[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Interview question

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

Bakul gets it.  "Entirely by you" does not mean "go get some sand
because you need to make some silicon ..."

"Entirely by you" means given a set of tools, show me what you did.
Just you.  Not your team, just you.

It's not an arbitrary question, Warner, it's giving people have done
it a chance to say so.  And weeding out the people who haven't.
Which is not a great way to sort people in general, it was a great
way to sort people for my 12 person company.  We needed people who
could do that, we were too small for people who couldn't.

And Bakul, yes, I asked a lot of other questions.  The only other one that
came up repeatedly was the "Safeway question".  What's that?  If you saw
a coworker at the store, do you go talk to them or do you hide in another
aisle and hope they don't see you?  There is your hire/don't hire answer.

Bill Moore's question was "If we need you to, will you sweep the floors?"

My 2 manager interview questions were:

If we hire you, who is going to come with you (good managers always have
people who love them and follow them.  Bad managers don't).

Tell me about the hardest time you had when you had to fire someone.
(I had people who wanted to be my VP of engineering who had never
had to fire anyone.  And it wasn't because they were awesome, it 
was because they had no experience).  Firing people, without it
blowing up in your face, is hard.  

On Tue, Jan 03, 2023 at 06:44:42PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2023, at 7:57 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 7:59 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 02:13:45PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> >> > Which of these, if any, do you count?
> >> 
> >> Any of them that are entirely done by you. 
> > 
> > With due respect, this seems like an impossible thing to have done. I think it's an arbitrary question.
> 
> I see the point of Larry asking this. Presumably it is *one* of the questions he asks! There are a lot of smart people who don't know or don't have experience with how to deliver a product. Product delivery is a lot more than hacking up some code. It is writing good design and user documentation, thorough testing, lots of trial and error to make the UI/GUI as intuitive as possible, making it as bug free as possible, may be even dealing with customer bug reports and requests etc. etc. At least to me it would not be a pass/fail question (IMHO there is no point in asking such questions to an interviewee).
> 
> > "No man is an Island" John Donne.
> > 
> > Nobody on this list can claim to have anything they did entirely by themselves. Everybody used tools built by others. Everybody used an OS built by others. Even people that did a full OS + all the tools used other tools to boostrap that were done by others. They used hardware that was designed by others, made from chips made by others from raw materials mined by others.
> 
> Right but even with a complete set of tools and detailed plans not everyone can do good carpentry. It requires care, knowing your craft, knowing what shortcuts you can take, knowing who to ask for advice etc. etc. And it is a different challenge when you have to make a dozen matching chairs as opposed to one.
> 
> When I was interviewing people my job was to assess their experience, abilities & aptitude. Nobody is perfect so you have to find where they would be a good fit in some job for which there is an opening, as well as whether it is of sufficiently interesting/challenging for them etc.
> 
> > We all "stand on the shoulders of giants"[*]. While I get the connection to looking for someone that's independent, self sufficient, etc, it seems a bit arbitrary. I've done a ton of work on the FreeBSD kernel, for example, but it isn't all 100% me. Others have contributed to it, others have reviewed my work, others have given me (or the project) bug fixes. That project, as with so many others, are so much better due to the collaboration that happened between people. In many ways that's more important than doing something 100% yourself.
> > 
> > Warner
> > 
> > [*] "If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders[sic] of others" -- Isaac Newton in a 1675 letter to his rival Robert Hooke
> 
> 
> 

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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat