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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And be careful what you say at the bar.
Dave Barry
What's next? sending a fake date during probation to evaluate how they behave with their spouses?
what is worse, this, or the guy under severe stress taking a taxi and not “engaging” because he has other shit on his mind?
Stress is a reasonable excuse, but it's also reasonable for many jobs to require a minimal level of curtesy even under stress, especially in a highly collaborative environment
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
>I don't see how this behavior is relevant to the job; and evaluating it on a hiring committee invites all sorts of "cultural fit" biases that generally making the hiring process inconsistent and discriminatory.
I don't see how not doing this, really changes anything. The process is already inconsistent and discriminatory. The only thing this really tests is integrity.
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.
Otoh, not clear what gp means by “rude”. Someone could perceive sad/neutral silence and “thank you, goodbye” as rude-ish too.
As an aside, I'm always shocked at what people will start saying in a taxi/uber, particularly I'm thinking of talking about confidential work stuff. My personal view is you never know who the driver is and loose lips sink ships, don't say anything in front of him that you wouldn't say in public. But I know many don't see it that way.
Also, when you're making hiring decisions, why are you trusting the opinion of a taxi driver who isn't even on your payroll? They certainly have their own prejudice, and if they know they have weight in hiring decisions, they could very well just be feeding you lies.
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.
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.
It's a bit like psychological or sociological studies. All the time, for ethics reasons, the researchers must tell the subjects than they are part of a psychological or sociological test. But, the test is generally not exactly what is said to the people. For example by testing something hidden or by using actors. See for example the Asch conformity experiments or the Cognitive Dissonance Experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
https://explorable.com/cognitive-dissonance-experiment
In this case the people where told than they where tested, no surprise here... That said, is it really ethic to trick people by telling them than they are tested on "something" but in reality testing them on something else ?
I 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.
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.)
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).
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".
The process just seemed to be “keep asking what else it could be indefinitely”
Didn’t get it. “Not a cultural fit”, or something. Kinda wished they’d told me more detailed what the problem was.
Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment.
According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.
Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.
Reminds me of that :)
edit: Here's a slightly more colourful telling of the story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble...
Does anyone happen to know which two problems Dantzig solved? Don't seem to be having much luck on my searches
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.
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.
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.
Thanks to co-pilot, these are approaching being one and the same (:
But also, it's a basic interview technique to explain your thinking out loud.
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.
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.
Also like outright lying, given what happened next. Not exactly the best company culture.
If I may ask, why in that interview did you just sit there and not ask any questions? I've passed code interviews where I learned an entire new algorithm on the fly (funny how knowing there is an nlogn solution to an n**2 problem can produce workable solutions).
I wasn't silent for half an hour, just for the first couple minutes; but I didn't write any code (which is what the interviewer was pressing me to do).
(Speaking of entirely new algorithms though, there was an interview question which was a thinly disguised 3SUM, and they expected the very obvious N^2 solution; my interviewers were shocked when I pointed out that the way they had structured the problem, the density was high enough to use a convolution and solve it in N log N time.)
Having covered this only a year previously, my answer was that CAP theory stated that this was theoretically impossible. However, their particular actual problem was slightly more relaxed than requiring full consistency, atomicity, and partition-tolerance. The different servers could only perform limited kinds of status transition - there was no transition that could be performed on more than one server, and status transitions were mostly one-way - most of them couldn't be undone. Also, the field only had to be eventually-consistent, and updates didn't need to be ordered. So, I offered them a way to cheat by splitting the status field up into essentially a log of operations, which naturally resolved the conflicts.
I got the job.
The goal is not to see how many algorithms you know. Algorithms are easy to learn on the job.
The goal is to see how you think in a social setting. How you approach a vague, imperfectly stated problem. Do you ask questions to gather more requirements? State assumptions? Then, based on that, how you try to break it down into smaller pieces. Are there different ways to model the problem or lenses you can apply? Can you think of this as a graph? A tree? A database? Can you incorporate ideas from the interviewer on the fly?
The software engineering job is about taking vague problems and turning them into working code with a help of a team, and the interview process is trying emulate that as best as possible under the weird limitations of an interview.
You can pass an interview without getting any of the "answers" "right" and you can fail them even while blasting out perfect algorithms on the whiteboard.
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.
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.
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.
Then you might actually be driving a lambo now too ;)
So yes I am pretty sure you don't want them at your company.
Of course they could have accepted the assholes and invested ample time and resources to nurture their emotional intelligence, but they would have resorted to that only if they couldn't find enough candidates.
Stress happens. Good management provides a buffer to mitigate it, but sometimes compounding events means it's gonna happen, despite the best planning.
Better to know up-front how people will behave during the worst times than to see the team completely collapse when they're needed the most.
I get that "the interview is stressful", but if you do enough of them, they're not that stressful.
