The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
manuel.darcemont.fr
The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#2Anyone who spends time fixing a coffee machine is not earning their extremely high staff engineer salary.
My time is not suited to fixing coffee machines. People paid literally 1/6th what I am are tasked for that.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#3Anyone who spends time fixing a coffee machine is not earning their extremely high staff engineer salary. My time is not suited to fixing coffee machines. People paid literally 1/6th what I am are tasked for that.
It would be good to message the person in charge of fixing or replacing it. All too often, others assume someone else already contacted them. Then, prepare a cup of tea and return to work.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#4Anyone who spends time fixing a coffee machine is not earning their extremely high staff engineer salary. My time is not suited to fixing coffee machines. People paid literally 1/6th what I am are tasked for that.
Is this the same reason you wouldn’t pick up trash on the floor?
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#5Anyone who spends time fixing a coffee machine is not earning their extremely high staff engineer salary. My time is not suited to fixing coffee machines. People paid literally 1/6th what I am are tasked for that.
From TFA : “if the office coffee machine broke down, how would the candidate react? Would they try to fix it, or would they wait for the office manager or the founder to do it instead?”
I guess we know what kind of candidate you would be :)
The engineer in me would at least try to characterize the problem. It might be something simple! And to flip your argument around, if it’s something you can fix in a minute, it’s going to be more expensive to call someone else to do it.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#6Is that a LinkedIn post? It's wordy, doesn't explain anything, and tries to be a simple remedy to a complex problem. A problem irrelevant to the task to boot.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#7Anyone who spends time fixing a coffee machine is not earning their extremely high staff engineer salary. My time is not suited to fixing coffee machines. People paid literally 1/6th what I am are tasked for that.
It is a "cultural fit" test, a cousin of "how many golf balls can you put in a manhole cover" or whatever. The question aims to figure out if you're going to take on certain tasks, and how you would take them on; especially in the frame of something outside your vocation, and if you're a "doer" or not. He states this frame explicitly in the post. Do you tackle the problem, and how, or do you throw your hands up, stating that it's someone else's problem?
You definitely will not get hired by that guy: you misunderstood the question.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#8I’m not sure we can expect complete strangers who are not yet part of an organization to feel certain ownership that is necessary to take it upon themselves to try to fix something.
If you make it worse, for example, are they going to charge you for breaking it?
It’s kind of like when a kid, you don’t go into your friend’s house’s fridge unless you’re invited to open it, at least the first time visiting.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#9These sorts of “gotcha” tests are silly. People are complicated, with many different personalities and behaviors. I can think of many reasons an excellent engineer might choose not to fix a broken coffee machine, especially in the stress of an interview.
If you want to know how somebody will work on the job, ask them to demonstrate the skills used on the actual job. This is called a “work sample interview.” (Leetcode problems don’t count, because most jobs don’t look like that. Neither do whiteboard interviews, for the same reason.)
If you want to know how somebody will behave in various situations, ask them to describe concrete examples of how they’ve reacted to those situations. Listen for deflection to hypotheticals and redirect towards lived experience. This is called a “behavioral interview.”
Don’t use tricks and gotchas.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#10"if the office coffee machine broke down, how would the candidate react?"
I don't drink coffee, so I would have no idea it was broken in the first place.
But I think the correct answer to this is to check if something obvious is broken, and if you can't determine the issue within about five minutes, tell HR that it is broken. They'll know what to do.