Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM's Asshole Test

johnpublic.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 604 posts

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#171

Post by UUID_KING »

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like working with a broad range of personality types.

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?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#172

Post by Closi »

bjourne wrote: post #89
Closi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't require a degree in human psychology to evaluate if someone is a team player in a group assessment. 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…

Yes, you do need a degree. However you react in this artificial situation in which you are grouped up with seven stranger has no bearing on your performance as an engineer. Furthermore, if you had a degree in psychology and wanted to perform an experiment like this you would need to seek approval from an ethics committee and they would turn down your request because the experiment is fucking stupid. Whoever devised t…

You need a degree and an ethics committee in order to do a simple group task interview?!

We are seeing how people can work in a team to complete a simple task to help a hiring decision, not replicating the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Do we need professional actors and casting directors to judge the role-play excercises? We should probably get journalists to do the interviews too.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#173

Post by Aachen »

yowlingcat wrote: post #130
tomatowurst wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you owned stock options and invested it in Google with portion of your salary going to it, you absolutely would be looking at extreme returns. The power of compounded returns is still not clear to some I see. With that money you could've funded any side project that generates recurring revenue. I don't get why you should quit your job, take on tremendous amount of risk for a highly improbable outcome with heavy su…

> I don't get why you should quit your job, take on tremendous amount of risk for a highly improbable outcome with heavy survivorship bias. For someone like you? I'd say you shouldn't. The correct option for the vast majority of people is to stay at a stable, low risk high paying corporate job and live a comfortable upper-middle class life. For other people...it's not that much risk if you're good at fundraising, hir…

> For someone like you?

Do you know each other or is this a judgement of character based off the few words in the above comments?

What they wrote sounds like good sense in general. A bit materialistic and generalizing perhaps, I wouldn't want a dino juice sapper and I have a lot of trouble doing pointless work let alone outright manipulative like adtech (but that's just me, evidently there's plenty on the other side), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be generally smart to accept a 4-day work week offer for presumably a high salary in addition to starting something with a high failure chance. But we don't know about savings or aspirations or industry knowledge or investors cperciva might have had, hence it's a bit generalizing, even if it's generally sensible.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#174

Post by facet1ous »

metadat wrote: post #162
Bahamut wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of airline companies doing similar when interviewing flight attendants - United will fly you to Newark to interview, but often there will be people shadowing candidates to see how they behave during their travels and that feedback is taken into account when evaluating candidates.

It's impressive if they have the resources and sophistication to really execute on this.

They could just note to flight attendants that there are passengers interviewing w/ the airline and have them raise any red flags pretty easily.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#175

Post by otterley »

jackblemming wrote: post #56
WisNorCan wrote: post #17

I am fairly sure Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk would have failed this test. Are you better off having them at your company or not?

Shockingly, there's plenty of competent CEOs who aren't assholes, but we don't idolize them because Americans love the idea of the genius asshole.

Warren Buffett being a model example of a non-asshole CEO. Same with Kenneth Chenault at American Express, Indra Nooyi at Pepsi, and countless others.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#176

Post by davesque »

I hear this and can't help but think IBM ended up with a bunch of "yes" men and women that wouldn't react appropriately to a bad situation. Given the performance of the company, I would guess I'm right.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#177

Post by sliken »

cmckn wrote: post #93
eej71 wrote: post #67

Decades ago, in the days before uber, my employer would fly in candidates from college campuses as part of an onsite interview. The candidate would fly in the night before and we relied on a taxi service to bring the candidate to the hotel. Then in the morning the same service would bring them to the onsite and of course bring them back to the airport at the end. It was a whole curated process. Little did the candida…

Hm, I don't dig this. I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated. People are stressed heading into an interview, and may be upset afterwards. Unless they're interviewing for a public-facing role, I don't see how this behavior is relevant to the job; and discussing it with a hiring committee invites all sorts of "cultural fit" biases that make…

If you want a healthy organization you need to be able to trust people, even when you can't watch them. This requires things like lack of deception, treating people decently, not lying, not stealing (physical or credit for ideas/work accomplished), etc.

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.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#179

Post by actually_a_dog »

hedora wrote: post #148
kragen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that fail unless your thinking is as slow as speech?

Not if you can compress your thinking it into something short. Good code interviews test communication skills too.

No, they don't, generally. When was the last time you were required to compose code in a real world situation, in front of someone, while talking through your thought process, all under time pressure and in a high-stakes environment?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#180

Post by IggleSniggle »

dkarl wrote: post #153

It's funny, the way we used to do coding interviews was to systematically ramp up the difficulty of the problem until the candidate struggled. 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-solv…

Why can’t you?
Post reply on HN