In imagination-land, it could've been a higher echelon of test.

Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring the interview back on track, with subtle grace?

At the end of a series of "bad interview loop" tests, you learn that they secretly weren't interviewing you to be a coder, and now you are the next chosen-one CEO of Lego.

> Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring the interview back on track, with subtle grace?

Said no company ever....

"Sorry, you failed to walk out on us. We don't think you're right for the team."

In my experience, tag-team or tribunal-style interviews are themselves a red flag. Usually it's a sign that the company doesn't know how to interview or whose opinions to trust, so they're just throwing everyone into the meeting.

And any company being so openly dishonest as to set up fake arguments for candidates react to . . . if discovered, that's the mother of all red flags.

This is not the case with new interviewers shadowing a single interviewer. That's actually a positive sign, that they know some of their people have skills and are actively trying to train their staff.

I've been part of a three-person panel for interviews at multiple companies. I think the idea of panels is first, to train people to be good interviewers. Second, to get the opinion of multiple people regarding the viability of candidate. Third, I bet there's a liability thing at a company level where they don't want a candidate who fails to be able to claim bias of one person.

Tag-team/tribunal interview war stories...

One time, for an unspecified job at a think-tank-ish place, after passing the first phone screen, the recruiter lightly prepped me for a call with the hiring manager. So I get on the call that's supposed to be with the hiring manager she described... and the format is like a thesis defense in front of a room of people I can't see, taking turns asking me incisive questions, on topics of their choosing, over a speakerphone. At one point, one of the random people talking at me admonished, a bit sternly, "That's not what I asked you." I at least half-bombed it. (I did get invited to do a job-talk after, like for an academic job, so apparently someone decided I'd passed well enough or to give me another chance. But I was really peeved with the recruiter giving me worse-than-zero intel on what I walked into, and there were other demands on my time, with no job talk ready to go, so I declined.) Much later, I wondered whether that interviewer barrage was intentionally a surprise, to try to filter for people who wouldn't wilt if they were a think-tank expert suddenly put on speakerphone to room of clients on some matter.

The best tag-team interviews I recall were for an R&D unit role at a traditional financial institution, where I'd be interfacing with teams throughout the org. Some of them videoconfs (during Covid) were 2 or 3 higher-up people, representing different parts of the org. That actually worked in that case, and gave both of us parties an impression of what the other might be like in some of the kinds of interfacing between teams we'd be doing. I came away with a positive impression of smart, humble, and amiable people, who'd done big things, and would be good to work with. (I was fortunate to get that offer, and in hindsight should've taken it, at the time.)

The most recent tag-team interview was for an early startup (where the plan was I'd be a key IC, and later lead engineering/technology, as the multi-talented founder moved to focus only on CEO duties). One of the interviews was a videoconf with all three non-CEO engineers at once, and I got a favorable initial impression of them, but I had a lot more questions and felt like maybe I was being dumped on them without them having enough info about me. Later, as the founder put together an offer and bounced it off me, one of the diligence things I asked for was to meet one-on-one with at least one of the engineers from the tag-team, when we might speak more candidly than in a group, develop a little rapport, etc. Founder declined, and said something like, that wouldn't be useful. (Then other things came up on my calendar, and I'm embarrassed to say I accidentally ghosted them, so I never asked him what he meant, nor clarified why I still thought it'd be very useful to talk with any one of them one-on-one before signing on.)

> That was one of about thirty red flags. I left without completing the interview.

It sounds like an extremely effective question;)

I had a high school literature teacher that asked me what I thought about the assigned reading, and then told I was wrong. After arguing that the question was not "what did it mean" vs what I thought. I think think whatever the hell I want to think. This was pretty much the death knell of my desire to participate in literature, and freed me up to spend my time in math/sciences. yes, it was just an excuse for something I was going to do anyways, but still a total lack of bedside manner from a teacher can have devastating results.

> bedside manner from a teacher

Why would a teacher have "bedside manner"? Sounds pretty sus...

lack of better words to call it, but if a teacher is a bad teacher at an influential time, it easily can sour a student. how is that sus?

A teacher having anything to do with a student's "bedside" is liable to be arrested yeah?

jeebus christo you're either denser than lead or a really bad comedian yeah?

That was probably not very politically correct, but I laughed when reading that.

I think a possible alternative is they’re not a native/regular speaker?

> you're either denser than lead

WTF is up with your personal attack there? That's uncalled for. :(

oh, but your pedo joke is perfectly fine then?

