions).
The process just seemed to be “keep asking what else it could be indefinitely”
Didn’t get it. “Not a cultural fit”, or something. Kinda wished they’d told me more detailed what the problem was.
The St. Petersburg game has an infinite expected payout! But most people would only be willing to wager $20 or so, and it's hard to articulate exactly why.
With 75% probability, you make at most 4 dollars. There’s almost a 94% chance you make less than 40 dollars.
As humans, we evaluate improvable events as not mattering so much.
You could ask: You have a 10^-30 chance of winning $10^40, otherwise you'll win $1.
Based on expected utility you should pay a huge sum to play, based on the real world you should pay $1. (Adjust the large numbers as needed if you have an issue that that much money doesn't exist.)
Personally, I would play one time, bet an amount of money I wouldn't be unhappy to lose and continue flipping until I were into 5 digits. On a $10 bet, that would be 10 flips, and I'd have a 1/1024 chance of pulling it off.
If I may ask, why in that interview did you just sit there and not ask any questions? I've passed code interviews where I learned an entire new algorithm on the fly (funny how knowing there is an nlogn solution to an n**2 problem can produce workable solutions).
I wasn't silent for half an hour, just for the first couple minutes; but I didn't write any code (which is what the interviewer was pressing me to do).
(Speaking of entirely new algorithms though, there was an interview question which was a thinly disguised 3SUM, and they expected the very obvious N^2 solution; my interviewers were shocked when I pointed out that the way they had structured the problem, the density was high enough to use a convolution and solve it in N log N time.)
During an interview, the person goes over a problem related to graphs. Then asks me if I could come up with a solution. I told him I had trouble following the details and the interview wasn't long enough for me to both figure that out and solve the problem.
I still got the job. I still don't know why he asked it of me. Eventually I found out that it was an actual problem he was trying to solve for work, and it relied upon a lot of domain specific knowledge that I didn't have at the time.
This doesn't totally make sense, most people would have interpreted that to mean they should quit talking and make their best effort to actually write something. It's not at all the same as pretending something works when you know it doesn't in an actual job, it's more like writing what you can on a test and hoping to get some partial credit.
Having covered this only a year previously, my answer was that CAP theory stated that this was theoretically impossible. However, their particular actual problem was slightly more relaxed than requiring full consistency, atomicity, and partition-tolerance. The different servers could only perform limited kinds of status transition - there was no transition that could be performed on more than one server, and status transitions were mostly one-way - most of them couldn't be undone. Also, the field only had to be eventually-consistent, and updates didn't need to be ordered. So, I offered them a way to cheat by splitting the status field up into essentially a log of operations, which naturally resolved the conflicts.
I got the job.
The goal is not to see how many algorithms you know. Algorithms are easy to learn on the job.
The goal is to see how you think in a social setting. How you approach a vague, imperfectly stated problem. Do you ask questions to gather more requirements? State assumptions? Then, based on that, how you try to break it down into smaller pieces. Are there different ways to model the problem or lenses you can apply? Can you think of this as a graph? A tree? A database? Can you incorporate ideas from the interviewer on the fly?
The software engineering job is about taking vague problems and turning them into working code with a help of a team, and the interview process is trying emulate that as best as possible under the weird limitations of an interview.
You can pass an interview without getting any of the "answers" "right" and you can fail them even while blasting out perfect algorithms on the whiteboard.
To this day I still don't know if it was a test.
Source: I conducted +400 interviews for Amazon. We don't do weird or obscure tests. Your recruiter will explicitly tell you what to expect.
It sounds like a mistake.
Note that this was in 2014 and outside of the US, so our experiences may vary.
As a hiring manager at AWS I conducted similarly many interviews, and can speak to a few things. Firstly, there was plenty of latitude for me to include additional factors in the process, as long as the core elements were present (screening + loop + bar raiser). Recruiters weren't always wonderful at candidate communication, especially when going beyond that baseline. Other HMs certainly included variations and additional steps, so this would not have been without precedent. Finally, this particular team were largely former CTOs and tech CEOs/founders, so there was a relatively high degree of eccentricity and wilfulness present; several of my loop interviews were with these particularly unruly ICs†.
