Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms | Hacker News Reader

Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms

snopes.com

364 pointschaostheory79 comments

Using the brown M&M's as a test to check if the contract was read thoroughly counts as a clever hack in my book.

Pure genius!

I had a lecturer (a Brit) who would insert the phrase 'Rule Britannia' into lecture notes to see if anyone ever read them.

There is also an urban myth about some entrance exam for Police/Army/Pilots etc where the instructions say read all the questions first. And the last question says, do not answer any questions just 'do some arbitrary thing' - to check wether you follow instructions properly.

Not an urban myth - that little joke was pulled more than once in US grammar schools in the 70/80's

I've had several teachers pull that crummy joke when I was in grammar school in the 90s too. This is more or less the test: http://echochamber.me/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24333&star...

Personally, I don't think there is a lesson to be learned here. It amounts to nothing more than a lame practical joke.

The lesson is: some people really like hierarchy and bureaucracy. Probably appropriate for pre-flight checks. Probably not appropriate for children in school.

It's a cheap shot, but it does cut down on obliviously repeating the process you've been taught. We want people to read directions for any new process, no?

It teacher you to follow instructions.

The one we had was a set of increasingly complex instructions, and the last instruction saying to just sit there quietly. So you would be working hard at solving the problems, and various people would just be sitting there with a smile on there face. You knew these people, since they were your classmates, so they weren't savants, so how did they get through these problems so quickly. Eventually each one of you realise, and look for the trick, getting to the last question. There is always someone who just keeps going.

1) No, it doesn't. The wording is typically "read everything before doing anything". That completely ambiguous. Most exams start with meaningless instructions about which pages you can and can't write on. How to fill in bubbles completely. What type of writing implement to use. It is a complete waste of your time to read initial instructions on exams, just as it is a complete waste of your time to read the initial remarks in most other aspects of life.

2) Even if it did teach you to follow instructions, is that a good lesson? I think I've only gotten to where I am in life by explicitly NOT following instructions.

#2 is not the lesson actually learned. The high-level instructions contradict the low-level instructions, and the lesson is on how to handle that (usually by following the high-level instructions.) This is the lesson that the Swedish military qualification exam posted here earlier tested (with "orders of a superior" as the low-level instruction and "Human rights" as the high-level instruction.)

Had a college professor do that to me. Said to read all the instructions-- instructions said skip #3 (4 question test).

#3 Just happened to be the toughest material of the class, where a mastery of both Haitian witchcraft and the Coriolis effect were needed.

Yeah. I got that, and learned, once again, that RTFM was not part of my skill set.

I've had that done to me on a test in elementary school. After going through a third of the test doing the most menial problems, I read the last question and realized what my problem was. At that point it was just entertaining watching everyone else struggle through with it.

Not sure if that rule britania story is applicable, what was being tested? For students to stand up and start yelling U - S- A - U - S - A - U - S - A.

It's a serious usability fault, not a clever hack. This test paper fails to comply with the user's expectations, like a webpage that breaks the Back button.

This all depends on where the onus lies. If you're developing a consumer-focused web application and your instructions are extremely complicated the onus is on the app creator to simplify. There are plenty of situations, however, where the relationship is really a partnership, and both sides need to fully get up to speed with each other. The Van Halen Case appears to be the latter.

Sometimes people have habits, like following their own expectations and assumptions rather than paying attention to detail and accurately comprehending clear, simple, literal instructions. These are good habits to test for, and good habits to break, in many instances. Not everything in the world neatly maps onto people's assumptions and intuitions.

I have actually experienced this kind of test. in my case, it was coupled with telling the test participants that they only have a short amount of time to complete the test, thus making it even more likely that the test participants would start answering questions immediately rather than following instructions to the letter.

Particularly when this extra time limit trick may be used, I'm not sure what value the test really had. Supposedly, even the police and armed forces are looking for people with initiative who can think creatively and not just mindless automatons who follow orders without question. This kind of test would not seem to align with that goal.