But you're literally saying "bedside manner" in a specific situation. If you didn't mean that, then shouldn't you have picked different wording?

And note, unlike your behaviour, I didn't call you names. I just pointed out your wording was weird. That's not a personal attack.

I guess if you don't know what a phrase means, there's always the internet to look it up before jumping to conclusions.

https://duckduckgo.com/?va=c&t=ha&q=bedside+manner&ia=web

Interesting. Good point about that phrase for doctors. :)

Hi Justin, the phrase "bedside manner" is very common, and was taken out of its original context for all kinds of uses because of medical drama TV shows. It basically means, "general human politeness for people you're caring for that are currently not in a confident position." This can apply to a medical professional that takes care of their patients, or a teacher watching over their students, or the person at Best Buy's Geek Squad explaining why your computer doesn't work. Rather than continuing to rile up the other user for no really good reason, perhaps you can accept that your lack of knowledge regarding common English idioms frustrated that other user, and forgive them for being mean to you. In the future, rather than make pedo jokes, maybe you'll give the phrase a look on Google to see if its been used before, because it likely has. Thank you for your time.

Thanks for taking time to explain things from your point of view.

I've seen the phrase used with medical professionals before.

Never with teachers or other situations though. The results and definition from the duckduckgo search (above) also only show it in use by medical professionals, not with others, and doesn't support your stated meaning.

Sounds like the phrase is used more widely in your part of the world. Good for you I guess. :)

I was leaning towards bad comedian, but now I'm leaning towards lead

Again with the unwarranted personal attacks. :(

Here's a tip: if you encounter this behavior in real life or online again you could simply not respond. It cancels the whole negative chain of communication.

Hi Dylan, in this case, Justin probably wasn't worth the time spent to correct here. Everyone else in the world knows the phrase "bedside manner" and knows you weren't talking about what they thought you were talking about. After an attempt or two, it was probably more worth it to move on, whereas here you made probably half a dozen attempts to reconcile with Justin to no avail, leading you to feel frustrated, which caused you to reduce yourself a bit in this conversation, in my opinion. Have a nice week!

> Justin probably wasn't worth the time spent

You're making personal attacks as well?

To be clear, I'm referring to your pattern displayed in this thread of aggressively taking words outside of context, and not doing a bare minimum effort to try to find reasonable context for them. In this case, it was probably not worth anybody's effort to explain the words to you; this is true. The fact that you're taking it personally as an attack is on you though, not me. Because I don't intend for it to be an attack, I'm simply stating that a lot of unnecessary time was wasted, and unkind words were slung for no good reason. None of it was worth it, because the value you've gotten from now understanding the phrase was not worth the amount of time it took to teach it to you. It's not even just because you weren't very receptive to the information, truth be told, we were maybe also poor teachers here. But I'll give you more information for your time:

A common theme among many English idioms is that a phrase is found in one discipline (ie. the medical discipline), in this case "bedside manner." Some deeper meaning is extrapolated, in this case it is "showing kind, friendly, and understanding behavior for people in your care." And then the phrase is re-used in other disciplines and contexts where the deeper meaning is what is intended to get across to the recipient hearing that phrase, rather than the literal interpretation (ie. the bed isn't necessarily involved at all.)

As another example: "curiosity killed the cat." There's no cat, and it's not necessary that people will die when this phrase is used. It just means "sometimes following your curiosity leads to bad consequences." Hopefully this lesson has helped you the next time you come across an idiom and wonder why they used that choice of words.

You can just read literature. Academic literary analysis has always been a grift imo. Just completely useless nonsense. Doesn't mean that literature isn't enjoyable.

I recently read a book that would count as literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction) for the first time in over a decade and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

> Just completely useless nonsense.

Explain that to all of those suffering through the reading just to make a grade because it is part of the required list. If I read Scarlet Letter today, I would not enjoy it any more than I did then. I'm just not entertained by some love triangle in a religious uptight society. I get enough of that in my every day life, minus the love triangle. It's the same reason I don't want to watch Rosanne or King of the Hill--it's just too close to home

The book I read was Revelations by Erik Hoel. It was a mystery novel about consciousness researchers. But Hoel is a literature nerd as well and so wrote it in that style. Would perhaps come off as pretentious if not for the good execution.

I always had this issue with assigned reading. I got much worse results when I actually read the book compared to reading just summaries and conclusions on the Internet. If I read myself I came to wrong or irrelevant conclusions and ideas.