So I could not so confidently rule it a mistake.
——
† Rather memorably, after a solid meeting of minds over the topic of establishing robust SRE practices within public-sector institutions, one such interviewer ran out of the meeting room to fetch me a copy of his favourite book on the topic. This is the only time I received a book for free from Amazon.
I also believe in adding a personal touch to the interview process, but I don't believe in mind games. To me this would fall in the same bucket as "let me mispronounce your name on purpose and see how you react" or "let's give the candidate the wrong directions and let them figure out the way". You could frame it the other way around, what if it goes wrong? at best you lose some valuable interview time and annoy the candidate, and doesn't tell you much about how good they will be at the job.
I beg to differ. The one and only time I've interviewed for an engineering role at AWS, I was told to be successful I would need to memorise a list of "management principles" handed down by none other than Bezos himself, all of which were meaningless generic platitudes that could have easily been copy pasted from anywhere. And sure enough, they quizzed me on them quite thoroughly during the interview process.
Between that, the "Bar Raiser", the extremely long hiring process, and the people who interviewed me, I'd seen enough red flags to bail out before they'd sent me an offer.
For the purpose of the interview, Leadership Principles are dressing for behavioral questions. Actually I think this reinforces my point: rather than generic behavioral rounds, you know which areas you'll be asked about. Also you shouldn't memorize them, but think about examples from your experience that match those.
I'm curious about your last sentence though. Long hiring process are exhausting and I understand a bad experience, but why were the Bar Raiser and the interviewers a red flag?
The ask, AFAICT, seems to be for me to prepare a collection of glib little short stories I can recite on demand in response to a "tell me about a time when..." question from a small list of possibilities.
Certainly I can do this; however, I am applying for a role as an engineer, not an actor or a storyteller. It is unclear what useful information this kind of prepared storytelling could possibly convey, and it is unclear whether, if this kind of activity is what the position actually entails to any great extent, I would want the position.
Behavioral questions are far from new and not unique to Amazon. They serve two purposes: first, as a cultural match, and second, as a performance predictor.
The thing about Leadership Principles in Amazon is that they are not just slogans on the wall. They play a role in your day to day work. Things like your performance review and promotion consider how you apply these LPs to an extent.
Does it sound terrible? I can relate. But what is the alternative? I believe culture is a property of organizations. If you don't explicitly set a culture, one will emerge on its own. I have worked for several companies, and I appreciate the LPs. At least I explicitly know what "rules" to operate under.
So what if you think LPs are dumb or you hate them? that's fine. That means you wouldn't like it here, so it saves both from a bad match.
Back to your point about the interview. What useful information does this convey? quite a lot actually.
First they act as a sanity check. If we ask about Earns Trust, actually we are doing sort of the Asshole Test from OP. We are trying to determine if you are a pain to work with, or if you can establish good relationships with people. With Learn and be Curious we are trying to determine if you are open to learn new things. If you actively refuse to learn and just want to do your thing, you will probably struggle here. Things change fast and most everyone needs to adapt to keep up.
Second, they act as a calibration for role and leveling. Say you are hiring for a senior engineer position, and interview a candidate with +10 years of experience. However all of the candidate's examples are very simple, such as implementing a small feature. Will this candidate thrive as a senior engineer in Amazon where they will have to lead several engineers in multi-team efforts? At the very least we can say we don't have enough evidence to judge.
Third, it turns out some of them are actually good on-the-job performance indicators. Amazon has an internal science team that runs experiments on hiring. One of their experiments determined that high scores in certain LPs correlate with good performance after hire.
So there you go. You might personally dislike behavioral questions, and that is fair. However there is plenty of evidence to back up their usefulness in making hiring decisions. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to work here or not.
