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IBM's Asshole Test

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Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#181

Post by op00to »

Victerius wrote: post #122
banana_giraffe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once walked into an interview where some code was already written on a whiteboard. It was presented to me as a "find the problem with the code" sort of puzzle, and I pointed out the one big logic problem with it's algorithm and wrote a quick fix. The interviewer responded with "hold on", and grabbed a colleague, pointed at the whiteboard, and the colleague said "yes! that'll fix it!" and ran off. I was offered the…

> I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. Out of curiosity, why?

They are so understaffed they need to use interviewees to do their work! Bad news!

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#182

Post by soheil »

This is a problem of active vs passive communication.

I can think of 100's of other personal behaviors that would be worse or just as bad as being an asshole. Passive aggressive behavior, secretly taking credit for someone's work, backstabbing and rallying others against someone in review cycles, ... The fact that being an asshole gets so much attention may be a symptom of the problems people are trying to root cause and are converging on an incorrect cause.

ie. chances are that you're not having the issues you're having in your org because people are being assholes, but because they're incompetent, smile in your face and sabotage you later, cozy up to the boss to get promoted or a multitude of other shitty attitudes that often go under the radar.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#183

Post by sargun »

Bahamut wrote: post #120
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…

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.

A strong part of me believes that United indexes on how much of an asshole the person can be. /s.

But, seriously, I feel like if you're using a potential employer's services, you should assume they're taking that into account when they're hiring you.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#184

Post by TameAntelope »

slg wrote: post #145

Honestly I see two asshole tests here. Some of the candidates failed the first one. IBM failed the other. This type of dishonest and unnecessarily stressful approach tells me that I probably don't want to be working there. Even just professing that a candidate needs to work well under stress is somewhat of a red flag. Why are your employees under so much stress? I am software developer not a trauma surgeon. If I am u…

Meh, I definitely want to filter out people who can't handle situations like this, because honestly they come up all the time. Uncertainty in ownership, data not matching up, clarity lacking; how people behave in these scenarios is basically how they'll behave at their job.

I don't think it's an "asshole" behavior to induce stress during an interview and observe results. What else are you supposed to do?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#185

Post by dfabulich »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #165
cperciva wrote: post #31

When I interviewed at Google in 2006, one of the interviewers asked me to write code for solving a particular problem. I replied along the lines of "ok I need to think about this, it's not obvious how to solve it" and started thinking. Time ticked away. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The interviewer started reminding me that he needed me to write some code and if there wasn't anything for him to copy dow…

I had something like this too for a quant trading interview. It was one of those problems about flipping a coin, heads doubles your money and tails you lose everything, "how much would you pay to play the game?" If forget the nuance of the question but when I did the math on the whiteboard, the expected value was 1 i.e. the same amount one wagers. At that point I said, "Well, I guess I could pay for the entertainment…

That sounds almost like the St. Petersburg Paradox. (But in the paradoxical version, you keep whatever's in the pot; you don't lose everything at the end.)

The St. Petersburg game has an infinite expected payout! But most people would only be willing to wager $20 or so, and it's hard to articulate exactly why.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#186

Post by joatmon-snoo »

cperciva wrote: post #95
readams wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just because the interviewing tool you have to put your notes into at Google takes text and not pictures :-). The hiring committee will actually look at this, and this is a different person from the interviewer.

Ok, but they were transcribing from the whiteboard onto paper. So everything I wrote must have been transcribed twice before it reached the hiring committee.

2006 was... early. I don't remember when HCs were formed, but there's no way the internal ATS had any level of sophistication, if it even existed then.

(Admittedly this is all years before my time.)

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#188

Post by ebrewste »

We used to have a very basic C whiteboard test for junior devs. Super simple "find the bugs" test. The best technical performance I ever saw was a guy that walked up to the board, swiped with the marker to mark the bugs like he was swatting flies (found every bug correctly). He finished the test in maybe 10 seconds, where typical was five minutes or more. He sat down in a huff. I didn't know we had an asshole test until that moment. I thanked him for coming in and showed him out. I'm so glad I never had to work with him.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#189

Post by zcw100 »

It sounds nice and makes a great story until you see all the exceptions being made. “He was a jerk but he did go to MIT”, “he was a jerk but his father is good friends with the CEO”, “he was a jerk but I’m a jerk and he reminds me of myself” but it won’t be that honest it will be more like “ he wasn’t a jerk he is just a natural leader and it was everyone else’s fault for not recognizing that and falling in line”

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#190

Post by Melatonic »

hindsightbias wrote: post #146
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…

Was told if you interview with the FBI, the interview starts the moment you go through the door. And be careful what you say at the bar.

The FBI has a bar inside their offices?
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