<story><title>IBM&apos;s Asshole Test</title><url>https://johnpublic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-asshole-test/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>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 &amp;quot;ok I need to think about this, it&amp;#x27;s not obvious how to solve it&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;t anything for him to copy down into his interview notes I wasn&amp;#x27;t going to pass the interview.  (Why interviewers were all &lt;i&gt;transcribing the whiteboard&lt;/i&gt; rather than taking photos I have no clue.)&lt;p&gt;Eventually I ran out of time, having written no code on the whiteboard.  I asked my interviewer &amp;quot;ok so what &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; the algorithm for solving this&amp;quot; and he admitted that he had no idea.&lt;p&gt;At the time, I thought he just meant that &lt;i&gt;he&lt;/i&gt; had no idea what the solution was; but in hindsight I wonder if the real test was to see if I would crumble under pressure and write code I knew didn&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;(I got a job offer, but turned it down to start Tarsnap instead.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bityard</author><text>I interviewed with Google once around the same time frame.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I ended up talking with 3 engineers. The first one asked me about stuff on my resume, my Linux experience, some hardware, software, and network questions, etc. He seemed pretty nice and I thought that session went well.&lt;p&gt;The second guy was a different story. It started off well enough but then he asked me how I would go about repairing a server that wouldn&amp;#x27;t boot. I asked him a few preliminary questions (does it have power, did anyone touch it recently, does it POST, etc) and then talked about which components I would swap out and in what order and why. After every piece of hardware, he would say, &amp;quot;it still doesn&amp;#x27;t boot, what do you do next?&amp;quot; I ran out of hardware to think of swapping and he eventually got visibly annoyed and began to lecture me on the troubleshooting process. Now, I was young but I wasn&amp;#x27;t green and probably got flustered and defensive in response. I&amp;#x27;m certain that cost me the job or at least my chances of advancing to the next round of interviews.&lt;p&gt;The next guy I talked to noticed my military record and only wanted to talk about airplanes and helicopters. I humored him while attempting to steer the conversation back to the position but he wasn&amp;#x27;t having it. I&amp;#x27;m sure he knew the previous guy gave me a strike against and was just killing time.&lt;p&gt;A few days later I got an email from Google saying that they had passed on me. Which as it turns out was probably a good thing because A) Google turned into a much different company in the years following that, and B) they never actually built the datacenter that I would have worked in anyway.</text></comment>
<story><title>IBM&apos;s Asshole Test</title><url>https://johnpublic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-asshole-test/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>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 &amp;quot;ok I need to think about this, it&amp;#x27;s not obvious how to solve it&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;t anything for him to copy down into his interview notes I wasn&amp;#x27;t going to pass the interview.  (Why interviewers were all &lt;i&gt;transcribing the whiteboard&lt;/i&gt; rather than taking photos I have no clue.)&lt;p&gt;Eventually I ran out of time, having written no code on the whiteboard.  I asked my interviewer &amp;quot;ok so what &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; the algorithm for solving this&amp;quot; and he admitted that he had no idea.&lt;p&gt;At the time, I thought he just meant that &lt;i&gt;he&lt;/i&gt; had no idea what the solution was; but in hindsight I wonder if the real test was to see if I would crumble under pressure and write code I knew didn&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;(I got a job offer, but turned it down to start Tarsnap instead.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bumper_crop</author><text>&amp;gt; Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.&lt;p&gt;It makes it easier to reason about the code.   It&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>