Regarding bar raisers, I don't see why an unrelated and unqualified person from an unrelated team that the candidate isn't interviewing for should have any say, let alone the ability veto their entire application. There's no way to spin that to make it seem like a good idea - at best you're unnecessarily empowering someone who can't properly assess a candidate, and at worst you're saying to the other interviewers that they can't be trusted and need to be supervised. I can understand the need to ensure the quality/integrity of the hiring process, but that doesn't check-out as a motive when the bar raiser isn't typically someone who's qualified to assess the integrity of process.
Also the name itself is a red flag; "bar raising" sounds like it's going to be one of those jobs where just doing your job isn't enough and you're expected to "put in 110%" - which normally translates to unreasonable workloads, unreasonable expectations, and high levels of internal competition. Whether or not that's the case, I can't say but it's the impression that the name gives me.
On the interviewers; the recruiter was slow to respond, disinterested, and rude. The person who I believe was the hiring manager was on his phone during the interview and didn't really engage, and one of the other people involved would cut me off mid-sentence repeatedly. Overall with that + "bar raising" I left with the impression that this would be a toxic environment, and pulled my application (to which the recruiter never responded). FWIW this was all for a role in Sydney, I understand Amazon is very large and experiences will differ between regions.
I'm a bit relieved to hear this: one of the weirdest professional experiences I have ever had was at an AWS interview. I've often wondered which parts of that day were a psych test or simply human error.
Timing of the interview was shortly before the HQ2 announcement (2017 I think), and the interview was in the outskirts of DC. I was told specifically not to bring a phone, which I thought was odd, but I didn't think I'd need one for the day since I'd be on site. So, per the instructions, I left it in the hotel, walked to the site, and checked in at the front desk. Unfortunately, they texted me 15 minutes before the start time that the schedule had shifted 2h later. The front desk did not get the message. So I sat in the lobby, repeatedly checked in every so often, had polite conversations with a random assortment of people, drank some coffee, and waited. That was the best part of the day. Each part of the remainder of the actual interview process had a similar "this seems a bit off" feature.
If you'd like to share what those "this seems off" situations where I'd love to hear that.
When I left the building that day, due to the late start and shifted schedule, the office was basically empty. I made it a few blocks on my walk back to the hotel when a thunderstorm rolled in. Lacking a phone and the option to return to the building to find a person, I ran. Didn't make it. I actually had forgotten about this part until I reflected back on it this morning. It was a fitting end.
The reasoning was that with easy problems, a lot of candidates could just write the solution on the whiteboard. You don't learn much about a candidate that way. But if you give them a problem they have to think about, and ask them to think out loud, you learn what problem-solving techniques they have at their disposal. Do they break down the input set into different cases, do they solve an easier version of the problem first, etc. If their code has a bug, can they pick an input that triggers the bug and walk through it step by step. We did hear "in real life I would probably need to get help with this" sometimes, and we counted that as a positive: the candidates shows self-awareness and resourcefulness.
And most importantly, do they turn into an asshole when they don't know the answer? We saw this surprisingly often. Some people got angry and directed it towards us. Some people tried to bluff us into thinking that their solution was correct. Nobody ever walked out on us, but I've heard of that happening.
All we wanted was to screen out people who turn into assholes when they don't have all the answers, and to give bonus points to people who had strategies for attacking a problem that was too hard to solve in their head in two minutes. Sheer cleverness was not high up on our requirements list (we needed a certain number of people who were clever at algorithms and such, but we didn't need everybody to be like that) so candidates that got stuck on a weaker version of the problem but attacked it with grace and resourcefulness often came out as more desirable than candidates that got to a harder version but responded badly when they struggled.
I wish we could still interview people like that.
Am I the only one who will approach things completely differently when "thinking out loud" as opposed to silently?
Much of my problem solving techniques are non-verbal and involve visualizing. But you can't really do that when you have to keep talking and that forces you down a problem solving strategy that can be verbalized better
I don't think it's an "asshole" behavior to induce stress during an interview and observe results. What else are you supposed to do?
At least in this environment you know you are being observed. Different from a company finding some embarrasing social media post in a bad time of your life.
I would just assume that about any employer anyway.
