Decades ago, in the days before uber, my employer would fly in candidates from college campuses as part of an onsite interview. The candidate would fly in the night before and we relied on a taxi service to bring the candidate to the hotel. Then in the morning the same service would bring them to the onsite and of course bring them back to the airport at the end. It was a whole curated process.
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.
I have seen several stories like this - the janitor, or secretary, or whoever is actually a trusted individual who is the true judge of character. To me, it seems implausible, more of a "feel good" story, but it also seems ill advised. Does the driver know he's part of the loop? Does the driver attend the debrief? Does the driver distinguish between great, normal, sub-normal, and bad social skills? What portion of jerks would be jerks to a single specific tax driver? Even a big jerk probably isn't a jerk to everyone all the time, and even a nice person may be rude or obnoxious occasionally.
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 seems like an unnecessarily convoluted interpretation of a simple idea: does the candidate act like an asshole to a powerless person?
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.
The driver was a specific person that the company knew. Maybe they were a secret homophobe or something, but you could say that of all the company's employees with just as high a likelihood.
> 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?
A secret homophobe? Who said it was a secret? It's just as likely that it wasn't particularly secret.
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.
It's not both. Either the taxi driver went through the process of being hired as HR personnel for the corporation, or else they didn't.
> 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.
The candidate would assume the taxi driver was powerless. I really think you’re reading too much into this. Op didn’t say they gave him veto power over their hiring process. It’s a good asshole test. Imagine some asshole was feeling important and powerful after getting flown out for an interview, and then cursed out a taxi driver because he wasn’t careful enough loading the luggage, or because he wasn’t driving aggressively enough. That’s exactly the kind of person I’d want filtered out.
> cursed out a taxi driver because he wasn’t careful enough loading the luggage
But what if this taxi driver really did toss around the interviewee's expensive luggage, with his best interview clothes and perhaps some materials or documents for an important interview the next day? Does the taxi driver report back, yea he got upset, but it was my fault? What if the interviewee just got off a long flight, wants to rest up for the interview, and isn't really up for chatting with a taxi driver? Does the taxi driver report back that he was rude, wouldn't talk?
I will agree that if the person is a total rageaholic nutcase, passing that info along to the company is valuable information. But reporting on anything else -- asking the driver to keep quiet, requesting he take better care of luggage, asking for a specific route, turning down the radio, whatever -- I'd be more suspicious that the driver is a nuisance than the interviewee has character flaws.
What if the driver actually became a taxi driver so that he could embed himself into the company's hiring process, gave dozens of fair, yet informal candidate reviews, spent years gaining everyone's confidence, all specifically so that one day he could sabotage his arch nemesis' interview by lying and denying him a job!
This subthread is really getting absurd. It's a perfectly good test to hear whether a candidate mistreated someone who they might perceive to be beneath them, and only severely asocial nerds would interpret Op's anecdote as if they put this taxi driver into the CI/CD pipeline to pass/fail candidates.
What's the point of having dedicated personnel, a human resources management division if you will, if an unaccountable outsider has the power to veto the entire hiring process? If you take it a few steps further, why not outsource the entire interview process?
It's an urban legend, a tired old trope of "gotcha!" style human observation that today is commonly used on the bottom-of-the-barrel TV talk shows like Maury Povich. The "absurd" part is that despite the tons of comments here, you haven't realized that yet. Lol.
I really think this whole thread is full of people who would fail the “how did they treat the taxi cab driver / waitress” test and are incensed by the idea that they might be judged by that behaviour.
Violence against homosexuals is pretty common in South and Central America - which is where most of recent American immigrants are from. Here's an example from CNN[1]
"Latin America offers a contradictory narrative: The region has the highest rates of violence against the LGBT community, according to research done by Transgender Europe, a non-governmental organization, but it also has some of the most progressive laws for LGBT equality and protection."
It seems like a pretty intuitive step to me to go from "Highest rate of hate crimes" to "more likely to be homophobic".
Perhaps, but it also seems intuitive to me that people who choose to (/ have the opportunity to) leave a country (i.e. immigrants) may not be representative of that country as a whole.
Even if he was (and he'd be a ridiculous taxi driver if the first thing he did was sharing his political opinions [though that's not unheard of, I've been riding with that kind of service provider]), not immediately going ballistic would be a quality I expect hires to have. No-one needs angry activist mob person joining the team.
We gay people do as a population have cultural "tells" which reveal our sexuality. To a random passerby probably not, but it doesnt take long for shibboleths to come out in a casual conversation.
This actually happened in my workplace, I recognised a coworker as gay long before he told me, just from his vocabulary.
Sure - but are these clue tells likely to come up in what the interviewee considers a chance encounter - riding in a taxi - to a job interview (thus probably dressed in an uniform way), when their mind is likely on other things?
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 "homophobic taxi driver" idea is meant as a representative suggestion of the possibility that the taxi driver may be making judgments in a way that the company doesn't want. That's not to say homophobia is the only or most likely way this could manifest, it's just an illustration.
The problem is that you're thinking in absolutes. That's not how life works. The driver doean't need to be a formal part of the hiring process that everyone rigorously goes through. There's variation and difference for every candidate. That's just because hiring is a human process.
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.
I'm just sad that treating someone like a human being is considered a positive
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.
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"?
I can't speak for the Parent commenter, but I get the feeling you are taking what he said a little too literally. Those were simply examples of what could be said during the process. Their reply was not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the responses.
Again, can't speak for OP, but I doubt it was intended as an example of a positive interaction - rather it's meant to be an indication that there was NOT a negative interaction. Again, those words are just examples of what could be said. They weren't saying "This is absolutely the words we used and built an entire decision of someone off of" or even anything close to "This is the range we specifically had".
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.
I was thinking the same. I get the whole Hacker News "being a contrarian just to be a contrarian" thing, but this specific thread has gone much further than I thought it would.
Wait I'm an asshole? For being upset that treating taxi drivers "as a human being" is considered a positive interaction instead of the absolute bare minimum of a respectful member of society?
1. Neither I nor anyone else in this thread has accused you of being an asshole.
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.
1. Apologies, the posts you replied to were shitting on me so I misinterpreted your comment as agreeing with them. ("you must be fun ~~at parties~~ in taxis" is a common dismissal + insult online)
There’s an element of that, but you may not have seen real assholes in action.
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.
Well said. I worked in retail in college as well and it sounds like we porbably have similar stories.
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.
Everyone should work some form of retail job at least once in their life.
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.
Somewhat related to the anecdote you’re skeptical of: I was a law clerk for multiple years for a presiding judge and if you were a wise attorney rule #1 was be kind to the administrative staff at the courthouse - judges would find out if you were rude and while no-one was ever unethical, in my opinion, arrogant attorneys were definitely grilled more than polite ones. Kindness gets you a long way. And if you were a jerk to my secretary I was definitely not putting in the extra effort to dig through the two-foot stack of motions we got everyday to fast track your motion to postpone to the presiding judge. It’s not my fault you filed it at the 11th hour.
I've realized the same thing during my career in IT. Being nice (to everyone, but especially) to the boss's assistant paid off time and again. I can't tell you the number of things I got done for me around the office specifically because I wasn't a jerk.
