331–340 of 604 posts
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…
As someone who worked at IBM for 6 years, I'm fairly sure no one in management above me had to go through that asshole test.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I'm sitting here wondering how people have bad interactions with flight attendants? Literally 90% of the words I say to them are: Hello, how are you. Thank you. Yes, water please. Have a good day. I think I asked once for a pillow (usually on Redeyes they hand them out) I've never had a fight attendant decline my request, or complain about it...
People sometimes have nonstandard needs, or get sick, or need to deal with another passenger's overly aggressive behavior. It's more about how the flight attendants react to those situations than to standard service.
In Robert Heinlein's early juvenile novel Space Cadet, the applicants are given a device and a set of instructions. The instructions make no sense for the device in question. Assuming this is based on something real life, I suppose it was the same underlying idea. Nobody could complete the instructions. They wanted to see what people did. How do people react to frustration and bad orders? There is plenty of frustrati…
One is a simple task where the test-taker could easily cheat if he wanted to. (Our hero doesn’t.)
In the next, the test-taker is asked to solve a puzzle with complex rules, and the purpose is to measure how long it takes him to figure out that there is no possible solution.
Our hero doesn’t notice the hidden purpose of either test, while most readers probably do. It’s a clever narrative device for a novel aimed at clever young people.
The text of that passage is below. Search for “beans”.
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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.
Seriously, compare the employees of United vs Southwest and there's a huge difference in attitude. Southwest employees seem happy, friendly, helpful, while United... Not.
I switched to Delta, and I'm much happier.
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> 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)…
> 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.
Building any size of a durable business is not for everyone. Well-resourced, intelligent, trained people fail for all kinds of reasons, and that's while working on it full-time.
Unless it's not important to you that it ultimately succeeds (and it's essentially a hobby production), eventually, your business will be subject to competition and market pressure -- to gain and retain market share.
What odds do you think you have of building and holding on to that if you're trying to squeeze it into your down time from your full-time job that presumably already requires your full mental energy 40 hours a week? Why put that energy into something that is going to fail in what is ultimately a competitive market? Why not just put those resources into an index fund or real estate?
Until you have significant experience bringing new products to market (and even then), achieving any kind of a durable go to market success with a new one is never trivial, whether you're building a niche product or a venture backed scaler.
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…
These team exercise are not uncommon or unreasonable in grad hiring, but it's a terrible idea to not clarify them up front.
But I feel like there's a bit of a flaw in their logic here; the kind of stress you feel when interviewing, competitively I might add, for what I can only assume is a prestigious position is going to be 100% different to the stress you'd face in that role day to day. So the reactions you observe in a weird test like this are probably only vaguely representative of how the candidates ACTUALLY behave day to day.
I'll happily change my mind if there's some research to back this up, but I have the strongest feeling this is just something a manager has dreamt up based on a hunch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One difference you might see is that the stories all have increased rewards for good behavior. Good behavior isn't something that's rewarded outside of childhood, it's just expected to be your default as an adult. The comments above talk about punishment for bad behavior, which happens all day every day. Nobody cares about giving the candidate a 'fair shake' because if you know and trust someone enough to listen to t…
> Good behavior isn't something that's rewarded outside of childhood Not true! Yesterday I walked out of a Home Depot with an unpaid drill bit in my shirt pocket (my hands were full). I discovered my error when I reached the car. I went back to pay, and got a 20% discount for being honest!