Of course they could have accepted the assholes and invested ample time and resources to nurture their emotional intelligence, but they would have resorted to that only if they couldn't find enough candidates.
Stress happens. Good management provides a buffer to mitigate it, but sometimes compounding events means it's gonna happen, despite the best planning.
Better to know up-front how people will behave during the worst times than to see the team completely collapse when they're needed the most.
These team exercise are not uncommon or unreasonable in grad hiring, but it's a terrible idea to not clarify them up front.
I get that "the interview is stressful", but if you do enough of them, they're not that stressful.
And in my experience, stuff like this is really good at identifying some assholes. I can't find references, but it is based on research, and is applied in other scenarios. It is in fact often recommended you do a version of this prior to marrying someone: Usually some physical activity is picked that both of you suck at, and the goal is not to achieve it, but to see how well you work together in unfamiliar terrain. It's not a great sign if failure to succeed results in a nasty argument ("We could have solved this if you'd done it my way!")
As always, the cost of a toxic hire is much greater than missing out on a good engineer. If this has even a 50% success rate at detecting jerks, it's worth it.
I remember doing an experiment like this as part of my preparation to a new job level. In our case, a natural leader emerged, the previous leader yielded their power, and we solved the game in like 15 minutes with the new leader and suggestions from the others. I guess I was lucky with my group.
First off, I never wanted to be an Executive, whatever that is. I wanted to do research, but when you are young and right out of school and they hit you with that you don't say no. So I went with the flow. They flew us around the country and we would be put in all these similar goofy psychologist designed situations. They even told us that they had hired PhD's in psychology and they where trying to figure out what makes a good Executive. I recall them giving us the Rorschach test and for fun I would say crazy stuff like, that looks like the nucleus of an atom when you are supposed to, obviously say, that looks like a butterfly, but fuck them, ya, it looks like a butterfly but for all we know that is what the nucleus of an atom looks like, or a super nova nebula, whatever.
These psychologists followed us around for 25 years and eventually wrote a book about us "guinea pigs". I have a copy of this book and I can clearly see me in it, I am that asshole, no question about that.
Their brilliant conclusion was that people with very high IQ's (I guess they said I had scored "off the charts" on IQ, whatever the fuck that actually means). So, OK, I am too smart to be an executive is what they concluded. But they never asked me if I gave a shit about being an Executive and maybe I was just fucking with them.
Anyhow, it was funny, and I got to travel all over the country on their dime and half the people in this thing just slept with each other and crap. Maybe that is the real test of Exec material ? hahahaha.
People have written about: * lying to, tricking, and misleading candidates * making problems harder and harder or exerting pressure to observe behavior under duress * forcing people to socialize in a mentally open state with someone that is actively manipulating them and deciding their fate
What kind of work places were they finding candidates for?
Why not simulate the actual position that needs filled? Why not just get to know the candidate and treat them like a pairing partner?
In the job you do the job. In the interview you ask if the candidate can do the job.
You shouldn't set up an adversarial environment unless you want to create one, it's far healthier to see where they shine and discover their passions and interests. Figure out what lights them up about the role because that's what they're going to do best and that's going to be what engages them in the role and helps them contribute to an awesome workplace.
Remember that you may be evaluating candidates but they are evaluating you too.
If you're talking about SWE or adjacent, why?
But suppose you disagree. Let's think about it differently: maybe stress isn't inevitable at work, but being faced with a problem that you can't easily solve is. A candidate needs to be able to deal with that situation, so it's fair to expose them to it in an interview. If they feel a certain amount of stress in that situation, then they need to cope with that amount of stress without being paralyzed by it, and without taking it out on the people around them. If a candidate experiences an unhealthy amount of stress when faced with a situation that is a normal part of the job duties, maybe it's not the right job for them.
In a sense you make my point for me. Interviews are sufficiently high stakes to be inherently stressful and there are always many unknowns in them. I think the interviewers very important job is to establish psychological safety in the interview even while exposing candidates to additional unknowns and difficult problems to solve. Think of it this way... Taking an adversarial approach provides headwinds, being supportive may get the whole interviewer pool further in the problems and better stimulates the supportive environment of a good office culture and environment.