Need new batteries for my pager? Done! Would like some updated business cards? Done! My desk phone needs replacing. Done!
One difference you might see is that the stories all have increased rewards for good behavior. Good behavior isn't something that's rewarded outside of childhood, it's just expected to be your default as an adult.
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.
Good behaviour is not rewarded? You and I must live in very different worlds then. Good behaviour is literally rewarded to me everyday. The time you help a colleague with a problem a few times leading to them vouching for you for another job. Going the extra mile for a work project allowing you more leeway in your planning out your hours. Making chitchat with the fast food worker that you get your sandwich from once a week leading him to give you a sandwich for free on your birthday.
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.
Years of good behavior has given me a very valuable reward. I have a mood disorder and anxiety issues, and while it is controlled by medication and therapy and coping techniques, etc. every now and then it does cause me problems. So occasionally I have a few weeks where my productivity drops significantly. But people in the company like me, because I have built a reputation as a helpful person, a hard worker, and a pleasant colleague. So I get the benefit of the doubt if I am having an off-week or two.
> Good behavior isn't something that's rewarded outside of childhood
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!
Except that you would have ended up with a much better price ($0) had you not let them know at all. I'm mostly joking, but if you ignore morals I don't think this is the most sound counterpoint.
Hahah right except that in this case the reward is purely intrinsic for returning to pay, while leaving without anyone knowing results in an extrinsic reward ($). "Being rewarded" is generally considered extrinsic otherwise you could just not do some bad thing and claim the feeling of knowing you didn't do the bad thing is a great reward in itself.
Dunno why you are so determined to say that my good deed (not stealing) was not rewarded. Cashier explicitly stated “honesty should be rewarded” and knocked three or four bucks off the price. Those extra dollar bills in my wallet are very much extrinsic. Why are you being so damn weird about it?
Those aren't "extra dollar bills in your wallet" any more than a tax refund is. You still paid, you just paid less. In the case where you didn't go back, you'd have had even more "extra dollar bills in your wallet."
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."
Accidentally stealing something where you don't realize that you stole it, and the store doesn't realize that you stole it, costs less than what happened. In terms of net global utility, even taking into account that your sense of morality has utility to you, it costs less. So this isn't a good example of "good behavior being rewarded" (i.e. having a net-positive outcome in global utility.)
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.)
You're falsely generalizing your specific situation into a full proof for a general ethical policy, though.
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?
The parent you were responding to stated that people are not really rewarded for good behaviour after childhood. I'm not saying your deed was not a good one. I am saying that you are monetarily worse off for having gone back to pay and that feeling of having done the right thing, or the discount off the original price is hardly an example of good behaviour being rewarded, especially when you compare the reward for not doing the right thing. If there is only right and wrong and the reward for doing the wrong thing is greater than the reward for doing the right thing, then there really is no reward for doing the right thing.
This is why I never have conversations with philosophy majors at parties. You are crawling through that same morass of specific straw man arguments that drive me nuts.
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.
Absolutely agree. I'm not trying to say that everyone should start stealing things because it's _cheaper_, just that the "reward" of doing the right thing is not particularly compelling if someone is already partaking in the bad behaviour.
There's tons of rewards for good behavior. Happens all the time. Some customer calls your boss and says "I just want to tell you, so-and-so was great to work with." And you get a raise. If it hasn't happened to you, you might not be very nice or good at your job.
"The taxi driver would sometimes complain to the people in the hiring loop when a candidate was rude to him." That also seems pretty implausible to me. The taxi driver is going to text or email HR or the hiring manager or someone? How frequently are people so rude to the taxi driver that they are disqualified from consideration? Does the taxi driver get compensated? Why is the taxi driver doing this? Does anybody vet the taxi driver's personality testing ability?
> The taxi driver is going to text or email HR or the hiring manager or someone?
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.
Since you asked, I find a few things implausible about your story. First, taxi drivers typically work with dispatchers. They aren't scheduling their own calls or schedules - because they are busy driving. Second, in the world of "decades ago" we are pre-smartphone. How, exactly, are you going to call up the taxi driver for a chat? And don't you think the taxi driver is going to notice that he has to take a call from the company after every person he drops off there? Taxi drivers drive dozens of people a day, he's supposed to remember or take notes on some random guy?
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.
About the trusted taxi driver, you would be surprised.
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."
Definitely was a normal thing in my country (Australia) for many drivers to have a card that you could call them directly. When my father used to commute to another city for a couple of years (mid 2000s), he had happened across a good taxi driver, got his card, and then called him up directly the day before to book the next morning's trip to the airport every week. He knew him by name, and they'd have a chat on the trip. He'd be driving, he'd just take the call on the hands-free.
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...
I can't speak for the rest of this story, but I will say that where I live, every taxi driver at the airport is also trying to set up their own "livery service" gig - that is, a group of regulars who frequently use them as their favorite taxi. So the part of "trusted driver" isn't dubious at all - it's totally plausible that a business would keep hiring the same driver on a predictable schedule to take candidates from the airport.
> In the world of "decades ago" we are pre-smartphone. How, exactly, are you going to call up the taxi driver for a chat?
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
Here we are not just talking about any taxi service. But someone who is known and paid to go to airport pick certain people up probably showing a sign or something to indicate to candidate that they are there for them. Includes things like being compensated for any wait time for delays likely. Drop them off at hotel. Go pick from hotel again and then likely deliver to right place in office and even give instructions where to go there.
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.
I work at Salesforce in Dublin.
There are a lot of taxi drivers that have personal relationships with people working there. Nothing to the point of having an official relationship, but sales people, TAM, and more that travel a lot but has the office as their "Hub" have one possibly two drivers that they favour.
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.
I just group all delivery services under taxis. That is not those that are clearly regular bus services. Be it taxi, Uber, lyft, limousine or black car...
When I was living with my parents in the 90s my elderly neighbors had (the wife's sister I think?) come to visit once or twice a month and it was always the same taxi driver, so I don't see how this would have been a problem.
And maybe the candidate came in with a haircut that reminded the interviewer of an abusive ex partner. Let's not pretend that interviewers are somehow objective judges of character - each and every one of us has biases, and that's okay.
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.
i think the reason that "magical negro" is considered offensive is that it only makes sense (as a trope) when the advice is coming from an unexpected source, which shows that the filmmakers considered "negro" an unexpected source.
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?
My VP poses as an analyst when "running into people" who are waiting for interviews. They then reach out to the hiring manager to give their opinion of the candidate.
I've heard of airline companies doing similar when interviewing flight attendants - United will fly you to Newark to interview, but often there will be people shadowing candidates to see how they behave during their travels and that feedback is taken into account when evaluating candidates.
A strong part of me believes that United indexes on how much of an asshole the person can be. /s.
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.
Seriously, compare the employees of United vs Southwest and there's a huge difference in attitude. Southwest employees seem happy, friendly, helpful, while United... Not.
I've flown United in every status, from nobody to the highest level of their frequent flyer plan. The problem isn't their people: it's that their airline has shitty policies.
It's a form of the birthday paradox. In a large enough room, there will be at least one person with a horror story about any airline.
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.
… but I have far more horror stories per mile flown with Delta than with Southwest.
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!)
