Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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 under regular stress, that is a failure in management of my employer.

View on HN

Somehow I found this very clever, and more appropriate than asking people to napkin-guess how many piano tuners are in NY. I'd expect most candidates kind of panicked, a few reacted superbly, and a few became assholes. This would be a very way to both separate the most problematic people, and find potential team leaders.

Of course they could have accepted the assholes and invested ample time and resources to nurture their emotional intelligence, but they would have resorted to that only if they couldn't find enough candidates.

Meh. The only teams that never face stress are those that don't have customers.

Stress happens. Good management provides a buffer to mitigate it, but sometimes compounding events means it's gonna happen, despite the best planning.

Better to know up-front how people will behave during the worst times than to see the team completely collapse when they're needed the most.

Eh, I would happily go for it.

I get that "the interview is stressful", but if you do enough of them, they're not that stressful.

And in my experience, stuff like this is really good at identifying some assholes. I can't find references, but it is based on research, and is applied in other scenarios. It is in fact often recommended you do a version of this prior to marrying someone: Usually some physical activity is picked that both of you suck at, and the goal is not to achieve it, but to see how well you work together in unfamiliar terrain. It's not a great sign if failure to succeed results in a nasty argument ("We could have solved this if you'd done it my way!")

As always, the cost of a toxic hire is much greater than missing out on a good engineer. If this has even a 50% success rate at detecting jerks, it's worth it.

Come on, the type of stress that the experiment creates is typical. It's not day to day, of course, management should take care of that. And the candidate is not expected to work well under stress - just not to be a huge asshole whenever a stressful situation inevitably arises.

I remember doing an experiment like this as part of my preparation to a new job level. In our case, a natural leader emerged, the previous leader yielded their power, and we solved the game in like 15 minutes with the new leader and suggestions from the others. I guess I was lucky with my group.

Meh, I definitely want to filter out people who can't handle situations like this, because honestly they come up all the time. Uncertainty in ownership, data not matching up, clarity lacking; how people behave in these scenarios is basically how they'll behave at their job.

I don't think it's an "asshole" behavior to induce stress during an interview and observe results. What else are you supposed to do?

It isn't just inducing stress that tells me they are an asshole. Interviews are inherently stressful, there is little need to intentionally add extra stress on top. The dishonesty is also a problem. Interviews are a two-way street. The first impression this gives candidates is that their employer will think nothing of lying to their face and employees will so regularly be under stress that handling stress well is one of the traits they find most important. No thanks.

It's a tricky problem because of the observer effect. You can't just say to candidates "we're testing your behavioral approach to problem solving" because then candidates will simply realize the goal is "don't go ballistic for an hour", despite perhaps revealing their true character once they are on the payroll.

At least in this environment you know you are being observed. Different from a company finding some embarrasing social media post in a bad time of your life.

Agreed! I would only want to work with people for whom this test isn't a big deal. No thanks indeed.

> The first impression this gives candidates is that their employer will think nothing of lying to their face

I would just assume that about any employer anyway.

Agree. The candidates were put in a situation where they had to decide whether to fend for themselves (hoard information and ideas) or burst out into team working mode - helping the same people they were competing with for the job.

These team exercise are not uncommon or unreasonable in grad hiring, but it's a terrible idea to not clarify them up front.

Well how does one become part of management?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com