Being able to notice little details like that is completely orthogonal to an individual's relative initiative and creativity vs. automaton-hood. It's probably often enough that those very details you were "too rushed to notice" are the ones that could kill you in that kind of work.

I see your point but thinking back on the situation as it was framed, it still seems to me that it was a direct test as to whether one will follow the procedure as it was stated or opt to stray from it. What conclusions could then be drawn from that are up for speculation I suppose.

Perhaps creativity vs. "automaton-hood" is not the dichotomy being tested and the value of the test really is more to do with following instructions when not doing so could kill you. But the sceptic/rebel in me wonders about those situations where following the instructions may well get you killed. I am not in the military or law enforcement and for better or worse, past experiences have taught me to be suspicious of both.

If you only have a short period of time, even better to skim through the test: to look for the easy questions to start with.

The anxiety of one-off offset mistakes (e.g. filling in the Scantron incorrectly) aside, I think computer based testing makes it harder to do random access of questions during a test.

My dad gave a test like that to people when he was in the Marine Corps. I'm not sure when he did it or in what unit but he says it was a test of their ability to follow directions. Since my dad had a lot of commands over maintenance, support, and engineer units it makes sense.

When I was an undergrad, one of the sharper students wrote a paper for a teacher who was famous for not reading the homework. In the middle of the paper he wrote a page or two extolling the virtues of the "come from" statement, and why it was superior to the "goto" statement. She gave him an 'A' on the paper.

Great idea. Though let's not deny that there's some rock star ego involved here too.

There's some rock star ego involved in most clever hacks.

Ah...

Enlightenment! There is a method to the madness of those insane autocrats who demands ridiculous things...

The thing is, it is madness all the same...

Then there's the recruiter-checking equivalent of "pink box testing":

http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/pink-box-testing/

But companies routinely do this in job interviews and then get decried for asking frivolous, irrelevant questions.

When Google asks prospective PMs what a binary search or hashtable is, it's not because they actually expect product managers to ever write one. It's because those are a proxy for general CS knowledge; it shows that either they've come out of an academic CS department or they hang around engineers enough to know the basic terminology. This in turn is a proxy for "Won't demand unreasonable features from engineering and can communicate reasonably well with them." This is rather important for a tech company, as anyone who's ever worked under someone with no clue about technology could tell you.

Similarly, when companies ask how many gas stations there are in the U.S, they don't actually care what the answer is. Rather, they want to see how you respond when put in a situation where you obviously don't have enough information to come up with a precise answer. They want to see what sort of background information you draw on to make an estimate; this is often a proxy for how open and aware you are to new experiences. They want to see you combine whatever background information you have to solve a problem. They want to see you self-check and see if your answer seems reasonable.

Yet for some reason, it's clever when Van Halen does it and pedantic when it happens in a job interview...

The M&M test is very specific. If you see brown M&Ms, it means they didn't read the contract carefully or take the details seriously. That in turn means something important and potentially dangerous is likely to be seriously wrong. The snopes article states that experience confirms this prediction.

The "how many gas stations in the US" question is nothing like the brown M&Ms test. It is not testing anything nearly so specific, nor is it as easily confirmed by experience. At best you're taking a subjective interpretation of a creative answer and comparing it to subjective performance down the road. And even if you don't consider the inherent subjectivity, it's hard to document a reasonable number of positive and negative test cases; and even then controlling for other variables is essentially impossible.

Van Halen used the test to predict performance conditions for a specific date and venue. The gas stations answer is used to predict the behavior of a person for a significant period of time.

In previous teams I worked on, I've often had to send out long emails or documents because someone got on my back over an artificial deadline. I would send it and make sure that an important link in the document was broken. If they didn't notice it, they didn't need the document/email urgently and usually get to hear a lecture from me later on arbitrary deadlines.