Pretty uniformly the same experience for me with Southwest (pre-pandemic). I'd sometimes prefer to fly Southwest over other airlines even for longer flights. Consistently decent people; surprisingly so, since you'd assume cheaper flights would bring more difficult customers. But maybe I never flew the cheaper routes.
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.
No Southwest is boarding is great for kids. We all board at the same time (it is after one group) So you end up all sitting together, with other parents. and anyone that sits with you did it by choice, totally lowers the anxiety of bothering other passengers that do not have kids.
People sometimes have nonstandard needs, or get sick, or need to deal with another passenger's overly aggressive behavior. It's more about how the flight attendants react to those situations than to standard service.
I've started using a wheelchair recently so that's fresh on my mind. I haven't flown with it yet, but I'm nervous at the prospect of my delicate $10K power chair being smashed to bits in the cargo hold, or lost, or the flight attendants losing patience with me getting to my seat.
Are you not able to use it on the plane itself? It's been a long time since I've flown anywhere, but I seem to recall there being quite good accommodations for such things.
sadly no. ostensibly for safety reasons actually, I think, but likely more because airlines would have to sacrifice seats for wheelchair space. instead, you either have to limp (if you're able) or transfer to a transport chair so they can wheel you to your seat. it's a hassle.
it'd be a tight squeeze through the aisle if it were possible, but I could make it work in my chair.
Not a horror story but once while sitting right at the back of a rather small local airline flight I found a pair of grimy white plastic jerry cans that had come loose from under my seat and were sliding around. I flagged a flight attendant down and was told they would ask the pilots. Later they told me they usually contained coffee! I was suprised that as the flight attendant they didn't know that but given the plane was so small maybe they were new to the job.
I once had a "There is water dripping on me; can you move me to a different seat and also tell me whether I should be concerned about that?". The flight attendant wasn't too thrilled about that one, probably because it created extra work for whoever had to figure out that it was just condensation. That's the only negative interaction I've ever had with a flight crew.
I had a flight attendant admonish me for being out of my seat when the fasten seatbelt light was on. But honestly, she was right: it was way too turbulent and my butt ought to have been in a seat. Problem was that nature was calling and the turbulence seemed interminable, and wasn't helping with the nature's call part.
(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"
Stowing large electronic items (bigger than a cell phone) is a safety requirement, and it’s likely that flight attendants have much less leeway in safety requirements than other aspects of the job.
(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.)
It's really nothing - just a different fare code. Gate agents and cabin crew can already tell when someone is a non-rev (e.g. an employee using flight benefits), so looping them in on the backend is just a quick schedule lookup and a couple more people on the feedback system. (N.B.: I'm not saying this actually happens, because I don't know; just that it would be very little trouble using systems that are already in place. I, for one, didn't change out of my suit until after I'd gotten back home when I did an airline interview.)
My dad worked for Boeing.
He got to take a ride in the company limo once. Driver started telling him all the dirty gossip. Which executives were having affairs. Which ones were scheming, etc.
I worked at a place where my boss told me this story. He was interviewing an engineer, on my bosses way in to the office that morning he was cut off in traffic. He honked, the person who cut him off flippes him the bird. He then followed that car all the way into the company parking lot. He had to interview the guy, but he didn't get the job.
I'm assuming its for positions having customer interactions. If not, the rejected ones are the lucky ones because the company sounds like too smart for its own good.
What's next? sending a fake date during probation to evaluate how they behave with their spouses?
Sounds fine on the surface. Until you dive deeper and think the taxi driver will eventually be aware of the leverage they have. And decide to be malicious with their own biases.
Being quiet in a taxi is perfectly normal. Barking orders at them, complaining that they're not going fast enough, treating them as beneath you, etc.: those are rude.
I think the issue isn't if the taxi driver actively likes a guy but more if the person does something so egregious to leave a deeply negative mark (or at least that's how I would use such a report from a taxi driver).
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
Hm, I don't dig this. I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated. People are stressed heading into an interview, and may be upset afterwards. Unless they're interviewing for a public-facing role, I don't see how this behavior is relevant to the job; and discussing it with a hiring committee invites all sorts of "cultural fit" biases that make the hiring process inconsistent and discriminatory. If a person's behavior would hinder their ability to do the job, then that's worth a rejection; but "rudeness" is a very subjective thing.
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.
I don't want to work with anyone who treats service workers like garbage, no matter what mood they are in. I have never in my life, no matter how bad or good of a day I am having, taken my frustrations out on a service worker for whatever internal/external stressors are happening to me.
I worry that this might unintentionally discriminate against culturally diverse candidates. Standards of politeness can vary between cultures (and even subcultures), and a person might behave in a way which is perceived as polite in their (sub)culture but as impolite in the culture of the service worker; an "asshole" could turn out to just be a cultural misunderstanding. Particularly if the candidate is from a minority or immigrant background (especially recent immigrant).
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 think this is an important point. If this is part of an interview strategy, it would be important to delineate what's "asshole" behavior and what's merely brusque or blunt (which would be an interesting document to read).
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.
I think this is a fair and nuanced comment. However, you seem to be stating (correct me if I'm wrong) that there are really two categories of situations here - situation A, where someone is an Asshole with a capital A, and situation B where you have a neurodiverse or immigrant candidate that is misinterpreting the situation and should not be dismissed based on their behavior.
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?
> Is there an easy and objective way to tell the difference?
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.
Who is an "asshole" depends a lot on perception though. One thing which noduerme said in their comment [0] struck me:
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 in the context of a conversation isn't retrospective analysis of your actions. It's the immediate sharing and understanding of emotions in a moment. You did not consider her emotions at all in your interaction. She did not consider that you might not follow the same social contract as everyone else. Those two things are not the same.
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.
I think right here, right now, you are engaging in the exact same behaviour you are accusing me of engaging in – where is your "immediate sharing and understanding of emotions in a moment" in the context of this conversation? Are you considering my emotions at all in your interaction with me?
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 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.
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.)
This is such a well-written response. It combines a real understanding of people
>> 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.
Thank you very much for your kind and empathetic response, I really appreciate it. It is a pity I can only upvote it once.
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.
> However, you seem to be stating (correct me if I'm wrong) that there are really two categories of situations here - situation A, where someone is an Asshole with a capital A, and situation B where you have a neurodiverse or immigrant candidate that is misinterpreting the situation and should not be dismissed based on their behavior.
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.
I don't completely disagree with your objection to the term, I think it is a term worthy of being critiqued. But, sometimes, when one is trying to communicate, the best option is to choose language which the majority of one's listeners will understand, even if one views that language as being in some ways flawed; choosing less flawed, yet less familiar, language may make it harder for the average listener to appreciate the point, and discussing the pros and cons of different terminological options can be a distracting detour which may also stand in the way of getting the primary point across. I think you are objecting, not to my point, but rather how I put it, because I think I could have made the same point without using that term. (And the same applies to my use of "culturally diverse", albeit for somewhat different reasons.)
The word you were looking for is neurodivergent. He was pointing out that you made a common linguistic error, and you barfed out a novel rather than investigate that you might've been wrong or misspoke.
The one real strength of diversity isn't that you have to like them all equally, it is that you can discriminate against the behavior you dislike and prefer people you do like.
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.
That's the really nasty thing about retail: the angrier and more abusive you are, you'll likely get your way. And much of the time, "your way" is being made whole with the situation.
