Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

I use my infinite resources to become benevolent dictator of Earth.

With my endless wealth I prevent climate change, provide the basic needs of every person on the planet, educate the world, and set up a global system of sustainable reproduction. I have infinite resources so I assume it's not eugenics or something dystopian, but more a collective human understanding of responsibility. Finally, with our future ensured, I dedicate as many of the world's top minds as possible to preserving my own life at any cost.

Once I have achieved immortality, likely by transplanting my mind into a robot body that can be updated over time so I remain the most advanced being on the planet, I steer the course of human history far into the future. All human suffering is ended. We all work as one to better ourselves. We spend decades, centuries, millennia improving not only our society, but our technology for inserting ping pong balls into 747s.

Under my kind leadership as an immortal god-king of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence, humanity becomes the dominant species in a surprisingly crowded universe. With each new species we meet, we find new allies in our advancement. Entire galaxies unite under my rule and never-ending resources, each furthering my transcendence of life and the speed at which we can put small plastic balls into extremely archaic public transportation.

Finally, at the far end of time, when there is nothing left to learn, no secret of the universe left unknown to me—I am now a single bio-mechanical entity composed of all intelligent life in existence—my setup is complete. Using technology so advanced that it cannot be described by words we have so far invented, technology so unimaginable it exceeds the power we ascribe to magic, I fill the plane. It is instantaneous. There is no time during which the plane is being filled. There is only before and after it was filled.

The creator of the universe descends on its final moments. The being sees the plane. It weeps for the beauty its children have created.

I think it has more to do with impostor syndrome and a fear that a new person will expose them as the frauds they perceive themselves as.

In my experience, sometimes that fear is justified. The people whom I've run across who are the most condescending to engineers who "haven't proved themselves" often have the most lax coding standards on the team. They're often the ones who build Rube Goldberg programs and who never document their work - you can't be replaced if nobody knows how your core programs work.

But short of that, the right number is zero on the interview circuit. You can employ jerks if you have to, but don't put them in more positions where they have to interact with others than necessary. Give them the legacy products where you can't staff a team of more than one qualified person anyway. Give them an office. And keep the door closed.

Remember that a jerk is basically a 0.1x developer - an employee who causes other employees to lose productivity by spending time working around the jerkiness, taking a morale hit, etc. Even a remarkably productive jerk at best only compensates for their negative effect on people they work with, and most jerks are not consistently remarkably productive. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best... is a good example of a company learning that lesson a little too late. A company that signals that they trust their jerks enough to make hiring decisions and to represent the company's culture to potential new hires is a company that signals they're actively cool with jerks (or incapable of noticing, which has the same effect).

If a jerk makes a good employee unhappy and they leave, the jerk is a net negative. And if you keep employing the jerks, you'll find yourself with a 0.5 jerk coefficient on your hands very quickly.

How is that relevant to the practice of "memorizing enough canned answers to most of these dang questions"?