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I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."
- bravesoul2 1y agoShare is name so half of HN can hire him!
- upghost 1y agoI'm assuming his name is "T. Scottsman".
- senthil_rajasek 1y agoMoral of the story, you can be a star but still have to "work with" your managers.
- cinbun8 1y agoOr maybe... don't be a brilliant jerk
- readthenotes1 1y agoOr maybe... Don't be a jerk
- avmich 1y agoBut likely, it's hard to find an adequate management.
- owebmaster 1y agoSome people interpret a "no" as "the guy saying no is a jerk". Don't be this kind.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoPossible engineer was filtering the places he would want to work at. Any place that fires me for calling bullshit — I would not want to work at anyway. Sayonara!
- stavros 1y agoYep, when I'm doubting whether I should do something at my job, I think "I wouldn't want to work for a company where this got me in trouble". Fortunately, it never has.
- localghost3000 1y agoMaybe I’m not reading the post right but the dude sounds like a dick? What am I missing here?
- avmich 1y agoThe dicks are the management.
- owebmaster 1y agoYou can read that, as a bad manager or inexperienced interviewee that asks stupid questions.
- sbuttgereit 1y agoOne thing that you, and many others commenting on may be missing, is that we're getting an uncorroborated, retelling of a story that may well be simply reflecting the teller's own attitudes and reflections rather than a blow-by-blow account of what actually happened. For example, say I was the interviewee and actually said of the SQL question: "Well, to be frank, that question isn't so good for understanding my SQL abilities." I don't think that would be rude or evidence of "being an asshole". A retelling of that story may simply be condensing it down to how that statement was interpreted: as a nice way to say, "that's a stupid question". We shouldn't get too far into parsing what's in the story as a verbatim telling of what happened. We have the author's impressions of those events and their interpretations of the outcomes to drive home a larger point the author wants to make. That's it.
- buggy6257 1y agoHonestly if I was interviewing, even if you told me the future and this was the outcome of hiring the guy, I still wouldn't hire him. It's clear he's brilliant, and experienced, and seems like he's just refusing to "play the game". Speaking truth to power works if you know when to also NOT do it, or how to do it in a way that gets people to listen. It doesn't really matter how brilliant a guy is; if he's not capable of "playing the game", then he's going to be (and WAS) out on his ass within a short timespan. That's a sink on my team's resources having to hire AGAIN and train AGAIN so short after his hiring. I don't want brilliant jerks, I'd rather have someone decent who can stick around by not getting himself fired for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.
- almostdeadguy 1y agoBeing kind and knowing how to deliver disagreement in a constructive way is important. Human beings aren’t perfect logical subjects immune from emotion (thankfully). Hopefully a good manager can take steps to address this or help mediate conversations where such a person might struggle. But places where “playing the game” (like withholding valid concerns with a decision) is a criteria for success are not long for this world
- ajmurmann 1y agoOne danger I see with brilliant jerks is that they can also lead to others not sharing their legitimate concerns. If someone who is usually right calls you stupid frequently when you speak up or just make a suggestion you'll eventually stop making suggestions. Psychological safety is core to teams self-correcting. Of course you could also only hire people with very aggressive communication styles. I've seen this work but it obviously Congress with its own downsides.
- almostdeadguy 1y agoI don’t disagree with this at all, psychological safety is important and abusive jerks don’t belong on any team. It’s also important to try to understand if someone is being intentionally rude and callous or simply being blunt/potentially being misunderstood.
- bgwalter 1y agoCalling someone a "disagreeable asshole" just for saying that something is a dumb question is a bit strong. So he went out for challenging management on an internal document and he was 100% correct according to that tweet. Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.
- more_corn 1y agoTelling the interviewer that his first question is stupid is a sign of a disagreeable asshole. Now granted, you can push back about questions irrelevant to the job but asking candidate for a data engineering role a MySQL question is fair game. And even if it were irrelevant you’d want to frame it better. I’ve pushed back twice. Once the interviewer apologized (you’re right that’s not really relevant to the role) the other time the interviewer was playing tech bingo and we simultaneously invalidated each other.
- bgwalter 1y agoHowever inappropriate the reaction to the SQL question may be, tweeting in a thinly anonymized manner about the incident is worse or perhaps even illegal. As for management, perhaps we should coin the term "agreeable assholes" as a neologism for Machiavellian.
- recursivedoubts 1y agofound the disagreeable asshole (I'm a disagreeable asshole)
- disambiguation 1y agoI knew it, I'm surrounded by disagreeable assholes!