Remember that candidates are interviewing with you too and you can better communicate the environment and get a better read of how they would participate when you better simulate the reality.
As for managers of software developers, that feels like an entirely different beast to me. Managers have to be ready to be exposed to arbitrary and unlimited stressors, up to and including existential threats to the company or to their position, and they not only have to manage their own reactions to those stressors, they have to be mindful of their reports' stress at the same time. A manager needs to be able, on their own, to put events at work or in an interview into perspective and not turn toxic. I've helped interview managers, but I have never helped plan the interview as a whole, so I don't know what reasonable limits are.
what kind of confidence interval can you assign to this test?
When the reality is far far less interesting: the combination of a pathological speech condition (which I covered up early as a child by mumbling a lot and thus picked up some bad enunciation habits), and inheriting a deep voice historically made me come off as bored and disinterested when really...I just have one of those voices that doesn't come across as exactly.... 'animated' when it hits your ears for the first time.
In fact...think Shaquille O'Neil and you're pretty close to how it sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROPsn3O6JAw
ahh yes, the vocal analog of "resting bitch face". A true shame.
Those quirks are unfortunate. I have a tendency to laugh when nervous and I've had some situations where I was interpreted as being inappropriate to some solemn situations.
I was so so so nervous.
The final part was a big group task. About 10 of you sat around a table in a big room. Then in the room sitting & watching were a bunch of people in suits (psychologists maybe? HR people?) watching you and taking notes.
You were then given one sheet of paper to share with the group outlining some "problem". I can't quite remember what it was, but it wasn't technical, and it wasn't a logic puzzle. Maybe solving some global problem?
Anyway, I was soooooooo nervous, I thought "I know, I'll try to show my leadership skills!"
I quickly grabbed the piece of paper and blurted "Ok guys, what do we think!"
I must have sounded like a maniac. One of the other candidates shot me down immediately with some sarcastic comment, and it was all over for me haha! I tried my best to be calm and productive but I was done like a dinner. Lesson learnt!
In retrospect I'm really glad I didn't get that job. Smaller companies have worked way better for me and my personality.
Assuming this is based on something real life, I suppose it was the same underlying idea. Nobody could complete the instructions. They wanted to see what people did.
How do people react to frustration and bad orders?
There is plenty of frustration in software work, and a good %age of incomprehensible or incorrect specifications.
'What?' Sma said, puzzled.
'Turning the maps upside down,' he repeated. 'Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's just heavier and pointing down? Or because it's done according to the galactic plane or something? I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's very upsetting.'
'Zakalwe, I had no idea. Let me offer you my apologies and those of the entire Special Circumstances Section; no, all of Contact; no: the entire Culture; no: all intelligent species.'
'Sma, you remorseless bitch, I'm trying to be serious.'
'No, I don't think you are. Maps...'
'But it's true! They turn them the wrong way up!'
'Then there must,' Diziet Sma said, 'be a reason for it.'
'What?' he demanded.
'Psychology,' Sma and the drone said at the same time.
—— Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks, London: Orbit, 1990
One is a simple task where the test-taker could easily cheat if he wanted to. (Our hero doesn’t.)
In the next, the test-taker is asked to solve a puzzle with complex rules, and the purpose is to measure how long it takes him to figure out that there is no possible solution.
Our hero doesn’t notice the hidden purpose of either test, while most readers probably do. It’s a clever narrative device for a novel aimed at clever young people.
The text of that passage is below. Search for “beans”.
The German General Staff in the old days would have training exercises where the objectives could only be met by disobeying orders.
And the test with the magic dingus with the buttons and levers somehow reminded me of using most enterprise software.
Of all the interview techniques I've used over the years, this had been the most predictive and the best recruiting tool. When the right candidate is in there with us we all end up having a great time.
Netlify offer a version of 11ty that includes a hosted CMS editing tool and it’s all hosted for free for basic access.