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.
depends on where you live - growing up in New Zealand we don't have a tipping culture, servers will get to you, in your turn, try and demand service and you're cutting against a cultural grain, perceived to be trying to claim you're better, more important, than the other customers, or the server.
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
Some time ago I spent a lot of time in youth hostels. A pattern I noticed was that people from all different cultures were polite and considerate until the number of people in the immediate group whom they considered allies in some way crossed some threshold at which point they became jerks, disregarding rules and politeness and generally acting as though they were the only real people there. I was in Europe, so most of the large groups were also European, but I at least saw German, Spanish, and French groups behaving this way. I met many Australians, but they were always traveling singly or in pairs and always stayed polite as far as I could see. I also have a vivid memory of Americans on a train in southern Germany voicing their opinions loudly and rudely about homes they saw passing by outside the train windows. It was just three or four Americans, but the arrangement of people on the train gave them a local majority.
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.
Well I myself was meeker traveling alone than I would be in a group of friends. It was observing this in part that led me to my hypothesis. I'd like to think I wouldn't become rude with sufficient friends around me, but I haven't tested that. I did observe that the rude groups were ruder in other countries than I observed groups of the same nationalities being in their own countries.
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.
The Arrogant American became the Arrogant German (1990s / 2000s), and is now often the Irate Brexiter.
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.
I find this extremely hard to believe. I, too, try very hard to not get upset at "service workers", but at a certain point, if someone has a bad attitude with me i'll eventually give it right back. This has only happened a few times, off the top of my head: support at ISPs a couple of times, creditors who were harassing me without reason, and one time extremely rude and racist people at a California School transportation office.
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.
>You might be as stoic and nonplussed as you claim, but we're all the heroes of our own stories, or something.
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)
Quick comment to help explain why this is getting some downvotes (in my best guess): The part where you say you try to treat service workers with respect but have your limits is fine / personal experience / probably broadly relatable, but the parts that are basically calling BS on someone for claiming they never lose their cool in such situations is… presumptuous and personal.
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.
I'll echo the parent commenter's anecdotes. I'm 43, so I've undoubtedly been exposed to many rude service workers in my days. Honestly, though, I can't remember a single incident. Perhaps that is a clue to my ability to respond kindly, or decently at the very least, and then move on. I'm not trying to "kill them with kindness", I just deliberately avoid confrontation and try to treat people like I'd want to be treated. Golden rule and all that.
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.
This would make sense as an objection if the taxi driver had specifically been asked to be a dick, to test the candidates. I'd assume they have some idea that the taxi driver is a fairly reasonable person (and apparently they know him well enough to trust his judgement).
English is a tricky language, and in my reading of GP i was incredulous at the word "never", especially since service workers can be in bad moods or stressed and that becomes, to you (or me, or GP), external stressors.
Oh, I think you are right there. I can't think of any times I've been rude to a worker off the top of my head, but I'm sure if we went over my life with a thin tooth comb we could find some instances. So it should be unusual that for an otherwise friendly candidate, this just happens to be the day when they have an unfortunate interaction.
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.
> I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated.
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.
> If you treat cab drivers and other service personnel badly, that’s because you’re a shit person.
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.
These are reasonable points in the context of normal everyday life. However, when making a hiring decision, there are likely to be several competent candidates who could all do the job just as well as any other. If you've got an easy way to filter out potentially problematic candidates based on their soft skills, might as well do so to avoid a bad hire. There's no room for giving the benefit of the doubt in this context.
>There's no room for giving the benefit of the doubt in this context.
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.
Then you refuse to be a helpful contributor to discussions.
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 serious and follow the core competency of the site (technical ones for example). For these discussions, it is best to avoid sarcasm and non-obvious forms of communication.
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.
>Some discussions are not serious, and are destined not to be really productive anyway. Dating advice falls into that category.
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?
Interesting! While I disagree with you that I've made the forum worse, this conversation has cause me to reflect on the importance of using low-stakes sarcasm like this, which has refined my internal justification for doing so. So, I guess everyone benefited. Have a good one!
I didn’t benefit if you’re going to keep making comments like you did here that hurt the forum for reasons I explained and which make no difference to you.
If you cheat on your partner you are also a "shit person". Do you think employers should reject candidates if they know they cheated on a romantic relationship?
Honestly, if I somehow knew that the candidate cheated on their partner, then yes, I would reject them. I doubt I will ever find myself in that position.
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.
I'd treat that similarly to finding that the person had embezzled money before. I wouldn't want a person of that character anywhere around me or my business.
>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.
I'm not sure if the Hawthorne effect applies that strongly here. It has to do with worker productivity, not behavior. In fact, this IBM test may weed out a few employees who are otherwise perfectly kind people in general public outings.
If you want a healthy organization you need to be able to trust people, even when you can't watch them. This requires things like lack of deception, treating people decently, not lying, not stealing (physical or credit for ideas/work accomplished), etc.
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.
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.
Let's remove some of the inflammatory language and look at more as this person doesn't "matter" to me. If I think the taxi driver is just a taxi driver, I am going to treat them as I would any person I'm not likely to meet again. Ideally, with respect but when one's guard is down an asshole is more likely to act like one.
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.
Finding out that someone is toxic only after they've got the job is problematic.
The idea here is to evaluate them when they aren't aware and on their best behavior.
Had the same thought. Lots of really big assumptions here with zero fact or evidence to back them up. And poor lack of awareness. Be careful judging, my friends.
Ethics aside, in my experience this type of character tends to contaminate their surroundings with this undirected negativity. It’s like a black hole that has no sides, only the mass of their ego. I have a friend like this, and while we are still friends and can manage that, I would never work together with him. It’s okay to be sad, stressed, angry. Not okay to spill it all over the world.
Otoh, not clear what gp means by “rude”. Someone could perceive sad/neutral silence and “thank you, goodbye” as rude-ish too.
I agree with you. I understand that how you behave as a member of society is useful information and it's valid to not hire a jerk. Having the taxi driver as a spy is a bit like bugging a confessional though. Like you say, if they really limit the taxi driver's input to "was he directly a jerk to me", that sounds ok, but like any surveillance, it's unlikely it really remains limited to such a fixed scope and other information doesn't come in and bias the answer. A taxi is where a lot of people feel safe from observation, and may say things not meant for anyone's ears.
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.
I disagree, the best time to evaluate how a candidate behaves towards other people is when they don't know they are being evaluated. Were they stressed before/after the interview? Well, how one behaves when stressed matters too. Finally, yes, rudeness is subjective, but so are most things in life.
I'm inclined to agree. When a company watches you without your knowledge it's a clever hack, but when the government does it it's a creepy social credit system? If the hiring company secretly owned the taxi company, wouldn't that be creepy too?
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.
If companies shared this data or it followed you around then this would be akin to a creepy social credit system. If it's an observervation during a test then it is just a kobayashi maru and not the same thing.
>I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated
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.
Responses here are really surprising to me. Should a Google hiring committee consider your search history, too?
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.
>Should a Google hiring committee consider your search history, too?
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.
Well, they know beforehand than they are evaluated for an interview...
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.
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 ?
Asking for character references from someone who has interacted with a candidate is perfectly fine.
