Zero clue what this guy’s point is.
I can’t even tell if his genius idea is supposed to be the one with 3 functional tennis balls or 5 tennis balls sliced in half.
Using the same 3 functional tennis balls in a container set up but pretending you invented it and calling it an Innovation would be very on brand for tech companies.
3 Likes
Nah it would have to be a subscription service.
Are you tired of hitting the same old tennis ball month after month? We will send you 3 brand new tennis balls every month, you can go on the website and customise your colour, hardness, bounciness to get your unique “tennis score” ®. Then for the low low price of $25 a month you can play all the tennis you want. Cancel anytime (by going through an impossible byzantine cancellation process designed to make you give up in frustration after 10 minutes.)
4 Likes
lol reminds me of the time i flamed out of some asshole ceo’s final interview which was not supposed to be a brain twister and he asked “how would you go about figuring out how many ping pong balls fit in a 747?” to which I thought it was a joke and laughed “I wouldn’t” and he said “pretend this interview depends on it.”
woops
2 Likes
you probably dodged a bullet, those questions are red flags for companies with broken hiring practices
3 Likes
yea i was too junior to know what a trap it was, they wanted me to take their monolithic application that had like 48 services and put it into a single container, and I didnt even know what kubernetes was yet and I was still like “wait why not kubernetes?”
I was legit insulted he asked me that. they put me through THREE rounds of the most insane programming tests I’ve ever done in my life and I aced them. I should’ve been a shoo in
I can’t stress enough that at every career level job interviews go both ways. You very badly do not want to get the wrong job. In terms of things that will fuck your quality of life the only thing I can think of that will do more damage is a bad live in long term relationship.
There are a lot of jobs a lot of us didn’t get we probably should be more grateful for.
I only got one crappy job, I made a lateral move into a large insurance company because they had better growth opportunities than my prior employer. I immediately didn’t like it and left after 6 months and went right back to my old job, lol.
There’s some truth to this, but job interviews are very much one-sided events in the vast majority of cases.
A bad job is bad, but usually better than no job at all.
100% agree. I think it’s very hard to tell how much contribution a high performing asshole actually has. They have a tendency to steal a ton of credit from other people. And that’s in addition to the problems that come from tolerating them and creating a culture of being an asshole in the workplace.
This doesn’t mean people need to be nice either. Just that specific type of ‘top performer’ that everyone hates for being a sociopath.
1 Like
in the long run assholes drag the org down, they disrupt team cohesion, they’re never worth it.
1 Like
I’ve seen a management team circle wagons for someone who was really a mid-tier performer while a lot of better talent left the company, just absolutely insane, but it’s par for the course in SF
2 Likes
There are some organizations where an asshole sales guy mostly does his own thing, breaks all the rules and is senior managements problem. In some of those cases they don’t poison much beyond that. Buy almost always no, the allegedly high performing asshole isn’t worth it.
been seeing this lately
in a more insane moment, a very new-ish senior engineer didnt have the organizational knowledge to do something, it wasnt well documented, and the principal just let him flounder rather than helping him, I suspect because the guy could have threatened him. inevitably he got frustrated and left shortly after.
Yes this happens all the time. Infuriating. Usually the result of senior managers who don’t actually know what people do.
1 Like
I don’t know, asshole sales guys tend to make everyone else’s job impossible by promising the world to clients to close sales, collecting their sales incentive bonus, and leaving everyone else with the problem of how to make the shitty deal with the client profitable.
1 Like
Right, it needs to be an organization where that’s not really possible. These do exist but are rare. I’m thinking a product thats not really price negotiable and a set territory / call list so the asshole can’t poach from others internally.
I’ve been left with this problem at my last startup. They’d sell stuff there was no way we could deliver or was a very poor use case for the product, and we’d have to make a square fit through a round hole. Felt really scummy to me managing those projects and pretending like it wasn’t the stupidest idea ever. thankfully that only lasted for about 6 months before the company fell apart.
My first rule. “No dickheads”. I’ve poached this from a couple of sports teams that use it for player selection.
I’ve also got a half written linkedin article lying around waiting to finish titled “the dickhead iceberg”
The idea being that
-
Any amount of shitty behaviour you see on the surface probably indicates a whole lot more shitty. behaviour that you havent seen and that can sink your company.
-
Dickheads look very different from above than below. Which is why senior management often tolerates them while everyone underneath them in the org cant understand how the fuck the person still has a job.
5 Likes