Use this as the Netlify CMS optimised version of 11ty as your starter: https://www.netlifycms.org/
Though, just a note that if you use them, you need to use them as your nameservers for your domain (the whole domain) (at least for the free tier)
... maybe doesn't matter for most people, but something that's put me off massively :D
Maybe what you say was true at one point. I only set up a static site and used Cloudflare to front it within the last couple of months.
When I set it up a couple of years ago, it was a hard requirement and looking at their features, it still seems to be the case: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#overview (under 'Custom Nameservers')
And, as per (https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001742119... and https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/partial-se...), they state that 'partial DNS' (i.e. using a CNAME to point to them) is only supported by Business and Enterprise plans.
Some other people asking this question: * https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/43719/is-it-p... * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18422998/cloudflare-or-i...
When I tested a while back, I couldn't setup a subdomain in cloudflare, it only allowed me to setup the root domain. When I did this and just updated the NS records for the subdomain to point to cloudflare, their validation of the nameserver change never passed (since I only set NS records on the subdomain level).
I'm not trying to argue for arguing sake, just trying to show why I thought/said what I originally said :)
Honestly, if this does now work, or there's a way around it, I'll be really happy as I could switch a couple of subdomains to them :D
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Websit...
So maybe this catches the intersection of "asshole" and "poor situational awareness".
It sounds pretty good to be able to move around in an organisation, but knowing who determines your fate in the short term, and who doesn't, is really important too.
When I go to a job interview I expect to be asked honest questions and intend to give honest answers. You want me to do a team activity? Ok, fair. You're giving me and a bunch of people a problem you *know* we can't solve, just to watch us panic? That. That just feels wrong.
I am a strong opponent of the "in this company we're like a family" discourse, but I also like to work for people that I don't dislike. If this is an asshole detection test, I'm afraid I just detected the company.
The strange thing for me was a weird day of interaction with a group of around 30 other new hires. We were divided into teams and had to work together to solve problems, etc. I always suspected that we were not being trained but instead graded on some sort of scale by those leading the exercises.
I worked at IBM for 5 years and never discovered what that was about.
On top of that, one evaluator in the right/wrong evaluation group can change the very definition of asshole on the spot and get group buy-in, given specific group composition.
To me a big part of the issue is that it's one test for one property, in one group configuration, by one evaluation group configuration...one might say it's _singularly_ disappointing to hear about that aspect.
One would hope a technology company could see the value in more scientific testing principles at least at a basic level? Hope my straw goggles are on, showing me straw-structures in straw-corporations.
because of this I really like to get into casual friendly convos early, with potential bosses or coworkers
It's not quite an "asshole test" or a Kobayashi Maru or anything like that – but a general "can you communicate and collaborate effectively with others on a technical topic" test. I guess it does highlight "asshole" personalities sometimes, but I'd say rather than offering a negative signal it tends to more effectively highlight good candidates.
Does this work? How? Isn't that the interesting part here?
The fact this test exists is uninteresting.
Nothing's happening and someone steps up. Doesn't inherently seem like an asshole thing to do. Things still not working and someone else steps up and says "Mind if I give this a shot?" Not inherently asshole either.
You can get an everyone tries to take charge situation in these scenarios. But just sitting back and waiting for someone to tell you what to do doesn't seem great either.
The stress should not be too high as most companies have policies that interns can not be assigned to essential work activities (and this might be the law in some US states.) It's typically 'educational' in some form for them as it lets them see how the sausage is made.
Certain kinds of behavior are not useful in the workplace. I like the idea of this test, but I think it is just one test of many that should be evaluated along with others.
Some engineers and leaders thrive on flipping situations that they find initially frustrating into opportunities.
They might appear grumpy for a moment and then elated the next after flipping their frustration into an opportunity.
If we made a filter, that filtered out all grumpy interview candidates, what would be gained and what would be lost? Is this inclusive?
It's fairly obvious if you're on the receiving end what the purpose of the test is when you're being observed (as with most interview questions, it helps to ask yourself why the interviewer asking me / having me do this?)
