[COFF] [TUHS] Interview question

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 8:44 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Bill Moore's question was "If we need you to, will you sweep the floors?"
>
> This better be well contextualized. Does this mean, "we're a small
> organization and everyone needs to be willing to pitch in as needed?"
> or does it mean, "are you willing to prostrate yourself before the
> altar of this organization in order to prove yourself?" If the former,
> sure. If the latter, then no: sorry, I've done my time in more ways
> than one, including literally sweeping and mopping the floors (and
> cleaning the head) in the Marines. There's a tendency in technology to
> basically haze the friendly new guy; I'm done with that.
>


The best programmers I've ever worked with understood teamwork and the team
produced something way better than what any one of us could do (this was
back in the days before egoless programming, CI, code reviews, etc), so we
invented the bits that worked for us on the fly). The thing is, every
single person on that team could (and often did) work on any aspect of the
product, be it the documentation (though the tech writers usually did
that), the code (the programmers usually did that, but the tech writers
committed fixes to the example code that was in the book), to the printer
being out of toner / paper, the soda supply in closet running out, the
snacks that we got at costco running low, stuffing product into boxes to
ship to customers, handling customer calls, dealing with talking to
customers at a technical conference in a sales booth, presenting papers at
conferences, etc. Nobody did anything entirely by themselves. We
interviewed several 'lone wolves' that had done it all, but found the one
we hired couldn't integrate into our pack because they couldn't be part of
a team and put the team first and the group needs ahead of their own.
That's the Genesis of my mistrust of this question, or at least the premise
behind it. And Dan, these 'scut tasks' weren't about hazing, but just about
doing what needed to be done...

Warner
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