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IBM's Asshole Test

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Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#491

Post by npteljes »

dinom wrote: post #240
throwaway6532 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of makes you wonder where all the assholes work?

Hmm... that's an interesting question. Could it be that groupthink turns the whole idea on it's head and such a process would just end up hiring nice but mediocre people? They say Steve Jobs could be a giant a$$hole at times. I've also heard that George Patton wasn't always a particularly lovable guy. Ultimately all people have shortcomings and so mining their gifts comes with a cost. I'm not strictly trying to make…

>just end up hiring nice but mediocre people

I think a company can scale better with nice mediocre employees, rather than hardworking assholes. Hugely dependent on domain of course, some are more technical than others, and there are other factors too. But if no specialist talent is needed, I think a company is better off with okay but nice talent. The individual niceness will translate into productive communication, which sets a healthy atmosphere, which leads to less stress, lower employee turnover, and in general a less problematic team and workplace in general.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#492

Post by JadeNB »

caf wrote: post #117
krono wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that…

There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.

> There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.

Or perhaps when you don't know it can't (yet) be solved.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#494

Post by Tepix »

erikerikson wrote: post #417

I've read a lot of these comments and it honestly seems like many people here have failed the HN version of this test while helping me understand why I've failed so many interviews... People have written about: * lying to, tricking, and misleading candidates * making problems harder and harder or exerting pressure to observe behavior under duress * forcing people to socialize in a mentally open state with someone tha…

The work environment may be stressful at times, it's very valuable for the employer to know how a candidate will behave in these situations, don't you agree?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#495

Post by rendall »

Tepix wrote: post #494
erikerikson wrote: post #417

I've read a lot of these comments and it honestly seems like many people here have failed the HN version of this test while helping me understand why I've failed so many interviews... People have written about: * lying to, tricking, and misleading candidates * making problems harder and harder or exerting pressure to observe behavior under duress * forcing people to socialize in a mentally open state with someone tha…

The work environment may be stressful at times, it's very valuable for the employer to know how a candidate will behave in these situations, don't you agree?

> The work environment may be stressful at times...

If you're talking about SWE or adjacent, why?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#496

Post by mnw21cam »

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…

My first job interview out of university, I was asked how to have separate independent database servers, each able to read/write to the same status field, synchronised between them over an unreliable network, with consistent and atomic updates being written by any of the servers.

Having covered this only a year previously, my answer was that CAP theory stated that this was theoretically impossible. However, their particular actual problem was slightly more relaxed than requiring full consistency, atomicity, and partition-tolerance. The different servers could only perform limited kinds of status transition - there was no transition that could be performed on more than one server, and status transitions were mostly one-way - most of them couldn't be undone. Also, the field only had to be eventually-consistent, and updates didn't need to be ordered. So, I offered them a way to cheat by splitting the status field up into essentially a log of operations, which naturally resolved the conflicts.

I got the job.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#497

Post by wodenokoto »

bityard wrote: post #157
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 interviewed with Google once around the same time frame. The position I interviewed for was something along the lines of datacenter operations. I did my interview from a local Google sales office and interviewed with three other employees via video call. This was around the time that Skype was fairly new, but whatever software they were using was clearly internal to Google. Anyway, I ended up talking with 3 enginee…

I had a similar interview question at google for about a clients who’s ads didn’t show up or something and I had to troubleshoot.

The process just seemed to be “keep asking what else it could be indefinitely”

Didn’t get it. “Not a cultural fit”, or something. Kinda wished they’d told me more detailed what the problem was.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#498

Post by wodenokoto »

inopinatus wrote: post #166

When I interviewed with AWS, half the loop interviews were with remote staff. I was shown to a videoconferencing room and asked to wait. There was a pile of VC equipment but it wasn't connected. With five minutes before we were due to start, I decided this was part of the interview and plugged stuff in myself, powered it on, and clicked through some boot-time screens, guessing at the right inputs. A few minutes later…

Didn’t there used to be stories on HN about a particular VC backed company where first day at work you’d be met with all the parts of a desktop computer and you had to assemble it yourself.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#499

Post by jhugo »

ALittleLight wrote: post #465
smegsicle wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd actually bet that homophobia is more common among immigrant taxi drivers i wonder which of your demographics predisposes you to judge such people in this way?

Violence against homosexuals is pretty common in South and Central America - which is where most of recent American immigrants are from. Here's an example from CNN[1] "Latin America offers a contradictory narrative: The region has the highest rates of violence against the LGBT community, according to research done by Transgender Europe, a non-governmental organization, but it also has some of the most progressive law…

Perhaps, but it also seems intuitive to me that people who choose to (/ have the opportunity to) leave a country (i.e. immigrants) may not be representative of that country as a whole.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#500

Post by ramraj07 »

dirkt wrote: post #473
ramraj07 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the only way you can write merge sort is if you memorize it Nah. You only have to remember the central idea (if you have two sorted "runs", you can merge them into a single sorted run). You draw a quick diagram to explain the idea, you go ahead and write code that does it. Then you apply recursion, and write down the overall algorithm (subdivide into runs until you can use some other method to sort it, then merge r…

That’s a great question. Thanks for continuing to ask these so I can avoid those orgs.

When I do come to having to decide on a sorting algorithm, I can refer to the code and algos and then decide. All I need to be able to do is understand the algorithm when I see it not memorize the differences between quick and merge sort. I’m actively working with multiple Olap and regular db solutions and my teams responsible for keeping 100 billion row tables in the most queryable format and it’s never been possible for me to make such a choice, only on whether I use spark or redshift or snowflake. So what exactly would you achieve by asking this question? The irony is I was rejected by 5 companies for not being technical, accepted by 1 where I’ve been thriving for years now at one of the most technical roles in the org.

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