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Anyone 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?
I think I would fail this test since most coffee machines are hard to repair unless it is something trivial and the idea of just repairing something is kind of odd. A better answer might be you work with the office manager, go to the store and grab a temporary one.
I also think this is a terrible idea for other reasons:
1. You are working at a small company and its easy to communicate, its broken and you are going to fix it. However, focus is critical even if it doesn't feel like it all the time.
2. It is hard to tell but it seems like saying you would talk to the office manager would cause you to fail but this seems like the most rational answer. You should work with them and see if you can fix it together or at least keep them in the loop.
Bias for action is great but you also need people who can focus, know what they are good at, and communicate with others.
edit: formatting (need to not post while raging)
This feels like one of those things that should be openly explained as part of the culture instead of "guess our opinion". Anything else seems like reading the tea leaves that day to make hiring decisions.
Anecdotally, I've had two opposite experiences just like this. In the first I was walking and talking with the CEO about something important our team was working on when we came to a bunch of water on the floor (enough that clearly there was a problem like a broken pipe or fridge issue in the next room). He stepped over it but I stopped, completely distracted, and said shouldn't we do something about this? His response was short but poignant - he said we don't know the situation, we have great people that he trusts whose domain IS handling that kind of thing, and that there is only so much time in the day and that we, the CEO and a VP, needed to intentionally focus on big things only we could effectively handle even if that meant water on the floor for a little while longer.
I've also had the opposite experience where someone took it upon themselves to redesign one of the flows in our product because they (correctly) didn't think it served customers well. This person put a ton of good faith effort into this and produced a decent looking wireframe for a ux that didn't correctly understand how things work or what our goals for the project were. In fact this already had a good redesign that existed and was on the roadmap but he apparently hadn't been told about it. When he showed his design to people (directly to engineers asking them to build it instead of their actual tasks...) it caused a bunch of awkwardness for him and others. There was more drama after his manager continued to handle it poorly but all of it could have been avoided by more communication in any direction before deciding to just go do something outside of your normal zone.
These are just anecdotes but they highlight how I feel about this; I think "testing" people on how they respond to situations like this is both broken and disrespectful. The right amount of "just go fix it" is extremely subjective and depends on the culture of the company around you, how specialized the task that needs doing is, and the priority of what you could/should be doing instead.
To be clear I think a "doer" attitude is very valuable; I just don't think this is a fair or high signal way to evaluate it.
Anyone 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 is a "cultural fit" test, a cousin of "how many golf balls can you put in a manhole cover" or whatever. The question aims to figure out if you're going to take on certain tasks, and how you would take them on; especially in the frame of something outside your vocation, and if you're a "doer" or not. He states this frame explicitly in the post. Do you tackle the problem, and how, or do you throw your hands up, stat…
Or was it a stupid trap like the INTP psychological scam? How is it related to my future job?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 going to be more expensive to call someone else to do it. The engineer in me would report it to the office manager so they can deal with getting the right people to do it. We have fancy/expensive/complicated superautomatic coffee machines…
So much this. I feel like the article is selecting for the d-k peak of mt stupid; unearned confidence without a deep understanding of the situation.
These 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 t…
The correlation is gone on a larger sample https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25426329
Seriously though, it’s not a good question since it depends not only on the person, but also on the organisation. Sometimes the right response is to try and fix it, sometimes to report it to office management, and even in some organisations they’ve been so on the ball there would be no reason to even report it because they’d havea repair organised already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 going to be more expensive to call someone else to do it. The engineer in me would report it to the office manager so they can deal with getting the right people to do it. We have fancy/expensive/complicated superautomatic coffee machines…
Engineering is also about knowing stuff. If you don’t know these things about the appliances you use every day as part of your work routine, and it seems you can’t be bothered to even find out, that also speaks to what kind of candidate you’d be.