Comment by wpietri
8 hours ago
I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure.
I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not professionals.
Ditto for ones who act like everything is a nail for their coding hammer. A developer who can save a company a couple hundred thousand dollars by not turning something simple into a big coding project is a rare and precious commodity. Or should be, at least.
The thing to do isn't to give demerits for "being difficult". The thing to do is to then add something to the scenario where they get into the thing you want them to get to. "For this, we need better access control than Google Sheets allows us." Or, "We need this to be more closely integrated with our accounting system."
Unless, of course, what you're hiring for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power. Which, honestly, a lot of places are.
> I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it.
<3. What do you think makes the difference here in orgs that respect this and those that simply try to hire yesmen?
Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.
I think all of those tendencies come to the fore at any organization that doesn't have either a strong sense of mission or a sufficiently desperate need for success that they pay attention to material reality rather than social reality. With a possible partial exception for things like co-ops and other places where the culture is fundamentally different enough. E.g., Mondragon, or Zingerman's.
I think Google, back in its don't be evil/organize the world's information era, probably qualified. They started with a very strong mission-driven culture rooted in academics and engineering. It took a fair bit of time for MBA dogmas to make it like most other places. But from everything I hear, what once felt almost like a calling now is just another job.
> MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.
This is a common refrain I also believe in and there's an interesting open question that comes up here about whether or not an engineering department should or shouldn't execute an order that intentionally destroys the product for short term gain.
1 reply →
> when the moment calls for it
In an interview when you’ve been explicitly asked to discuss a topic to have a technical discussion about something is not when the moment calls for it. Doubly so if you’ve been asked twice. If you’re not willing to put aside being technically correct when you’re trying to show off your best self, it’s pretty likely that when things get tough, you’ll behave the same.
> unless of course what you’re being for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power
D, do you think that someone saying “can we please talk about a technical topic, here’s an example we’re both likely familiar with” is looking for yes men? I actively want my team and coworkers to challenge me, but I absolutely don’t want to work with that person who appears at every meeting with a list of reasons why we shouldn’t do X.
When I ask an interviewee a technical question, what I want is an answer that is correct technically.
If I want them to give me a different kind of technical answer, then I think it's on me to ask a question that actually requires what I'm looking for. It's not hard! All the Stripe interviewer had to say is, "Ok, great. It sounds like you have a good sense for system capacity. Now let's add another zero to all the load numbers." And then keep increasing orders of magnitude until they learn what they're looking to learn.
I am, just to be clear, not defending people being willfully obtuse or contrary jackasses. But that's not the scenario being described in either the Stripe story or the Google Sheets story I'm responding to. Two apparently reasonable people were asked technical questions and they gave answers that were the right thing for the business.
I think that's good and I like to hire people like that. I get lots of others don't, and I get the POSIWID reasons behind it. But I'm not going to pretend I think it's a healthy way to run an organization. And I also get that the people who like pretense and deference in interviews are not going to like me saying so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