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.
if i were to institute something like this, the driver would be fairly (and well) compensated to do this task. Any tips would be handed over at the end, so there's no consideration of compensation involved. Obviously tipping is a data point, but it wouldn't influence the drivers report beyond that checkbox.
Now we're adding wage-theft on top of both assessing candidates on their disposable wealth, and accepting and keeping payment from them? The ethics get pretty muddy the further down this path we walk.
i find most things murky if you really try to walk for a while.
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.
When I interviewed at Google in 2006, one of the interviewers asked me to write code for solving a particular problem. I replied along the lines of "ok I need to think about this, it's not obvious how to solve it" and started thinking. Time ticked away. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The interviewer started reminding me that he needed me to write some code and if there wasn't anything for him to copy down into his interview notes I wasn't going to pass the interview. (Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.)
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.)
I interviewed with Google once around the same time frame.
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.
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).
so, what was the answer, from the lecture? what had you missed?
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".
Yes, exactly. If quick obvious troubleshooting isn't making progress immediately, then unrack it is the smart real-world answer, which is different from the fantasy interview-world answer.
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.
> so, what was the answer, from the lecture? what had you missed?
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.
Yep, seems more like a cattle vs. pets question as retold. That may have been a newer concept at the time, so no amount of Socratic reasoning would get you there.
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.
"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."
I took Huffman's class at UCSC and he said he had actually thrown the solution in the garbage before realizing it worked and retrieving it.
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!
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.
When I started reading my brain went straight to Von Neumann. Now I really want to read a fanfic about a story where John Von Neumann is invited to a Google interview.
> The people authorized to open manhole covers could easily be trained to do it safely.
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.
> 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).
I once walked into an interview where some code was already written on a whiteboard. It was presented to me as a "find the problem with the code" sort of puzzle, and I pointed out the one big logic problem with it's algorithm and wrote a quick fix.
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.
I had an interview question that dealt with knowing some crazy shit about C data structure layout and pointers and casting. (Embedded development position)
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.
Honest question: What difference does it make whether you work on a l33tcode question or a real problem in the interview? At least the real problem has a chance of being interesting.
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.
I prefer to use real problems with the work that have already been solved. It shows what the day-to-day is like, you know there's at least one solution to the problem, and you aren't asking someone to work for free.
Giving actual problems during an interview is fine, and I'd actually prefer getting an interview problem that the company is really working on. I think people are just pattern-matching this to the kind of scam where the company farms out their work as multi-hour take-home problems with no intention of actually hiring the candidate afterwards.
I wouldn't say you are, but some people have been burned by the concept of spec work that employed tricks like this to basically get free brainstorming. In other industries like art it's especially egregious.
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.
Leetcode is fine. Once a dude asked me to write out merge sort. Like, I’m not from a CS bg (I suppose that wouldn’t matter). And I literally did look at merge and other sorts two days back. But that didn’t matter, the only way you can write merge sort is if you memorize it (or spend an inordinate amount of time writing sorting algos). I didn’t get that job, but I’ve been monitoring that company and they’re not doing that well anyway. Perhaps a coincidence?
> the only way you can write merge sort is if you memorize it
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...)
That’s a great question. Thanks for continuing to ask these so I can avoid those orgs.
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.
Asking an interview candidate to solve an actual problem the business is currently facing is shitty, and I wouldn't want to work for them either.
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.
I interviewed for a security position where they asked me an interesting question (I don't exactly remember what it was). After thinking a bit I told them "you don't" — as in there isn't a solution to the problem they posed.
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.
I once interviewed a guy who was going to work on a different team than mine who, 20 minutes in, I knew he was going to pass everyone's interview. I then proceeded to give him a "take home test" which was actually my project for the sprint, but framed in a generic manner. He was a much better and faster programmer than I, and he completed it beyond my expectations. I made the modifications to make it work with my project and I even received a commendation at the end of the sprint on how clean "my work" was.
You, sir or madam, are an absolutely asshole. I admire your out-of-the-box thinking and your honesty, but I do not admire your natural proclivity towards exploitation.
Lol, as if this would happen: "Hey aren't you that bloodyplonker who told a story about doing something dishonest on a public forum?" "No way I'd hire you!"
Like is the story even true? How would anyone connect the real person to this post? Is anyone even reading this?
> Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.
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.
It's just because the interviewing tool you have to put your notes into at Google takes text and not pictures :-). The hiring committee will actually look at this, and this is a different person from the interviewer.
Ok, but they were transcribing from the whiteboard onto paper. So everything I wrote must have been transcribed twice before it reached the hiring committee.
Isn't this a bit of revisionist thinking? I don't know that cameras of that quality were commonplace in 2006. It's not like you could just pull out your iPhone. And most digital cameras weren't much better (i.e. I wouldn't trust being able to read handwriting from their pictures). So then what, you supply each interviewer with a roll of film and a company darkroom?
It's also easier to write your own notes down this way too.
2006 was... early. I don't remember when HCs were formed, but there's no way the internal ATS had any level of sophistication, if it even existed then.
From what the recruiter told me, there was a hiring committee but their recommendations had to be approved by the founders before an offer could go out.
Yeah, in my experience this is really what it's all about. Thinking out loud helps them assess how you reason through trade-offs, potential ideas you run through, edge cases you catch, at what stage you catch them and how you go about addressing them etc.
Thinking out-loud also prevents candidates from going completely off the rails. Maybe they missed an important detail or are solving a different problem than what the interviewer intended. These things happen, better to catch them early in the interview.
No, they don't, generally. When was the last time you were required to compose code in a real world situation, in front of someone, while talking through your thought process, all under time pressure and in a high-stakes environment?
You pair program under time pressure similar to interview conditions? Really? I find that hard to believe.
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.
When I'm working on a product I'm under time pressure: we need to get this feature done so we can move on to the next, or we need to fix this bug — possibly the site is down, or the customer's system is compromised, until we get it done. In an interview there's a sort of "pressure" but it's like the pressure of playing a video game or taking a math test or lifting weights: I'm working hard to do my best, but nothing really depends on it. It's just a difficult challenge I'm completing, the only purpose being to see (and, well, show) how well I can complete it.
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.)
You're either missing or conveniently ignoring the fact that almost all deadlines are artificial, and the only thing that happens when they get missed is that someone's quarterly plan doesn't match up to reality. I had a whole bit about that written up in my editor that I decided not to include, but, needless to say, reality disagrees with you here. Software projects are notoriously late, and people generally don't get fired as a result. Your other scenarios of "site down" or "customer system compromised" aren't even examples of time pressure, so I have no idea what you were even getting at.
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.
Since you've interviewed candidates for programming jobs you know that being 99th percentile among them is pretty easy. Just being a programmer is enough. It's easy to exceed 10× zero.
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.
I think you missed the "time pressure" and "high stakes environment" points. I've done plenty of rubber ducking on the job and elsewhere, and not one time have I ever had to solve the problem in 45 minutes, or else lose out on a big opportunity, similar to how an interview would work.
I had something like this too for a quant trading interview. It was one of those problems about flipping a coin, heads doubles your money and tails you lose everything, "how much would you pay to play the game?" If forget the nuance of the question but when I did the math on the whiteboard, the expected value was 1 i.e. the same amount one wagers. At that point I said, "Well, I guess I could pay for the entertainment value... how much do I owe you for this interview?"
