kanelbullar

A successful tech company, through and through.

Their business is built on the deployment of custom (if not particularly sexy) office technology and quite simply could not exist without it. There's also another certain very significant tech company they outright acquired to enhance their overall operations and portfolio.

So - they're not a traditional tech-only company; but a tech company quite definitely.

Please, this is a very old topic.

The way society is currently configured, at some point, for all practical purposes, you are effectively forced to take some kind of job. Or see your life turn into living hell in a whole bunch of ways. Which means that the idea that both parties are truly "willing" parties (let alone have more or less equal leverage in) the negotiation, at the very least -- needs to be radically revisited.

But for contract work? If you don't like the terms, don't accept.

"And don't pay the rent, and don't feed your kids" you mean.

The thing is - if your production system really ends up going haywire and losing $10 million every second or whatever, then then the root cause isn't some race condition. It's the whole human and organizational process (or lack thereof) that allowed that defect to slip in undetected (and in a position to cause so much damage without proper safeguards) in the first place.

Meaning: presumably he's trying to be helpful, and give you a perfectly accurate representation of how people at his company interact when trying to solve problems together.

At that point - he's talking to you as if he thinks you have the understanding of a child, basically.

There really is no positive recourse available other than to politely end the interview, and chalk up another day of your life (plus N days spent preparing) that you'll never get back.

And yet - those are the people who are not weeded out, but selected for by the default interview process.

Beats me - but the "skills" demonstrated in the interview process you're defending -- "suck up; just keep going online until you memorize enough canned answers to most of these dang questions; suck up, suck up, suck up" -- certainly aren't going to help.

If anything, they're basically orthogonal to the set of competencies needed to deal with that kind of a situation.

You know, the actual work you have your people do (along with the monetary compensation, and of course the extent to which they're pleasant to work with, you know, while at work) really (really) ought to be sufficient motivation to show up in the morning and get stuff done, over the longer haul.

By the same token -- if you feel you not only absolutely need extracurricular activities (let lone that your people need to "all hang out with each other socially" at odd hours of the day and night) to hold the team together... but feel the need to point to a deficit in this area as the primary reason why your team does not succeed... then you're definitely missing this bigger picture.

Eventually, the team's output suffered as turnover increased, until eventually, he ended up leaving. The net effect was hugely disruptive to the company.

Indeed. It sounds like you lost a good employee (and many others like him that he could have potentially recruited into your company) for the sake of the (perceived) benefits of maintaining a certain monoculture -- predicated in turn on a certain stereotype of fun and "energetic" younger employees. And how wonderful everything can be when you only hire people who fit that particular mold.

Interesting, because many candidates would (rightly and safely) assume that you're asking if they already know the answer - not if (duh) they could just google it. And accordingly, to respond with "just google it" would mark them as a plodding, uninspired programmer - and definitely cost them points (or even outright sink the interview).

There are a surprising number of candidates & engineers that simply give up when they encounter a hard problem.

It sure is easy (and gratifying) to feel categorically superior to a significant portion of the people who walked in through that door with the idea of landing a job.

But Occam's Razor suggest that, rather than being a bunch of gutless dolts - they were (perhaps as a result of being bludgeoned by one soul-crushing interview experience too many) simply assuming a more conservative acceptance level to your question than you thought they were.