wideopenjake

I mentioned this in another comment, but yeah, I bombed the interview precisely because I understood the problem and its domain but failed to walk through my initial thinking process with the interviewer who was pairing with me. I was approaching it as a technical problem, not an evaluation of my ability to pair with peers - which was why I was underwhelmed.

Having said that - over the years, I now much prefer conducting interviews where interviewer and candidate walk through a problem, figuring out a solution together; they provide much more insight into a candidate compared to rote memorization/whiteboard tasks like "Implement a linked list". So, in the end, I've learned to appreciate their approach.

Oh, I totally agree. That wasn't intended as a slight toward the company; rather, the solution to the problem was (if I remember correctly) only a few lines of code, but I think the test was tailored to more junior candidates, who might have needed to talk through it more (and as a result, have provided more insight into their thought process).

At the time, I didn't realize _that_ was likely what they were evaluating, but in my experience interviewing engineers since then helped me realize what I'd overlooked.

I mentioned they passed on me mostly for transparency given the rest of my comment, but I can understand how it might have sounded otherwise. I liked their concept and stayed connected for a while after, not something I normally tend to do if there's bad blood.

We did, early on, get flooded by people who migrated en masse from another social network who - for lack of a better phrase - equated 'freedom of speech' with a right to post 'shock-and-awe' content just to get a rise out of others. They'd been run out of the other one and decided to try to take over ours.

Those of us running the site had a _lot_ of long philosophical discussions about what to do, but we ultimately realized that posting disturbing content with intent only to provoke wasn't constructive, and we had the right to define what type of community we wanted to foster.

So we booted the shock-jockeys out, and then went to an application-only process that lasted from 10,000 until about 100,000 users (that's a lot of hand-reviewed applications!) - and you know... I could still sleep at night after that, because it wasn't about stopping any specific cause or idea or viewpoint. (Indeed, a few came back, reapplied, and rejoined as constructive members of the community after that)

IMHO, there's a place for provocation, but only if there's a point to it - a message to be communicated. Random photos of animal heads in a jar with no commentary or explanation? Not so much.

I guess I thought of us as rather selective due to the application process, but as I think back, the application process actually allowed us to accept a much broader array of viewpoints, because our goal was always aimed at intentionality and constructive interaction.

I was head of technology for another "make a better world" social network, and we approached fostering positivity as a practice of encouraging constructive interaction and discouraging _destructive_ interaction.

In other words, being directly abusive toward others was obviously destructive and discouraged, but disagreement, even when quite strong, was great, as long as everyone involved maintained a level of basic respect when interacting with each other.

There's also a big difference between vehement dislike of a distant thing, concept or person, especially if one can express their reasons well, and using slurs or advocating violence or harm. I imagine here they used 'hate' to stand in for 'hate speech', but not being in their minds - I really don't know.

Early on in Ello's life, possibly year 1, I interviewed for a job with them - back when their office was basically one floor of a residence, and all the engineers pretty much worked at a single dinner table packed with monitors. I probably scored the interview because of my previous experience as CTO of a startup social network for people who wanted social change (which we sold to Gaiam, and that's how it eventually died a few years later, but at least I ended up in the Denver/Boulder area).

Anyway, the code test part of the interview involved pairing with another engineer on a small portion of the ello User model (their application was built with Ruby on Rails at the time), and I remember being rather underwhelmed by what they asked me to do, at least in terms of whether it provided a decent test of my abilities. I ended up sending a follow-up email expressing that, along with numerous polished samples of other project work.

They ended up passing on me, but I stayed a member of ello for a while longer because I thought the idea might have promise. Maybe I left too early, but I eventually ditched it because... there was no "there", there.

I liked their general idea, but... they could have done so much more with it, even with a small team. As it was, I left before ello ever got out of its "tumblr clone with way too much empty space" phase - if it ever did.

RIP

As far as Spam Musubi - the US military brought Spam to the islands during WWII, and it quickly became available off-base. Combined with wartime fishing restrictions on the islands, the quickly became the easiest meat source available to locals. They made do with what they had, and spam sushi was invented along the way. Eventually, it took on a cult following of its own, and the rest is history - but Spam's place on the Hawaiian Islands originally comes from hardships imposed by the US military occupying the islands during WWII.