That sounds almost like the St. Petersburg Paradox. (But in the paradoxical version, you keep whatever's in the pot; you don't lose everything at the end.)
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.
It's not hard to articulate why: Nearly all the large numbers are beyond what anyone can actually pay. If you assume that the bet pays out at most 4 billion dollars, and simply can't pay more than that, suddenly the expected value is $32, instead of "infinite".
The math and discussion of infinity in the problem unnecessarily complicate it.
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.)
I suspect they were looking for you to do some risk/reward analysis.
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.
That's really unprofessional. I've never talked to anybody at Google who administered a "I don't know the algorithm" interview like that. They would have been spanked badly by the interview committee, if repeating this behavior.
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 should have been clearer. After thinking for a bit I did start asking questions, but the interviewer didn't give me any useful information. IIRC I asked if I could assume the problem was small enough that I could just do a brute force search of possible solutions and the answer came back that no, they needed a solution which would work for any size; I know I asked other questions but I can't remember what they were.
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.)
The issue isn't structure but rather density. If you have N values ranging from -M to M, the "obvious" solution is O(N^2) and the convolution us O(M log M). So if you have lots of values within a narrow range the convolution wins.
My first job interview out of university, I was asked how to have separate independent database servers, each able to read/write to the same status field, synchronised between them over an unreliable network, with consistent and atomic updates being written by any of the servers.
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 think you're operating under a misunderstanding of how these interviews work.
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.
> 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.
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.
Something similar happened in my first job out of college.
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.
> (Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.)
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.
Depends what you mean by great, but there were a number of phones with 2-3mp cameras, more than sufficient for a whiteboard.
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.
My Sony Ericsson K750 took pretty nice 1.3 MP photos for the time (launched 2005), it was better than my 1.3 MP Olympus Camedia C-860L from ca five years prior and was my main camera until DSLRs got cheap enough.
Did you talk to the interviewer at all during this? I could see them wanting to know your thought process to solving an unsolveable problem but otherwise this seems a little far fetched. Probably they just really liked you?
The two aren't mutually exclusive, you could've easily started out with salary + stock options that would've put you in a better position to start a side gig.
Then you might actually be driving a lambo now too ;)
tarsnap is a one man show and he's not building a startup. he could've easily worked at Google, take advantage of the rising stock prices AND continue work on his SaaS. Lot of us do exactly that because it doesn't make sense to leave a good paying job at a large company to take on tremendous risk at as you said, consuming endeavour with small probability of success (+90% failure rate).
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.
By '06 Google was already public so you weren't going to make life changing, never work again in your life money from stock awards/options. At best you'd be sitting on a decent nest egg that maybe bought you some property or better investments if you were smart (and a $250k supercar is not a smart investment).
This was before Facebook broke the SV no-poaching ring, so the offer probably wasn’t that spectacular. Also, in 2006-2010 any RSU’s would be rather horizontal.
I don't know why people think that the SV no-poaching thing really had a large effect on people hired at Google when it was active. It didn't.
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.
yes, but you'd get more stock each year (a larger count). Also the stockw as definitely not "horizontal". Google outperformed the market in each of the tech bursts.
if you owned stock options and invested it in Google with portion of your salary going to it, you absolutely would be looking at extreme returns. The power of compounded returns is still not clear to some I see.
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.
> 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.
I actually touched on this in my comment. I didn't disagree with you.
> 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.
the small percentage of survivors will lay it out like there's specific sequence of steps but its 1) very tough to find market product fit 2) even if you do, theres no guarantee you will be chosen 3) your immediate circle, your economic class, education, race impact your perceived social credit 4) luck (even all three are met but some still do not "make it"
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.
I think that there is a much deeper track to entrepreneurship than the false, oversimplified binary of
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.
When I interviewed with AWS, half the loop interviews were with remote staff. I was shown to a videoconferencing room and asked to wait. There was a pile of VC equipment but it wasn't connected. With five minutes before we were due to start, I decided this was part of the interview and plugged stuff in myself, powered it on, and clicked through some boot-time screens, guessing at the right inputs. A few minutes later a call came in and the interviews themselves proceeded normally.
The second part of the story is I got hired, but not for the job I was going for. Instead, they asked me to manage the whole team.
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.
If it was a while ago things might have been different. Not sure if you are around anymore but there is a continuous push for standardization. There is also a big emphasis on candidate experience lately.
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'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.
That's unfortunate. The fact of the matter is that Amazon interviews thousands of engineers each month, so statistically there will be pretty bad experiences every now and then. I personally like to read candidates feedback every now and then and you can find some horror stories in there. Also unfortunately not everyone is a good interviewer and this can also impact your personal experience.
If you'd like to share what those "this seems off" situations where I'd love to hear that.
This is distant past for me, but I'll clarify two things: everyone that I encountered seemed quite sharp - it was a strong and interesting group. Next, my experience was personally unpleasant and parts of it still stick with me, but it was not horror-level. I also recognize it's a gigantic company, and chalk my day up to a bad match and statistical flukes.
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.
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.
I suppose you mean the leadership principles. Yes, that feels cult-ish, but is part of the company culture. I personally like part of them, but that's a topic of its own.
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?
Not the grandparent, but I'm encountering this particular part of the AWS interview structure right now, and trying to decide whether to bother continuing.
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.
I feel cynicism in your answer. I can still give you an honest answer to your question.
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.
I was explicitly told to memorise the principles and the recruiter quizzed me on them during the first screening interview. Good to know that's not the norm I guess, seems like a bizarre thing to do especially for a technical role.
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.
It is impossible to know this for sure, especially at such a large company. It doesn't even have to actually be part of the official interview, it could have been something one of the interviewers decided to do unilaterally. OP will never really know.
Didn’t there used to be stories on HN about a particular VC backed company where first day at work you’d be met with all the parts of a desktop computer and you had to assemble it yourself.
It's funny, the way we used to do coding interviews was to systematically ramp up the difficulty of the problem until the candidate struggled.
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.
"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."
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 had a set of problems increasing in difficulty. Most candidates only solved (or had seen) one or two, but some sailed past those to increasing difficulty problems.
Honestly I see two asshole tests here. Some of the candidates failed the first one. IBM failed the other. This type of dishonest and unnecessarily stressful approach tells me that I probably don't want to be working there. Even just professing that a candidate needs to work well under stress is somewhat of a red flag. Why are your employees under so much stress? I am software developer not a trauma surgeon. If I am under regular stress, that is a failure in management of my employer.
Somehow I found this very clever, and more appropriate than asking people to napkin-guess how many piano tuners are in NY. I'd expect most candidates kind of panicked, a few reacted superbly, and a few became assholes. This would be a very way to both separate the most problematic people, and find potential team leaders.
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.
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.
Come on, the type of stress that the experiment creates is typical. It's not day to day, of course, management should take care of that. And the candidate is not expected to work well under stress - just not to be a huge asshole whenever a stressful situation inevitably arises.
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.
Meh, I definitely want to filter out people who can't handle situations like this, because honestly they come up all the time. Uncertainty in ownership, data not matching up, clarity lacking; how people behave in these scenarios is basically how they'll behave at their job.
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?
