Re:Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Qu...
by stcredzero on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @03:18PM
(#17962449)
I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them.
I've been flat-out accused of cheating and bald-faced lying, on scant evidence, when I was clearly doing neither. I very strongly suspect that the interviewers were motivated by their ageist prejudices in that case. I also have a very strong feeling that your intuition about the interview process is correct. I've done a bit of introspection and realized that there is a bit of dark side in me which can come out in situations where I wield power.
Also, and this is probably more specific, there's a bit of a mythos around companies like Google and friends that have tough interviews and high standards: they hire the best people, they're doing the best work, they're the smartest, etc. I can tell you from experience, that mythos doesn't hold up once you're doing you day to day job. I've seen people with stunning credentials doing what most would consider exciting work become genuinely bored.
There's a class of real world activities of substance and significant consequence where one encounters, "long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror." Lots of development also falls into this category. You spend a half year, doing basically nothing but "fixing bugs in a CRUD app." Then, there's a high priority bug where error dialogs pop up for a whole bunch of high profile enraged users who quickly and definitively figure out they're being lied to by the system. The logs and HTTPS proxy captures tell you contradictory information, and you discover that some vital logging information is getting swallowed by lazy coding. Then the logging system goes down, staying down for weeks. On top of that, someone breaks the development debug build. All the while, director level execs are breathing down your neck. I'm not making this up. This actually happened to me.
Most of the time, the job can involve almost nothing, then all of a sudden, you need more than your wits about you. It's for times like that, that one seeks to hire people who can actually apply knowledge, as opposed to those who regurgitated it on an exam then promptly forgot it.
I've been flat-out accused of cheating and bald-faced lying, on scant evidence, when I was clearly doing neither. I very strongly suspect that the interviewers were motivated by their ageist prejudices in that case. I also have a very strong feeling that your intuition about the interview process is correct. I've done a bit of introspection and realized that there is a bit of dark side in me which can come out in situations where I wield power.
Also, and this is probably more specific, there's a bit of a mythos around companies like Google and friends that have tough interviews and high standards: they hire the best people, they're doing the best work, they're the smartest, etc. I can tell you from experience, that mythos doesn't hold up once you're doing you day to day job. I've seen people with stunning credentials doing what most would consider exciting work become genuinely bored.
There's a class of real world activities of substance and significant consequence where one encounters, "long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror." Lots of development also falls into this category. You spend a half year, doing basically nothing but "fixing bugs in a CRUD app." Then, there's a high priority bug where error dialogs pop up for a whole bunch of high profile enraged users who quickly and definitively figure out they're being lied to by the system. The logs and HTTPS proxy captures tell you contradictory information, and you discover that some vital logging information is getting swallowed by lazy coding. Then the logging system goes down, staying down for weeks. On top of that, someone breaks the development debug build. All the while, director level execs are breathing down your neck. I'm not making this up. This actually happened to me.
Most of the time, the job can involve almost nothing, then all of a sudden, you need more than your wits about you. It's for times like that, that one seeks to hire people who can actually apply knowledge, as opposed to those who regurgitated it on an exam then promptly forgot it.