Broken coffee machine? That’s a SEV0. Declare an incident.
Did you try rebooting it?
Remove the power cable, count to 5 and plug it in again.
The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
51–53 of 53 posts
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#52Anyone 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?
Picking up trash from the floor does not require special tools, and does not void the warranty of the floor.
Re: The Coffee Machine Hiring Test
#53I really don't like these kind of silver-bullet "hey look I easily solved a complex problem" self-congratulatory posts. 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…
So the CEO that stepped over the water didn't even tell anyone about the problem? That just seems wrong. Would this person call the cops if he saw burglars breaking into a neighbor's house? Some things are everyone's job to report even if someone else will clean it up. Did anyone at the company with the guerilla design effort realize that there was a huge communication problem or did they just spank the guerillas?
In the first one it was a very small office so it was taken care of immediately.
In the second one that's exactly what I took away from it - I escalated immediately, saying this was a concrete example of two separate communication failures. It didn't turn out particularly well and I wish it had been handled better (it was lost in a culture war between two execs, which was the cause of the original communication gap in the first place) but I feel like I did my part and no gorillas were spanked, just left feeling upset.