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IBM's Asshole Test

johnpublic.mataroa.blog

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Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#91

Post by tomatowurst »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #79
tomatowurst wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, you could've easily started out with salary + stock options that would've put you in a better position to start a side gig. Then you might actually be driving a lambo now too ;)

By '06 Google was already public so you weren't going to make life changing, never work again in your life money from stock awards/options. At best you'd be sitting on a decent nest egg that maybe bought you some property or better investments if you were smart (and a $250k supercar is not a smart investment).

if you owned stock options and invested it in Google with portion of your salary going to it, you absolutely would be looking at extreme returns. The power of compounded returns is still not clear to some I see.

With that money you could've funded any side project that generates recurring revenue.

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.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#92

Post by throwaway6532 »

cobaltoxide wrote: post #41
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…

2006 is ancient history. But also, it's a basic interview technique to explain your thinking out loud.

Yeah, in my experience this is really what it's all about. Thinking out loud helps them assess how you reason through trade-offs, potential ideas you run through, edge cases you catch, at what stage you catch them and how you go about addressing them etc.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#93

Post by cmckn »

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…

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 the hiring process inconsistent and discriminatory. If a person's behavior would hinder their ability to do the job, then that's worth a rejection; but "rudeness" is a very subjective thing.

edit: to clarify, I'm talking about behavior that could be interpreted in different ways by different people. If you tell a driver to fuck off, yeah; I don't want to hire you or work with you. The parent gave no example of the behavior they'd reject a candidate for, and I assume it'd be reasonable; my point is just that this kind of thing is hard to do right and I'd avoid it.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#94

Post by isk517 »

monktastic1 wrote: post #40
stevemadere wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assholes who actually can learn to hide the fact that they are assholes are probably a lot less annoying.

Except that they'll only hide it when it helps them. In general this is far more dangerous.

Agreed, the most successful assholes have always been the ones that understood that you can't be a asshole all the time, you need to deploy it at a opportune moment.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#95

Post by cperciva »

readams wrote: post #80
bumper_crop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue. It makes it easier to reason about the code. It's the difference between typing out the answer from Stack Overflow, v.s. copy pasting it. At least for me, writing the code down at the speed the candidate does triggers the error checking part of my brain.

It's just because the interviewing tool you have to put your notes into at Google takes text and not pictures :-). The hiring committee will actually look at this, and this is a different person from the interviewer.

Ok, but they were transcribing from the whiteboard onto paper. So everything I wrote must have been transcribed twice before it reached the hiring committee.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#96

Post by krono »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #66
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…

This story strikes me as pretty funny. As if he might say "damn, I was hoping you knew. We've been working on this one for weeks!"

  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 the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig

Reminds me of that :)

edit: Here's a slightly more colourful telling of the story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble...

Does anyone happen to know which two problems Dantzig solved? Don't seem to be having much luck on my searches

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#98

Post by kragen »

cobaltoxide wrote: post #41
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…

2006 is ancient history. But also, it's a basic interview technique to explain your thinking out loud.

Wouldn't that fail unless your thinking is as slow as speech?

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#99

Post by dsr_ »

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…

Your comment was critical without being in any way helpful, and you tried to defuse it with a smiley.

It doesn't warrant ad hominem attacks, but hardly anything does.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#100

Post by yodon »

cmckn wrote: post #93
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…

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…

Your character is defined by who you are and how you behave when you think no one is watching you.
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