I thought I'd more or less seen most MBA nonsense around these days, but oh boy this is something else entirely. In order to assess a candidate, you're gonna think in your head "what do I think this person would do if the coffee machine broke down". You base your hiring decision for a person you just met and know more or less nothing about on what you made up in your head in a complete shower thought scenario.
The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#12These 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…
This test is even more nonsense than that, the idea isn't even to have them try and fix it, the idea is to think in your head what you think they would do.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#13Anyone 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’s true in that there is comparative advantage in not doing it.
That’s what makes it a cultural scissor, and therefore a useful discriminator: there is no right answer, but there is definitely one kind of person these guys are selecting for.
I also like working with the kind of person who sometimes eschews comparative advantage. More than a decade ago, a startup I was at had our conference.
We ran barebones: front desk, ushers, lighting, everything. Run by members of the team. I was on engineering, at the front desk. It was great fun. Our customers loved it.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#14Enthusiasm is traditionally the straightforward signal to capture this.
I get that it’s intangible and could be faked to some degree but it also sometimes comes off so clearly and always leads to good outcomes in my experience.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#15These 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…
Yup, exactly! I’m not even convinced this person is the kind that would stop on the side of the road when they see someone with a broken down car. Are they the type that would try to see if they could fix it? If not, why not? Why would it be different from this interview, on the flip side why would one expect all travelers to be good samaritans?
It’s great if this is this person’s personality, but not everyone is like this.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#16Anyone 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?
Trash on the flor has a known quick solution, a broken coffee machine doesn't and the fix often needs to be coordinated or you easily call in multiple people to repair it etc.
In general if a task needs to be coordinated you shouldn't try to do it yourself, at best you should notify a coordinator but usually they are already aware of it and you are just spamming them.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#17I look forward to the next couple posts in this series: The Leaky Faucet Test and The Clogged Toilet Test.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#18These 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…
> 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.)
They do count, job sample tests doesn't need to be exactly like the job just similar. There is correlation between performance on those tests with performance on the job, far from perfect but its much better than the zero correlation you get from these cultural fit tests or free form discussions.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#19Anyone 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…
Typically when you buy an expensive percolator it comes with a service and supplies contract that gives you callout times and weekly deliveries. Why would you risk breaking something that cost thousands of dollars and risk voiding that contract?
Even something as “simple” as a commercial percolator has a lot behind it that we might not know about. Unless it’s a water line issue I wouldn’t touch it.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#20What happens if I break your beloved coffee machine in the process? If I'm the new guy I'm not keen to find out.