And in my experience, stuff like this is really good at identifying some assholes. I can't find references, but it is based on research, and is applied in other scenarios. It is in fact often recommended you do a version of this prior to marrying someone: Usually some physical activity is picked that both of you suck at, and the goal is not to achieve it, but to see how well you work together in unfamiliar terrain. It's not a great sign if failure to succeed results in a nasty argument ("We could have solved this if you'd done it my way!")
As always, the cost of a toxic hire is much greater than missing out on a good engineer. If this has even a 50% success rate at detecting jerks, it's worth it.
I remember doing an experiment like this as part of my preparation to a new job level. In our case, a natural leader emerged, the previous leader yielded their power, and we solved the game in like 15 minutes with the new leader and suggestions from the others. I guess I was lucky with my group.
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?
These team exercise are not uncommon or unreasonable in grad hiring, but it's a terrible idea to not clarify them up front.
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.
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)
Do you know if a better plan which scales to companies with hundos of thousands of employees?
Author says they were shadowing, not an expert.
To this day I still don't know if it was a test.
Source: I conducted +400 interviews for Amazon. We don't do weird or obscure tests. Your recruiter will explicitly tell you what to expect.
It sounds like a mistake.
Note that this was in 2014 and outside of the US, so our experiences may vary.
As a hiring manager at AWS I conducted similarly many interviews, and can speak to a few things. Firstly, there was plenty of latitude for me to include additional factors in the process, as long as the core elements were present (screening + loop + bar raiser). Recruiters weren't always wonderful at candidate communication, especially when going beyond that baseline. Other HMs certainly included variations and additional steps, so this would not have been without precedent. Finally, this particular team were largely former CTOs and tech CEOs/founders, so there was a relatively high degree of eccentricity and wilfulness present; several of my loop interviews were with these particularly unruly ICs†.
So I could not so confidently rule it a mistake.
——
† Rather memorably, after a solid meeting of minds over the topic of establishing robust SRE practices within public-sector institutions, one such interviewer ran out of the meeting room to fetch me a copy of his favourite book on the topic. This is the only time I received a book for free from Amazon.
I'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.
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.
The reasoning was that with easy problems, a lot of candidates could just write the solution on the whiteboard. You don't learn much about a candidate that way. But if you give them a problem they have to think about, and ask them to think out loud, you learn what problem-solving techniques they have at their disposal. Do they break down the input set into different cases, do they solve an easier version of the problem first, etc. If their code has a bug, can they pick an input that triggers the bug and walk through it step by step. We did hear "in real life I would probably need to get help with this" sometimes, and we counted that as a positive: the candidates shows self-awareness and resourcefulness.
And most importantly, do they turn into an asshole when they don't know the answer? We saw this surprisingly often. Some people got angry and directed it towards us. Some people tried to bluff us into thinking that their solution was correct. Nobody ever walked out on us, but I've heard of that happening.
All we wanted was to screen out people who turn into assholes when they don't have all the answers, and to give bonus points to people who had strategies for attacking a problem that was too hard to solve in their head in two minutes. Sheer cleverness was not high up on our requirements list (we needed a certain number of people who were clever at algorithms and such, but we didn't need everybody to be like that) so candidates that got stuck on a weaker version of the problem but attacked it with grace and resourcefulness often came out as more desirable than candidates that got to a harder version but responded badly when they struggled.
I wish we could still interview people like that.
Am I the only one who will approach things completely differently when "thinking out loud" as opposed to silently?
Much of my problem solving techniques are non-verbal and involve visualizing. But you can't really do that when you have to keep talking and that forces you down a problem solving strategy that can be verbalized better
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.
But suppose you disagree. Let's think about it differently: maybe stress isn't inevitable at work, but being faced with a problem that you can't easily solve is. A candidate needs to be able to deal with that situation, so it's fair to expose them to it in an interview. If they feel a certain amount of stress in that situation, then they need to cope with that amount of stress without being paralyzed by it, and without taking it out on the people around them. If a candidate experiences an unhealthy amount of stress when faced with a situation that is a normal part of the job duties, maybe it's not the right job for them.
In a sense you make my point for me. Interviews are sufficiently high stakes to be inherently stressful and there are always many unknowns in them. I think the interviewers very important job is to establish psychological safety in the interview even while exposing candidates to additional unknowns and difficult problems to solve. Think of it this way... Taking an adversarial approach provides headwinds, being supportive may get the whole interviewer pool further in the problems and better stimulates the supportive environment of a good office culture and environment.
Remember that candidates are interviewing with you too and you can better communicate the environment and get a better read of how they would participate when you better simulate the reality.
So maybe this catches the intersection of "asshole" and "poor situational awareness".
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.
Assuming this is based on something real life, I suppose it was the same underlying idea. Nobody could complete the instructions. They wanted to see what people did.
How do people react to frustration and bad orders?
There is plenty of frustration in software work, and a good %age of incomprehensible or incorrect specifications.
'What?' Sma said, puzzled.
'Turning the maps upside down,' he repeated. 'Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's just heavier and pointing down? Or because it's done according to the galactic plane or something? I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's very upsetting.'