The behavior behind the need for your checks is something that irks me. Because you can send one-off thoughts via email many people assume that all emails are just one-offs.

Kansas's rider specifies that the venue is not allowed to bill any other band as "the original Kansas", which is something of a reaction against Proto-Kaw, a band composed of the original members of Kansas (since Kansas itself has faced numerous personnel changes). Something of a Theseus' ship paradox. They also require prune juice! (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/kansas/kansas1.ht...)

According to the documentary on disc 2 on their latest live DVD, Dream Theater's rider specifies that their drummer, Mike Portnoy, be supplied with a jersey from the local basketball or soccer team. He has a sizable collection.

Meat Loaf is a superstar. Don't believe me? His rider specifies (and I quote):

"Purchaser acknowledges that it is promoting a worldwide "superstar" artist and that each and every element of such promotion, production, and other arrangements shall be absolutely first-class in nature and commensurate with the stature of a "superstar" in the entertainment industry". (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/meatloaf/meatloaf...)

That sounds like a standard 'negotiable' clause - you can argue that pretty much anything should/shouldn't have been done for a world class superstar.

The M+M one is cleverer because it is a no-arguements, you did it or did not. You don't have lawyers arguing about the meaning of "arrangements commensurate with"

Something of a Theseus' ship paradox.

Neat, I'd never heard of that one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

To summarise the brown M&Ms were a "canary" to indicate if all the details of the contract had been attended too. If there were brown M&Ms then the rest of the contractual points would be examined with more stringency.

It's interesting that they used this as a careful "get out clause" or an indicator of other more serious ones.

A canary is a kind of bird. The parent poster is alluding to the phrase "canary in a coal mine". Coal miners supposedly carried caged birds down the shafts as fore-warning of suffocating conditions or gases, as the small bird would be affected before the humans. The generic idea here is to use a cheap sensor to check for impending failure in a system.

Let's not bring the reddit memes to HN.

Wait, what? For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom. This is a very, very, very America-centric idiom.

/I teach English, SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE, and other tests to native and non-native English speakers on the side.

A canary is also a random value placed on the stack so the program can detect a buffer overflow. If the canary has been overwritten the program can terminate before malicious code is executed. I suspect a significant portion of Hacker News users is familiar with this terminology regardless of where they learned English.

As a non-programmer, I had no idea that this usage was so widespread. That's actually rather cool, and I'm going to ping my editor to add it to the reference books.

Bit off-topic, but the Rsync project als has a canary for when things go wrong: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

> For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom.

Movies, books, general interest... Sure, I'm not even a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure I was aware of that expression as a teenager. Also, most serious C programmers know about placing a "canary" at the end of a buffer to check for overflows. Even if anyone was confused, wikipedia offers "Canaries were formerly used by miners to warn of dangerous gases." - which a typical person reading HN should be able to find without any problems.

I'd risk a guess that people reading these pages are quite familiar with most US/UK idioms... Sorry - your comment just struck me as a bit weird, especially when you put 4 acronyms (mostly US-specific) in the last sentence while defending the "canary" explanation.

Ok, can we all get along now and go back to the main thread now? :)

I'm not sure why you would think we don't know about this in the UK. Canaries were used in UK mines until around 1987. I'm pretty sure it's a well know saying, at least among the people that I know.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/30...

indeed I thikn the practice started here in the UK!

> Wait, what? For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom. This is a very, very, very America-centric idiom.

I know that idiom from junior school. That was in USSR, perhasp as close to un-American as you can get.

Most performing artists I meet are very professional, friendly guys. Show them respect and take it seriously, and you'll get it in return.

If you love insane/awesome riders, here's my favorite, Iggy Pop's: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/iggypop/iggypop1....

This is quite different from the Van Halen story. No lessons to learn, but at least there's "Dead Dog Island" to give a few laughs...

If there's something to learn from it, it's that you can be professional and hilarious at the same time.