It isn't just inducing stress that tells me they are an asshole. Interviews are inherently stressful, there is little need to intentionally add extra stress on top. The dishonesty is also a problem. Interviews are a two-way street. The first impression this gives candidates is that their employer will think nothing of lying to their face and employees will so regularly be under stress that handling stress well is one of the traits they find most important. No thanks.
It's a tricky problem because of the observer effect. You can't just say to candidates "we're testing your behavioral approach to problem solving" because then candidates will simply realize the goal is "don't go ballistic for an hour", despite perhaps revealing their true character once they are on the payroll.
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.
Agree. The candidates were put in a situation where they had to decide whether to fend for themselves (hoard information and ideas) or burst out into team working mode - helping the same people they were competing with for the job.
These team exercise are not uncommon or unreasonable in grad hiring, but it's a terrible idea to not clarify them up front.
OMG, PTSD is kicking in for me here. I was in a similar program way way back in the 1970's early 1980's with Ma Bell. I was working at Bell Labs after getting my Masters in EE and they put me in what they called the JET program (Junior Executive Training).
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.
I wasn't alive when the telecom dinosaurs roamed the planet. So I'm about as clueless. Was the study you were a part of ever printed somewhere, like the HBR or WSJ?
I've read a lot of these comments and it honestly seems like many people here have failed the HN version of this test while helping me understand why I've failed so many interviews...
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.
I think stress is a normal part of life. Too much stress is harmful, but too little stress is like living in zero gravity: we aren't built for it, and we start to deteriorate.
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.
Stress is part of life and most software jobs have times of it though that should be an exception. I agree a sense of tendencies under stress should be observed.
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.
Software developers are protected by their managers and, to the extent possible, exposed to limited and controlled stressors. I wouldn't say that getting assignments of limited and predictable difficulty is realistic, though, no matter how hard a manager tries. Even a junior dev will get tasks that turn out to be a lot harder than anybody anticipated, so it's reasonable to want to see how they respond. The only way to do that is to keep turning up the difficulty in the interview until they struggle.
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.
The work environment may be stressful at times, it's very valuable for the employer to know how a candidate will behave in these situations, don't you agree?
We used to have a very basic C whiteboard test for junior devs. Super simple "find the bugs" test. The best technical performance I ever saw was a guy that walked up to the board, swiped with the marker to mark the bugs like he was swatting flies (found every bug correctly). He finished the test in maybe 10 seconds, where typical was five minutes or more. He sat down in a huff. I didn't know we had an asshole test until that moment. I thanked him for coming in and showed him out. I'm so glad I never had to work with him.
This vaguely reminds me of somebody I know who's also pretty smart, but socially extremely odd to the point of being rude/insensitive. Though I'm pretty sure the person I know is on the spectrum and likely doesn't realize/mean it.
I would probably fail this test as someone who has been accused before in professional settings of being an 'asshole' due to my speaking method.
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.
>I just have one of those voices that doesn't come across as exactly.... 'animated' when it hits your ears for the first time.
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.
It sounds nice and makes a great story until you see all the exceptions being made. “He was a jerk but he did go to MIT”, “he was a jerk but his father is good friends with the CEO”, “he was a jerk but I’m a jerk and he reminds me of myself” but it won’t be that honest it will be more like “ he wasn’t a jerk he is just a natural leader and it was everyone else’s fault for not recognizing that and falling in line”
One of my first grad interviews was at a large bank. They had one big interview day, where dozens of people were invited and herded into a big room together. They had several smaller rooms where different stages of the interview process were conducted. Your name would be called along with the room number and you'd nervously walk on in. Then you'd come out, waiting for the next interview. One was technical, and I think others were more around culture fit?
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.
In Robert Heinlein's early juvenile novel Space Cadet, the applicants are given a device and a set of instructions. The instructions make no sense for the device in question.
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.
'Sma, believe me; it has not all been "fun".' He leant against a cabinet full of ancient projectile weapons. 'And, worse than all that,' he insisted, 'is when you turn the goddamn maps upside-down.'
'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
I was reminded of Space Cadet, too. Reading that passage again (for the first time in fifty years), I see that there were at least two tests with hidden purposes.
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”.
I don't have an asshole test, but I do have a collaboration test I use when hiring for design or product roles. I match the candidate with the hiring manager and two peers. And essentially mimic the rapid sketching exercise from a design sprint for a very simple and broadly understood feature. For example: editing tweets. I'm less interested in the quality of the candidates work than how they work. Are the comfortable working out in the open? How do they accept feedback? Are they generous with their own criticism and praise? Will they iterate on ideas they didn't originate? Will they react well to someone else incorporating their best idea into their own designs? I'll also produce a few concepts that are flat out terrible and see how their feedback changes when coming from a supervisor.
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.
Sticking Cloudflare's free-tier CDN in front of your existing blog will probably help a lot. If nothing else, it'll make a stopgap while you're investigating alternatives.
I am certain this is not true, as I only use them for a subdomain CDN for hosting my static site, and don’t use them for any of my other dynamic sites that are on the same parent domain.
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')
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
Fly.io can host instances of whatever (any kind of Docker container, so Ghost and Wordpress aren’t hard) and has a good free tier. You can also use Netlify or GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages for free static hosting, if you don’t need anything special. Wordpress.com is pretty low effort. I think all of these can do custom domains in their free tier.
This is one of the reasons I like matrixed organizations as it allows people, over several years, to choose who they work with and encourages leaders/managers to develop effective people and leadership skills. Siloed organizations unfortunately facilitate assholes.
Don't matrix organisations put you in the stressful position of having two or more bosses, who may disagree about what they are looking to see from you, especially when it comes to evaluating your performance and promotion/fire recommendations?
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.
In my experience, when done well, the manager on the org-chart is primarily a people manager and does the annual performance reviews of staff based on input from the employees' project managers, peers, and/or team leads. If they have additional goals (technical/product/etc.) beyond improving the capability and impact of their group then that can definitely muddy things up for everyone.
Something about this doesn't sit right with me, but I'm not sure I can put my finger on it.
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.
My interview for IBM back in the 1980s went well, and I got the job as a software architect. I don’t remember much about the interview; it must not have been stressful.
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.
Just wait until people figure out that group composition can also affect whether people appear to be assholes, apathetic, etc. The wrong grouping will give even the most otherwise-perfect wallpower the permission and impetus to speak up and completely torch their opportunity.
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.
I have a "no jerks" rule too. challenge is to try to spot them early, even before you say yes to an employer/client. its hard to do reliably. but there are less complications early than down the road when they've become one's coworkers or boss
because of this I really like to get into casual friendly convos early, with potential bosses or coworkers
Our team has done something similar to this for quite a while and I think it's been valuable. About ten minutes to read a page of high-level specifications regarding a general proposed system design, then the rest of the hour at a whiteboard (or remote equivalent) with a couple of other team members to sketch out and discuss what the implementation might look like.
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.
I think of these as a "Star Trek" test. You know: Wesley is confronted with "his deepest fear" during entrance exams for Star Fleet, Counselor Troi can't pass a holodeck test for "command responsibilities" until she's willing to order Jordi to do a suicide repair. I'm sure there were others.
The common theme is supposed to be that the obvious test is a fake and they're really testing for something else.