- Ancapistani 1y agoSir, this is a funhouse.
- millzlane 1y agoIt's not my <insert company name>. Has been my mantra lately. If I mention that a quarterly update cycle for mission critical software is too long in the context of security and the desktop enginners don't agree...I just repeat my mantra. I did recently develop a fix to a stupid bug a company said was working as expected. So I don't always stick to the mantra. But I'll disagree once. But then I commit to whatever management wants no matter how boneheaded. They're smart enough to see their dumb idea failed without me rubbing their noses in it.
- owebmaster 1y ago> But then I commit to whatever management wants no matter how boneheaded. This is always the right thing to do when you decided to sell yourself as a cog of a bigger machine. Some times, management is right and the know-it-all engineer isn't.
- bravesoul2 1y agoCorrect modulo immoral or law breaking practice.
- afavour 1y agoFor anyone who doesn’t want to have to register: https://nitter.net/ryxcommar/status/1930985076965142918#m https://nitter.net/ryxcommar/status/1930985076965142918#m
- crazydoggers 1y agoIf I were on the board / an investor of the company, I’d let the managers go and hire back that engineer. The goal of a company is to serve its customers and make a profit, not stroke managements egos. And it sounds more like this guy pointed out what was wrong and maybe embarrassed people, but that doesn’t make him an asshole. It’s one thing to be mean or call people names, that’s an asshole. But this guy was an “asshole” because he was right and it embarrassed people? I’ve seen the type of management that is so insecure they can’t be pointed out what they are doing wrong, sounds more like what happened here. A good company has management that has a thick skin and acknowledges its missteps and raises up talent. If you can’t admit an employee “lower” than you can point out your flaws and give you criticism, then you’re the problem.
- kstrauser 1y agoIt depends on so much that wasn’t covered here. If you tell me I’m wrong and show me why, I’ll thank you. If you tell me my idea is stupid and make it a point to maximally humiliate me for the mistake, I may have to bury your body in the desert. It’s never a good idea to make someone feel extra embarrassed for an error. That’s how you get them to loathe you and to make them hide future mistakes from you.
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y agoYes but once the guy is sacked for cause, or trumped up poor performance, bad attitude etc. the remaining narrative is crafted by the layer of management that remains.
- Ancapistani 1y ago> A good company has management that has a thick skin and acknowledges its missteps and raises up talent. I've worked in companies where "thick skin" was a critical requirement. It worked OK, but the stress level was high and it was pretty toxic (even for someone with very thick skin). I've worked in companies where empathy was the critical requirement. That was a better environment to work in, but it wasn't effective. Those companies died. Where I work now is a mix of both: empathetic, but coupled with intellectual curiosity and respect. We challenge each other's ideas, but it's clear that we aren't attacking each others as people. It honestly seems to be the best of both worlds. "Thick skin" isn't exactly the right way to put it, though. I'd say "vulnerability" describes it better.
- ayhanfuat 1y agoBrilliance doesn’t balance out being a jerk. The net result is always negative.
- remram 1y agoAsking dumb questions has become one of my moves in interviews. This is to expose LLM users, as LLMs are extremely unlikely to answer a "how do I do X" question with "you shouldn't do X", or "how would you replace Y" with "you should keep using Y". I guess now I have an additional reason to ask, so that I can screen out the assholes that will say it's a dumb question...
- sandinmyjoints 1y agoWhat interview format are you using that a candidate could be using an LLM during it?
- elijaht 1y agoAnything not in person?
- cluckindan 1y agoThere is software that sends video call transcripts to LLMs and shows you answers in real-time.
- sandinmyjoints 1y agoI was not aware of this. (We haven’t been interviewing recently.) Honest question, is it not possible to see the candidate’s eyes scanning the text? In video meetings I notice this when someone is reading.
- sdedovic 1y agoFun fact, there are multiple pieces of software that will real-time correct your eye tracking. Useful for virtual all hands or talks to fix teleprompter eyes.
- sandinmyjoints 1y agoYikes!
- viraptor 1y agoI'm surprised they didn't follow up with "why it that a dumb question?" It would likely lead to an interesting answer on its own, in the context of the interview.
- djoldman 1y agoAbsolutely. And then regardless of the answer: "what is a good SQL question and what makes it better than the first one?"
