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Comment by neo_g | Hacker News Reader

This sounds so weird, people without any expertise in human psychology are in-charge of a behavior detection exercise. The worst part, those who got in were the new experts in 6-months.

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You don't require a degree in human psychology to evaluate if someone is a team player in a group assessment.

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.

Who's not the team player in this story? The person who stands up and tries to provide some leadership in a situation that has stalled?

How did they do that? A couple possibilities:

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™

...but the recollection doesn't differentiate between these two so it doesn't seem to be the important factor?

The recollection doesn't say anything about who else didn't make it. I don't think they included the information you're trying to infer from the story.

Yes, you do need a degree. However you react in this artificial situation in which you are grouped up with seven stranger has no bearing on your performance as an engineer. Furthermore, if you had a degree in psychology and wanted to perform an experiment like this you would need to seek approval from an ethics committee and they would turn down your request because the experiment is fucking stupid. Whoever devised this "IBM Asshole Test" is the real asshole here.

The test wasn't to determine your performance as an engineer, it was to see if you demonstrated bad behaviour working in a group under pressure. You could be a great engineer and I'd still pass you up if, in this test, you were rude and abusive, or impatient and condescending to the rest of the group.

You need a degree and an ethics committee in order to do a simple group task interview?!

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.

I'm not sure it's quite the same as a psychological evaluation ;)

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)

Yeah, just this. It's not a psychology experiment, it's "do I want to work with this person?"

Considering the abysmal state of psychology vis-a-vis the reproducibility crisis, I would trust a random person's instinctive asshole detector more than someone who's been trained not to use it.

It's better than no filtration of assholes at all, which is the industry standard.

Do you know if a better plan which scales to companies with hundos of thousands of employees?

Take this with a pinch of salt, but I read an anecdote on Reddit a long time ago about a corporation in New York (I think it was a bank) where an executive was looking for a new VP/Director/something. He found a potential candidate and invited him to a one-on-one lunch. When the candidate placed his order, the executive discreetly told the waiter to bring the wrong order for the candidate. The point was to see how the candidate would react to unexpected situations. Would the candidate assert himself and demand that his order be corrected? Or would he roll along and adapt to the new situation? Either choice could reveal potential qualities or defaults about the candidate.

No it really does not, or at best barely, if you don't think too much. Brains are highly context dependent in how they work.

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.

Interesting.

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.)

As "that guy" it's somewhat refreshing to hear this. I think the key is really self-awareness and understanding of group dynamics enough to help you get the balance of individuals right.

I can imagine that being "that guy", you may not be appreciated enough. But definitely we can't get anywhere near what we need to get done with the mix of all types of personalities. It's absolutely a team effort and requires the whole spectrum of talents.

It's a combination of being loved and being hated at the same time, sometimes by different sets of people at the same time, sometimes by the same people at different times. I think hated is a bit of a strong word, but suffice to say it's quite tricky because the reasons for both of those emotions come from exactly the same place.

> Would the candidate assert himself and demand that his order be corrected? Or would he roll along and adapt to the new situation?

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 mean, if I were in that situation, I'd probably accept it just because the accuracy of my order doesn't really matter compared to the meeting as long as it's edible, it doesn't really say anything about my decision making when it does matter.

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.

Seems like a bad experiment. If the water brings something that I'd like equally or maybe more (having seen it in front of me)-- why argue?

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.

Is the correct response to slip a Benjamin to another waiter to "accidentally" trip the one who screwed up, so you can judge from their response what your demeanor should be like when requesting a correction?

OK, what qualities did the choices reveal? I can attribute both desireable and undesireable traits to either branch taken.

What was the desired outcome?

I hate dark patterns in dates, that was a date. Learn to communicate and choose that.

> those who got in were the new experts in 6-months.

Author says they were shadowing, not an expert.

Do you need especial expertise in human psychology to see who is behaving like an asshole in a group?

This is fetishizing psychology expertise. Others are allowed to participate. I don't need a PhD in economics to participate in our economy.

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