They're all bullshit.
Every single one of them falls apart as soon as people start talking about them with each other, not to mention they're just begging to be abused by the testing authority, or entice corruption.
The post doesn't go into enough detail to be sure, but I think the "asshole" participants fighting for control of the whiteboard assumed that whoever would successfully lead the group to solve the puzzle would receive good marks and have the highest probability of receiving an offer. Furthermore, some companies, or departments/teams within companies, foster a corporate culture where "assholes" are more likely to be promoted. So a group participant who isn't naturally an "asshole" may have taken a risk by behaving like one, gambling on the idea that such traits would be looked upon favorably.
I don't get it - in the recollection, the person leading at the front wasn't getting anywhere, so someone else stepped in to give it a go. Is that supposed to be an asshole thing to do?
I didn't really get from reading that who the asshole was supposed to be.
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.
Well the story doesn't tell us who was the 'assholes'. It could be someone up at the whiteboard, or it could be someone yelling at the people that was at the whiteboard.
The one time I've experienced assessing this type of thing it's very much something you have a natural feel for as you watch the events unfold. You can't really assess it in the abstract sense, it's all about the concrete interactions and how the individuals handle them.
I'm probably from a different culture than you so this is new to me. Care to elaborate? Am I picturing it right that someone is put under stress for six months without pay (or at least for pay that might barely cover base rent in my experience) to see if they can deal with stress without burning out or doing a worse job?
It shouldn't be like that. Most internships are three months and typically in the summer between academic years for undergraduate or graduate students. They are paid internships, but much less than a permanent position (enough to cover base rent and travel logistics.)
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.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like working with a broad range of personality types.
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?
In the age of "cracking the coding interview", glassdoor, levels.fyi, etc... it would only work a handful of times before everyone is in on the test and true assholes won't expose themselves.
Agreed, the most successful assholes have always been the ones that understood that you can't be a asshole all the time, you need to deploy it at a opportune moment.
If you've got an asshole being strategic about when to be an asshole, you actually have a sociopath, because most folks at the point where they know they're being an asshole would just stop.
Having been on the receiving end of this as a candidate (not at IBM), everyone was in on the test in the first 15 seconds, and it changed people's behavior instantly.
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?)
Like with those "personality tests" where anyone with decent perception and reading comprehension can easily tell which outcomes each answer's going to push them toward, and so obtain any result they like.
I had an interview at a startup years ago (got the job) that was grueling, about six hours total, you met with six different teams of three people, from different disciplines across the company. It was sort of a good cop/bad cop thing. Not to aggressive, but just seeing if you were willing to admit you didn't know when you were asked a questions you didn't know (and there were lots I didn't know) and how you reacted in the situation. Some people don't handle 'not knowing', and try to BS their way through. Then, some are apologetic when they get called out, and some dig in. If you fell into that last group, you were not getting a job. If you fell into the second group, it was more of a sliding scale. Did you attempt to BS your way through multiple times across the multiple teams? Or did you realize, the first time you got called out, that it wouldn't work.
Am I the only one that finds it slightly amusing that the test also makes sure that the supposed work task/puzzle doesn't actually matter?
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).
This is true. This past week, I coached a friend who is a new grad on a how to ace an interview. Going in, she was super worried, almost on the verge of tears.
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.
We had a candidate once who was super smart, it was a role we really needed filled. His level of knowledge exceeded mine on every area I asked (not a high bar, but it meant he got full marks on every one of my questions). But he was insufferable. (Blamey, exaggerating, interrupting, bitter). In the hiring committee everyone rated his knowledge tops. Everyone also said “but I’d never want to work with him”
He had interviewed with our parent company before. He asked why he hadn’t been selected the previous time “was it because I asked about the secret locations of data centers?” I said “I assure you it wasn’t that” we ended up not hiring him and leaving the role unfilled. Some employees are not better than nothing.
Think about that for a second. We chose to have nothing than hire an asshole.
This is a problem of active vs passive communication.
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.
THANK YOU. I happen to be a bit of a conniving Machiavellian dickhead but I married a brilliant principled asshole.
It really fundamentally grinds my gears that her principled devotion to doing what is right and what is best for all parties, even if unpopular (ie, an asshole), frequently results in her “losing” in a plethora of ways to the manipulative cunts like myself. Not that she would see it that way. Because she’s a principled asshole.
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.
Here in Brazil HR has a similar setup of group tests that they call "Group Dynamics". They would give a task and let the group figure by itself how to solve it.
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.
Many years ago when applying for a somewhat similar program at another big company I went through something similar. Bunch of us in a room with a difficult to solve problem, not enough time, and at the end we had to do a group presentation on our solution. I don't know if it was exactly an asshole test, it was also to see how people worked in a group generally. Even if it is somewhat artificial people's personalities quickly became apparent. I really enjoyed it :)
I've evaluated one of these group exercises for a grad program before. One thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was out of the four individuals there was one guy that continually derailed the group, and there was another guy who even though the other guy was always derailing things still showed courtesy towards him and listened to his opinions. The other two guys were both reasonable and I liked them too, but the guy whom I both liked and who showed courtesy to an individual I would describe as "difficult" was one of the ones we wound up hiring. He got glowing reviews from pretty much every assessor and went on to become a great colleague to work with. I think any of those three out of the four people would have been fine hires, and the other guy was a strong no-hire.
To get into the national airline pilot training program in France, there is something similar. You're then debriefed by a psychologist. In that case it's not just about not being an asshole, but also about being able to speak up when required, and so on.
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.
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.
I hear this and can't help but think IBM ended up with a bunch of "yes" men and women that wouldn't react appropriately to a bad situation. Given the performance of the company, I would guess I'm right.
Wharton MBA has this Team-based Discussion (TBD) as a part of their application process. From what I hear, it is to weed out Asshole type of personality. In regard to how effective the method is, I'm not 100% convinced.
Hmm... that's an interesting question. Could it be that groupthink turns the whole idea on it's head and such a process would just end up hiring nice but mediocre people?
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.
Sounds more like a way to make sure to hire meek submissives who won't question the way things are normally done. There was a reason Apple's entire marketing strategy in the 80s took aim directly at IBM.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If confronting isn't being an asshole, then what is this test supposed to measure?
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?
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
Always go to lunch, whichever side of the interview you're on. Preferably a place with table service - could even be a diner. How does your counterpart treat service staff ?
So IBM wants redpilled Machiavellians who "keep frame" under pressure, but once hired will politely grab power, backstab and intrigue against colleagues.
It did have a solution. However, the packs all contained different information. Once this information was shared, an individual could solve the puzzle fairly easily. Group dynamics tended to block this though.
yeah , agreed -- but that doesn't really say anything about parents' point.
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.
Similarly I wonder how many of those "top-of-the-foodchain" software devs and system architects were dropped during earlier job applications elsewhere, only because some brainfart caused them to fail the stupid code challenge.
That’s one way to look at it. The other way is to determine confidence. Either way, these are character traits and filtering for one or the other is unfortunate. Teams should mimic villages, everyone is there. Everyone. The shy, the arrogant, the nice, etc. There will be flawed people in a village, but that is a village. Not utopia.
This is generally called a "stress interview" and, as I understand it, they used to be more common decades ago.
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.
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.