[COFF] [TUHS] Interview question

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 11:00 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 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...

Perhaps I was not clear. What you are describing sounds more like what
I meant when I wrote, 'does this mean, "we're a small organization and
everyone needs to be willing to pitch in as needed?"' That's fine; if
it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Sometimes that _may_ mean
literally sweeping the floor.

But too often I've observed what I've taken to calling, "the old
school Unix mentality": putting people in a pecking order based on
mostly arbitrary criteria, forming an in-group (and implicitly an
out-group) and expecting people to grovel to get into the in-group.
This is the opposite of teamwork, it's garbage treatment of people,
and I'm not interested in it anymore.

Here's a literal example of what I mean. From a "pattern" actually
called "Sweep the Floor" at
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/apprenticeship-patterns/9780596806842/ch04.html:

    | Playing the role of a traditional apprentice also helped me to
    | build up humility and respect for the senior craftsmen. I remember
    | Uncle Bob Martin came into a room, saw the trash overflowing,
    | and changed the garbage bag. My mentor scolded me and
    | appropriately said that it is not the job of the master craftsman to
    | take out the garbage. It is a sign of respect and piety that was an
    | important lesson for me to learn.

Yeah, no. Robert C Martin can take out his own trash, thank you very
much. And the "mentor" can hire custodial workers. This is highly
inappropriate and the person who wrote this should have walked. Again,
I've paid my dues in this department.

        - Dan C.