- laweijfmvo 1y agoI interviewed an individual with similar sounding experience/background. Said my first question was silly and insulting. I apologized but said our interview process is standardized, and please just entertain me. They proceeded to spend the rest of the interview giving the absolute worst answer I’d ever heard in any interview to any question. Did not make it past the initial interview. Jerks come in all sizes.
- dedicate 1y agoHonestly, this whole story feels like a massive red flag for the company, not the data scientist. They loved his attitude when it challenged broken systems, but the second he aimed that same energy at management's BS, he was out. Makes you wonder... is "culture fit" just code for "won't call out your boss"?
- wenc 1y agoThe SQL question (mentioned in the thread) was: "It was very benign and was probably the most practical question I asked him! Let's say you want to randomly sample 1,000 users out of a table with a user_id column, e.g. so you can get a list of IDs to send a customer feedback form to. How would you do that?" To me, that's not a dumb question. I mean, there is a simple answer but there are also complicated answers (especially if your table size is large, and performance matters): 1. SELECT user_id FROM table LIMIT 1000 -- this gives unordered results, but is not truly random (it's dependent on database retrieval patterns) 2. SELECT user_id FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1000 -- this is uniform random, but it's expensive for big tables. 3. SELECT user_id USING SAMPLE reservoir(1000 ROWS) -- this is a fast and memory-efficient streaming method, i.e. Reservoir Sampling [1] in which n is treated as large and unknown (DuckDB supports this sampling method and others: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/samples.html https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/samples.html) Reservoir sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling) was a hot topic among data scientists on Quora circa 2011. Sometimes simple questions have deep implications.
- krackers 1y agoCould it be construed as a dumb question because the details depend on the specific engine you're using? If you have TABLESAMPLE, then the question is trivial. The question doesn't really test anything general other than "are you aware that your engine probably already has a feature for this"
- wenc 1y agoI don’t think that in itself is dumb. It’s an application question that tests knowledge on sampling and doing it within the constraints of a database language and performance envelope of a large data store. The spirit of the question isn’t about the syntax but knowing the trade offs when applying sampling on a database.
- bravesoul2 1y agoI like the question. Not sure how id do it. As a one off of the table is not too big id get all the IDs then write a program to pick 1000 at random. I assume randomness is more important than expense but that can be a clarifying question to the interviewer. If this query had to be done regularly for A B testing or whatever I might suggest a salted hash. Given an id you hash and do a Bitcoin style "is it lower than X". Figure out X based on total user count and desired sample. This way you can tell if a user is in the set without looking at other records. You can also handle the user count growing or shrinking. But the trade off is rough numbers over exact numbers.
- jinushaun 1y agoSounds like they fired the wrong person. Sure, on a case by case basis, it’s easy to make the argument that the smart asshole should’ve been more agreeable and tactful. But in the long term, keeping these managers hurts the company more and it’s how you end up with zombie orgs that scrape by.
- keepamovin 1y agoBeing an asshole is a right ordinarily reserved exclusively for managers and is somewhat correlated with their insecurity/incompetence. So the corporate principle is often not against assholery per se, it's against who's permitted by the hierarchy to do it. I've seen this a few times. There's more assholes among those who have a "manager"-type title. But by no means are all managers assholes. I think it oftens comes down to: 1) emotional immaturity, where people don't know how to execute the duties of the office (getting others to do something) without some kind of abusive coercion / intimidation; 2) also likely comes down to people reflecting the authority style they were raised with - so those who were traumatized by abusive asshole parents are probably going to have that as a model of authority and reflect that when they have authority; 3) finally, I often observed it correlated with obvious insecurity, in that it seems to be a defensive mechanism where people who fear themselves to be incompetent/unworthy will compensate by trying to shore up their position with abuse of their colleagues. Ideally, promotion should prevent/remediate such behavior, but I guess that the selfish-streak often displayed by assholes is mildly adaptive for the power dynamics involved in getting promoted. As a last point, often I think there's something else, that people tend to trust that "abusive/coercive" assholes will be able to "get shit done" (by, roughly, intimidating their team) - which there is probably some "truth" to, unless a team wholesale revolts against such behavior. Overall this last points reflects some room for improvement in human organizational dynamics in general. As a counterpoint to the prevailing "assholery" discussion in this thread, it would be really cool I think to see counterexamples in detail of managers who greatly succeeded by being stellar people and really good managers. I think ideally the "asshole manager" trope will become a true relic of history, something antiquated like the tolerated alcoholic hothead, or whatever.