Very professional but often very narcissistic and demanding. I had a friend who was tour managing for a major artist-- the amount of logistics he had to juggle was mind-numbing-- only to be fired a couple months ago because he forgot to order a pizza for the artist after the show. :-/

While this is a great anecdote I can't help but think that mayb this wasn't the real reason your friend was let go, it was more like an excuse or a last straw. Obviously I don't know anything about the circumstances but that's what Occam's Razor dictates.

You'd be surprised.

Actually, the main article is a good argument that it can be both.

Yes, the organization method mandates that a person be fired for merely forgetting the pizza because ... this, arguably, makes it less likely that anyone will be fired for something more serious.

But at that point, the organization method itself kind-of ... sucks.

This American Life covered this as well: http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1308

(not much more on Van Halen than the Snopes page but the episode was pretty good)

From observation, this is often done in job postings for startups - several that I've encountered will contain an innocuous line something like "include an Italian sonnet in your cover letter to guarantee that your application will be forwarded to the development manager", presumably as a way to make sure that applicants read the entire posting and associated administrivia.

Wow, what a great way to arbitrarily lower the quality of the applicant pool you end up with.

How is screening out people who don't read the listing going to lower the quality?

Because you'll still filter out people who can read the listing, but either can't or don't want to write an italian sonnet.

It doesn't say /your/ Italian sonnet

Exactly - I think this is what they were going for. Another posting asked for a definition of a specific term from Star Trek, which you could find by putting the term into Google and reading any one of the first 20 results.

For the record, I included a sonnet that I found on Wikipedia, cited it, and got a call-back - so they're clearly OK with poetry being outside of my skill set.

Why should the job applicant waste his time reading the job description of every one of the hundreds of jobs he will try to apply to? I think the best thing to do is to just send the resume, and if they'll want you they'll contact you.

I think an explicit purpose of this strategy is to avoid people who are resume-bombing to hundreds of jobs.

In all cases that I've seen, the companies are small (5-15 current employees) startups where hiring a candidate with the right personality and attention to detail is just as important as having the right skills on paper. These companies seem to want people who have spent some time looking at the posting to make sure they want to be part of the startup experience, as opposed to people who will take anything.

It's a way to start to filter out people who want a job from people who want this job, which is something the hiring company wants to do.

The fact that a job applicant doesn't read through the entire job posting doesn't mean he doesn't have attention to detail - it can mean he decided that reading it thoroughly is just not worth the time.

Just because someone sends his resume without reading the ad doesn't mean he'll take the job. He may just want to know whether the company finds him interesting before he will think whether this job is what he wants.

I always read the entire thing to see if there's anything special that the company's interested in -- "Familiarity with X, Y, and Z (all rare things) desired but not necessary." Let's say I happen to know a lot about Y, but it's hidden mid-way through my resume. I'd adjust my email w/ resume to highlight what I know.

If reading the job posting thoroughly is not worth his time, why should the company believe he'll think doing the job is worth his time?

The idea is to hire someone that's best for the job, not someone who is best at getting the job.

Granted, not reading the posting thoroughly is not a good indicator, but it really is an extremely minor one. If the candidate is poor there will be plenty of other reasons to disqualify, and if it's an otherwise good candidate it's really not worth getting too worked up over.

That's the kind of person that will never work for our company. If you're applying to hundreds of jobs and just sending your resume to everyone our process will definitely filter you out. When we advertise online for a job we're usually looking for one or two key skills and we're very careful to spell out exactly what we want (e.g. a relevant university degree and at least X experience with Y technology) and still we get HUNDREDS of applications from people with no degree and no experience with the technology we're after.

More recently we've begun to filter applications like this, and now instead of 200 applications in the first 48 hours we probably get 6 or 8 - but all of those match our requirements. Sure we could be missing out on some awesome person but it's not worth my time looking through 200 applications to find him.

It is possible that my strategy is mistaken and that I should change it. I'm thinking about it.

Amusingly though, in the example that you brought my strategy would have been pretty good. Instead of reading through your ad until I got to the place I am disqualified for the job, I would have just sent the resume and not wasted any more of my time. Since I'm not getting the job in either case, I have only saved myself time.

Additionally, there is always the chance that because of other accomplishments mentioned in my resume, the company will still hire me.

I'm not saying my strategy is the best one. I'm starting to think I should change it. But this is an example of when it is beneficial.

That's where you're mistaken. In this example, because you didn't craft a meaningful cover letter, you disqualified yourself even if you were a perfect fit.

Had you read the posting and spent a few minutes explaining why you were good at the two things they asked for, you would have been called in for an interview.

Wow.

My first reaction to this was "why would this guy need to send off more than half a dozen resumes to get a job?", followed shortly by "my god, how much damage is this guy doing to his career?"

One thing you'll quickly notice if you have to do any hiring in this industry is that there's a vast pool of unhirable developers out there. These guys have very little chance of landing a job, so they're forced to apply for every single job out there in the vain hope that they'll be able to fool somebody into hiring them. Because they don't have time to craft good cover letters to each of those shops, they are very easy to detect, and their resumes tend to go straight into the trash.

By emulating their tactics, the Parent is essentially placing himself into this "untalented pool" voluntarily. Dude, if you're listening, please stop. All you're doing is blacklisting yourself out of the industry.

Since I'm seeing so much negative reactions, I guess I should mellow down my strategy a bit.

It also screens out people who read the ad and don't want to be bothered with your silly games.

If it reliably screens out the idiot recruiters who didn't read anything, the odd false positive is probably worth it.

Remember - manual filtering has a failure rate just as much as any automated approach, the trick is to balance out the false positive/negative rates so that they're acceptable for your purposes.

In any case, if you're a startup, you probably don't want anybody who doesn't have enough of a sense of humour to enjoy the odd silly game in the middle of the mind numbing toil of a job hunt. If I was looking and saw an ad like this I'd probably take a few minutes off to learn about italian sonnets whether I was planning to apply for the job or not, and be glad that I'd been inspired to look.

You don't need to ask for Italian sonnets. I have found that just asking for a cover letter and asking them to address one simple relevant question is enough to screen out most people that don't read the ad. I do it mostly because I want to see a little writing sample along with the resume.

I'm reminded of the testing scene in Men in Black. When another candidate spouts a meaningless repeat of how they want "the best of the best of the best", Will Smith's character pokes fun at the idea that he doesn't even really know why they are there yet he is all jazzed. Will Smith's character is the only one who pulls the table up to his awkward, round chair to help him fill out paperwork. While everyone is going nuts killing aliens at the shooting range, Will Smith's character shoots the 8 year old girl carrying quantum physics books (or some such). And has to answer for it and explain himself. But he gets the job and everyone else gets their memory erased.

RTF contract, apparently. Always a good idea.

When posting on RentACoder I once required that the reply has to contain a certain sentence, so I can easily ignore the plentiful form replies.

It's a lot like putting an assert() in your code. assert(m&m != brown);

The driving school test I just passed (with flying colors I'll have you know) had this in the middle of it:

"A frog is a term used to describe train car couplings."

Then, in the test section, right after something about how far behind another car you should stop at an intersection, would be "What is another term for a train coupling?"

I assume this was to make sure you read the test. I just cut & pasted the stuff into a text editor, so I could search for these odd duck questions when they came up.

FTA (David Lee Roth): I went into full Shakespearean "What is this before me?" . . . you know, with the skull in one hand . . .

"What is this before me?" is from Macbeth ("dagger of the mind"). The "skull in one hand" is from Hamlet, in the "alas, poor Yorick" scene. Good scenes each, but they don't fit together.

I bet Roth knows that and just uses that sentence to see if anyone is paying attention ...

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