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IBM's Asshole Test

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Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#201

Post by Melatonic »

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…

Did you talk to the interviewer at all during this? I could see them wanting to know your thought process to solving an unsolveable problem but otherwise this seems a little far fetched. Probably they just really liked you?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#202

Post by brewdad »

cmckn wrote: post #151
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's understandable that people might be stressed or upset, but if they take it out on people they consider beneath them that's not a good sign.

> they consider beneath them 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.

Let's remove some of the inflammatory language and look at more as this person doesn't "matter" to me. If I think the taxi driver is just a taxi driver, I am going to treat them as I would any person I'm not likely to meet again. Ideally, with respect but when one's guard is down an asshole is more likely to act like one.

In the interview room, any candidate will be on their best behavior since impressing those people "matters" greatly. Same for the behavioral lunch sessions that many companies also use. If I have any sense, I'm going to recognize that this is still part of the "interview" even though we may be at a restaurant offsite discussing anything from the job to the Yankees pitchers.

The argument, that I tend to agree with, is that gathering info from the taxi driver is a better indicator of true character. I don't expect the taxi driver to deliver a full psychological report but I would like to know if they felt mistreated in some way.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#203

Post by jokab »

hnarn wrote: post #134
cmckn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated. That makes about as much sense as saying that you shouldn’t be held responsible for stealing office supplies because no one informed you that there were cameras installed. If you treat cab drivers and other service personnel badly, that’s because you’re a shit person. It’s really that simple. I’ve…

#realtalk

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#204

Post by genewitch »

jameshart wrote: post #164
cmckn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Asking for character references from someone who has interacted with a candidate is perfectly fine. I think where this might get dodgy is with the possibility that some of the candidates might have tipped this driver, which puts us in the position of asking for an opinion about several candidates from someone who might have been compensated by some of them.

if i were to institute something like this, the driver would be fairly (and well) compensated to do this task. Any tips would be handed over at the end, so there's no consideration of compensation involved. Obviously tipping is a data point, but it wouldn't influence the drivers report beyond that checkbox.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#205

Post by ramraj07 »

metadat wrote: post #168
eropple wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but for my money, a company that does that isn't a company to work for. I don't work for free and you shouldn't either.

Honest question: What difference does it make whether you work on a l33tcode question or a real problem in the interview? At least the real problem has a chance of being interesting. Sometimes I do give candidates examples of real challenges we're facing. The purpose is not to get anything for free, but rather to see if they're good at coming up with new ideas. It also gets boring asking the same questions that may o…

Leetcode is fine. Once a dude asked me to write out merge sort. Like, I’m not from a CS bg (I suppose that wouldn’t matter). And I literally did look at merge and other sorts two days back. But that didn’t matter, the only way you can write merge sort is if you memorize it (or spend an inordinate amount of time writing sorting algos). I didn’t get that job, but I’ve been monitoring that company and they’re not doing that well anyway. Perhaps a coincidence?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#206

Post by HWR_14 »

tomatowurst wrote: post #88
Flankk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking from experience or from the ass? In my experience a startup is all consuming.

tarsnap is a one man show and he's not building a startup. he could've easily worked at Google, take advantage of the rising stock prices AND continue work on his SaaS. Lot of us do exactly that because it doesn't make sense to leave a good paying job at a large company to take on tremendous risk at as you said, consuming endeavour with small probability of success (+90% failure rate). I don't get why people are so u…

> he could've easily worked at Google, take advantage of the rising stock prices AND continue work on his SaaS.

Wouldn't Google then own all the code he wrote, even on his own SaaS sideproject?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#207

Post by l33t2328 »

dfabulich wrote: post #185
dudeinjapan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I don’t think it’s hard to articulate why. The reason why is that expected value places too much emphasis on low probability edge cases.

With 75% probability, you make at most 4 dollars. There’s almost a 94% chance you make less than 40 dollars.

As humans, we evaluate improvable events as not mattering so much.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#208

Post by Aachen »

itronitron wrote: post #15
tantalor wrote: post #7

> You see who turns into an asshole under pressure Does this work? How? Isn't that the interesting part here? The fact this test exists is uninteresting.

This is also what many internships are for.

I'm probably from a different culture than you so this is new to me. Care to elaborate? Am I picturing it right that someone is put under stress for six months without pay (or at least for pay that might barely cover base rent in my experience) to see if they can deal with stress without burning out or doing a worse job?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#209

Post by ALittleLight »

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 have seen several stories like this - the janitor, or secretary, or whoever is actually a trusted individual who is the true judge of character. To me, it seems implausible, more of a "feel good" story, but it also seems ill advised. Does the driver know he's part of the loop? Does the driver attend the debrief? Does the driver distinguish between great, normal, sub-normal, and bad social skills? What portion of jerks would be jerks to a single specific tax driver? Even a big jerk probably isn't a jerk to everyone all the time, and even a nice person may be rude or obnoxious occasionally.

Stories like this also remind me of the "Magical Negro" trope where a simple but helpful black person offers sage advise or magic to help the protagonists out of a jam. These "The taxi driver was your real interviewer" stories don't (necessarily) have a racial element, but it's the same, magic wisdom of simple lower class folk idea.

When two people don't get along it's hard to find the objective truth by talking to one of them. Maybe the candidate didn't talk to the taxi driver because he was nervously thinking about the interviewer and that came off to the driver as aloof or arrogant. Maybe the driver didn't like the candidate's race, gender, experience, age, etc. Maybe something was said that was misunderstood by one or both parties. Point is - it's a very weak test.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#210

Post by cbsmith »

Melatonic wrote: post #190
hindsightbias wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the comment was more that the interview doesn't stop when you leave the office...
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