'Zakalwe, I had no idea. Let me offer you my apologies and those of the entire Special Circumstances Section; no, all of Contact; no: the entire Culture; no: all intelligent species.'
'Sma, you remorseless bitch, I'm trying to be serious.'
'No, I don't think you are. Maps...'
'But it's true! They turn them the wrong way up!'
'Then there must,' Diziet Sma said, 'be a reason for it.'
'What?' he demanded.
'Psychology,' Sma and the drone said at the same time.
—— Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks, London: Orbit, 1990
One is a simple task where the test-taker could easily cheat if he wanted to. (Our hero doesn’t.)
In the next, the test-taker is asked to solve a puzzle with complex rules, and the purpose is to measure how long it takes him to figure out that there is no possible solution.
Our hero doesn’t notice the hidden purpose of either test, while most readers probably do. It’s a clever narrative device for a novel aimed at clever young people.
The text of that passage is below. Search for “beans”.
The German General Staff in the old days would have training exercises where the objectives could only be met by disobeying orders.
And the test with the magic dingus with the buttons and levers somehow reminded me of using most enterprise software.
Does this work? How? Isn't that the interesting part here?
The fact this test exists is uninteresting.
When the reality is far far less interesting: the combination of a pathological speech condition (which I covered up early as a child by mumbling a lot and thus picked up some bad enunciation habits), and inheriting a deep voice historically made me come off as bored and disinterested when really...I just have one of those voices that doesn't come across as exactly.... 'animated' when it hits your ears for the first time.
In fact...think Shaquille O'Neil and you're pretty close to how it sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROPsn3O6JAw
ahh yes, the vocal analog of "resting bitch face". A true shame.
Those quirks are unfortunate. I have a tendency to laugh when nervous and I've had some situations where I was interpreted as being inappropriate to some solemn situations.
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.
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.
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).
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.
When I go to a job interview I expect to be asked honest questions and intend to give honest answers. You want me to do a team activity? Ok, fair. You're giving me and a bunch of people a problem you *know* we can't solve, just to watch us panic? That. That just feels wrong.
I am a strong opponent of the "in this company we're like a family" discourse, but I also like to work for people that I don't dislike. If this is an asshole detection test, I'm afraid I just detected the company.
The strange thing for me was a weird day of interaction with a group of around 30 other new hires. We were divided into teams and had to work together to solve problems, etc. I always suspected that we were not being trained but instead graded on some sort of scale by those leading the exercises.
I worked at IBM for 5 years and never discovered what that was about.
because of this I really like to get into casual friendly convos early, with potential bosses or coworkers
It's not quite an "asshole test" or a Kobayashi Maru or anything like that – but a general "can you communicate and collaborate effectively with others on a technical topic" test. I guess it does highlight "asshole" personalities sometimes, but I'd say rather than offering a negative signal it tends to more effectively highlight good candidates.
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?
Think about that for a second. We chose to have nothing than hire an asshole.
I can think of 100's of other personal behaviors that would be worse or just as bad as being an asshole. Passive aggressive behavior, secretly taking credit for someone's work, backstabbing and rallying others against someone in review cycles, ... The fact that being an asshole gets so much attention may be a symptom of the problems people are trying to root cause and are converging on an incorrect cause.
ie. chances are that you're not having the issues you're having in your org because people are being assholes, but because they're incompetent, smile in your face and sabotage you later, cozy up to the boss to get promoted or a multitude of other shitty attitudes that often go under the radar.
But I feel like there's a bit of a flaw in their logic here; the kind of stress you feel when interviewing, competitively I might add, for what I can only assume is a prestigious position is going to be 100% different to the stress you'd face in that role day to day. So the reactions you observe in a weird test like this are probably only vaguely representative of how the candidates ACTUALLY behave day to day.
I'll happily change my mind if there's some research to back this up, but I have the strongest feeling this is just something a manager has dreamt up based on a hunch.
After some experience with it I figured out that it wasn't the task or who had more "mic time", but who would show leadership skills that mattered.
As usually everyone wanted to talk, what I did was just to orchestrate who said what, making no point on the matter, just controlling the turns and asking "what do you think about Anne's point Dave?". Worked like a charm.
I don’t think we even care in this day and age with hiring if someone is an asshole. Most of the companies I’ve worked at have had many of them in various forms. (Or just simply - not pleasant people) It’s trivial to fake in any interview format.
I have no proof, but after dealing with them for 25 years, I have no doubt.
In 2006 I went to a "new grads hiring day" at a large company, and one of the steps looked just like this, except I think we were divided in groups of eight.
My team solved the problem at the last second and we all passed to the next round.
But I'm wondering whether I can pass if I don't speak up at all? Or just passively play along?
Open face, closed thoughts.
How to handle failure and group behaviour is one of key … you can see sone very strange bevahiour reported.
Like a professor turned into communist mode and asked why not arrested her senior, when she tried to fake her age. People went crazy under pressure.
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.