Perhaps an ironically appropriate test for hiring for a job at many offices/IBM (and exemplifying some of the problems with these bad faith test techniques).
The strategy was simple: right from the beginning, ask questions about the company and the interviewer's daily work, e.g. "Can you tell me about what you do?" Act as if every response is super interesting/inspiring, and follow-up with more questions, saying you are really eager to learn, etc. until the time runs out, so that they don't get a chance to ask her anything.
She got the job.
Think about that for a second. We chose to have nothing than hire an asshole.
I can think of 100's of other personal behaviors that would be worse or just as bad as being an asshole. Passive aggressive behavior, secretly taking credit for someone's work, backstabbing and rallying others against someone in review cycles, ... The fact that being an asshole gets so much attention may be a symptom of the problems people are trying to root cause and are converging on an incorrect cause.
ie. chances are that you're not having the issues you're having in your org because people are being assholes, but because they're incompetent, smile in your face and sabotage you later, cozy up to the boss to get promoted or a multitude of other shitty attitudes that often go under the radar.
But I feel like there's a bit of a flaw in their logic here; the kind of stress you feel when interviewing, competitively I might add, for what I can only assume is a prestigious position is going to be 100% different to the stress you'd face in that role day to day. So the reactions you observe in a weird test like this are probably only vaguely representative of how the candidates ACTUALLY behave day to day.
I'll happily change my mind if there's some research to back this up, but I have the strongest feeling this is just something a manager has dreamt up based on a hunch.
After some experience with it I figured out that it wasn't the task or who had more "mic time", but who would show leadership skills that mattered.
As usually everyone wanted to talk, what I did was just to orchestrate who said what, making no point on the matter, just controlling the turns and asking "what do you think about Anne's point Dave?". Worked like a charm.
I don’t think we even care in this day and age with hiring if someone is an asshole. Most of the companies I’ve worked at have had many of them in various forms. (Or just simply - not pleasant people) It’s trivial to fake in any interview format.
I have no proof, but after dealing with them for 25 years, I have no doubt.
In 2006 I went to a "new grads hiring day" at a large company, and one of the steps looked just like this, except I think we were divided in groups of eight.
My team solved the problem at the last second and we all passed to the next round.
They say Steve Jobs could be a giant a$$hole at times. I've also heard that George Patton wasn't always a particularly lovable guy.
Ultimately all people have shortcomings and so mining their gifts comes with a cost. I'm not strictly trying to make excuses for anti-social behavior here but being able to understand, empathize and forgive must go hand in hand.
I think a company can scale better with nice mediocre employees, rather than hardworking assholes. Hugely dependent on domain of course, some are more technical than others, and there are other factors too. But if no specialist talent is needed, I think a company is better off with okay but nice talent. The individual niceness will translate into productive communication, which sets a healthy atmosphere, which leads to less stress, lower employee turnover, and in general a less problematic team and workplace in general.
The original post doesn't explain who's considered an asshole at the end of the test. In fact, the whole point is that the test is opaque - the assholes are whoever someone at IBM subjectively doesn't want to hire. So who passes or fails the whiteboard test, and why? If it was as simple as "whoever takes over the dry-erase marker from the first person is an asshole", then they'd be ridding themselves of anyone who questioned authority. Therefore, what's the difference between this and any other test which tried to bar entry to anyone who'd introduce new ideas to a stagnant corporate culture?
Author says they were shadowing, not an expert.
Do you know if a better plan which scales to companies with hundos of thousands of employees?
I mean, if you had to work in a team with someone.. this sounds like a good way to see how they'd fit in actually working in team under a pressured situation.
You're not labelling them as this or that, or necessarily checking for 'hidden indications' that they could have some condition you know nothing about, it's just finding people that fit into the culture that you're looking to fill.
I (probably awful) analogy could be, if I go to car boot (garage) sale and find things that are good value (and/or haggle).. I'm not telling the person how much the item's worth, but what price it's worth to me/what I can afford.. I'm not claiming to be a antique evaluator.
