IBM's Asshole Test

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.