(Update: Well, I guess I don't _actually_ know they're doing/not doing, but it's my interpretation)
I doubt a similar baking mistake would get a similar response than a wrong-order mistake in a restaurant. Maybe it does, or maybe it doesn't, but making a prediction from one to the other based on such little evidence... well, the person who gets tested really is the one doing such a test, and it does not look good. Okay, there's an A for effort, at least he tried it at all.
I'm sure the very-negative case works, if he freaks out or becomes too obsessed over such a mistake that speaks against the person. But the cases you described sound pretty tame, if he merely asks for the mistake to be corrected that in itself isn't noteworthy. I certainly don't see it as being useful for determining what he would do if there was a similar mistake in the bank business. The context is totally different.
I hate dark patterns in dates, that was a date. Learn to communicate and choose that.
It's knowing P(A|B) and trying to obtain a P(A|C) where B and C are mostly disjoint, making the info not too useful.
Honestly, I'm the guy who would just "roll with it" and eat whatever was brought to me because I honestly can't bring the energy to arguing with the waiter.
But having hired people and other professionals, I almost always hire the person who would assert themselves and demand the right thing be done.
Why?
Well, I recognize that I don't like to be "that guy". So I hire people who can do it for me. It has always worked out quite well in the past, where I've been able to form a team of people who work well together, but can be assertive to external groups. (And I, of course, only need to get out of their way.)
Depending on what was brought I might not even be confident that they messed up the order-- e.g. if what they brought was also something that I credibly could have ordered.
This is a false dichotomy, not to mention plenty of people who _are_ abrasive and rude to service workers would probably have the smarts to not do so in that situation... Kindly mentioning that the order was wrong (especially in the case of an allergy/health issue) shouldn't be seen as assertive or demanding and I hope that's not what they were implying!
I've been assessed during a similar group assessment (we had to work together to produce a layout for a shopping centre), and also been an assesser for one of these excercises. All you are really trying to identify are:
1) The people that won't help others, and will intentionally try to throw other candidates under the bus (so you make sure you never hire them).
and
2) The people that do genuinely try to help the other candidates who are struggling (so you can hire them).
It's not exactly some sort of highly-complex psychological evaluation, you are just seeing how people work in a group task.
1. "You're all being mired in nonsense. Give me the board, hand me the packets, and I'll show you how it's done."
2. "Okay, let's organize this somehow. I'll make a list of related widgets and gadgets. Becky, can you see if we all have the same dooh-dad structure?"
I'd say 1 is an asshole, and 2 is a Team Player™
We are seeing how people can work in a team to complete a simple task to help a hiring decision, not replicating the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Do we need professional actors and casting directors to judge the role-play excercises? We should probably get journalists to do the interviews too.
But I'm wondering whether I can pass if I don't speak up at all? Or just passively play along?
Also I doubt there was any info in those packets that would have mattered. The whole point of the test was to stump the group.
Open face, closed thoughts.
How to handle failure and group behaviour is one of key … you can see sone very strange bevahiour reported.
Like a professor turned into communist mode and asked why not arrested her senior, when she tried to fake her age. People went crazy under pressure.
Yeah, that guy had problems.
in fact it makes just as much sense totally flipped -- lots of highly effective people who have been successful in this world have had terrible interpersonal skills.
Presumably the point being made is that interpersonal skill doesn't predict success in business 1:1, and that deciding to throw a portion of applicants out due to perceived social issues is necessarily throwing out some thorny individuals with fantastic individual ability for the sake of the herd.
I can't say whether or not that's good or bad -- but as someone with terrible interpersonal skills myself I tend to hope that someone would alert me to my individual faux pas rather than silently ridding themselves of my presence all together.
So yes I am pretty sure you don't want them at your company.
These days, I think it would be considered wrong to deceive candidates or to purposefully increase their level of stress (at least when interviewing for a normal desk job). If someone were to try this today, the only thing it would prove is that the interviewer is an asshole.