[TheSpiceIsLife]

Only if we consider technical work a performance art.

Only earlier today I told one of the new starters: can you please not stand behind me while I work. They asked "why?", my response: "because it fucking irritates me".

My work isn't a stage show. If we're actively involved in a skill sharing session together, or conveying meaningful information, that's different entirely.

But I think it's perfectly normal to not want to be the centre of anyone's attention while your doing knowledge / technical work.

[nawgz]

> But I think it's perfectly normal to not want to be the centre of anyone's attention while your doing knowledge / technical work

You are indeed involved in a skill-sharing - well, demonstrating - session where you are meant to convey meaningful information about your abilities as a colleague to the audience. Your analogy has therefore directly fallen apart.

Also, I am not really sure what you are getting at with this language, but in general, if I was to have an interviewee who was to state the interview "fucking irritates" them, it would most certainly not be a successful interview.

Taking a good faith chomp at what you've said, representing an interview as "performance art" when it is probably trying to suss out your skills again seems like the kind of lack-of-social-skills that I would love to suss out in an interview. It's not like you are going to be asked to understand and implement a distributed algorithm for the first time in your life, they will take topics that should be at-worst adjacent to your knowledge base and ask you about them.

In an interview, I expect the interviewee, as someone claiming they have the capability to be my colleague, to then demonstrate that we can discuss, reason about, and explore in real-time solutions to problems. If you consider the mere act of collaborating with a colleague "performance art", it most certainly is a bad sign for how well your knowledge base will filter to the team thru any means except them reading your code.

[craftinator]

> You are indeed involved in a skill-sharing - well, demonstrating - session where you are meant to convey meaningful information about your abilities as a colleague to the audience.

If you were the manager at an architectural firm, would you have a candidate come in and invite them to design a bridge on a whiteboard? Interestingly, at the age of about 8, I could do this by remembering what the structure looked like; simple memorization. At 12, I competed in a bridge building competition, using balsa wood; I could draw a bridge that used good basic design principles. At 16, I could spend hours drawing a realistic looking design, annotating lengths and angles, design features. I know NOTHING about bridge building. Never have, beyond the basic low hanging fruit that anyone who's taken a basic physics class will be able to derive.

There simply isn't time during an interview to demonstrate a full professional design pipeline in ANY meaningful way. It's simply bullshit. This is why handing out problems to people as they arrive at interviews like some fucked up high school pop quiz makes you and your company look like a fucked up high school, full of pedantic pedagogy.

> Also, I am not really sure what you are getting at with this language, but in general, if I was to have an interviewee who was to state the interview "fucking irritates" them, it would most certainly not be a successful interview.

What an odd response. I would ask them what about the interview "fucking irritated" them, because there might be something terribly stupid about our interview process, and bettering the interview process is extraordinarily important to a business.

> Taking a good faith chomp at what you've said, representing an interview as "performance art" when it is probably trying to suss out your skills again seems like the kind of lack-of-social-skills that I would love to suss out in an interview.

Social skills are a skillset highly valued for a social role at a company, like HR, Sales, Business Development, etc. Engineering skills are highly valued for engineering roles, such as Lead Engineer, Architect, R&D Lead, etc. You don't interview your sales people and hand them a paper asking them to derive the quadratic formula from first principles; that would be idiotic. Some might be able to do it, but then why are you even asking them to do BS that is unimportant for a newly hired sales person.

> to then demonstrate that we can discuss, reason about, and explore in real-time solutions to problems.

This is simply not how most fields in science and engineering work. There are times when it's appropriate and needed to discuss, plan, and share information, but that is a VERY small slice of the pie. Forcing people to discuss, realtime, how they are going about solving a problem of any complexity, speaks to an awful culture saturated with bureaucracy and groupthink. A sit-down chat or planning meeting on occasion is really important, but should gazing play-by-play? Disgusting.

[nawgz]

> If you were the manager at an architectural firm, would you have a candidate come in and invite them to design a bridge on a whiteboard?

Let's say I were.

> I know NOTHING about bridge building. Never have, beyond the basic low hanging fruit that anyone who's taken a basic physics class will be able to derive.

These would be exactly the kind of things the SOCIAL aspect of that whiteboard interview would dig into. Indeed, same with software engineering. I am sure that many people would be able to solve the whiteboard problem I give; that's quite directly not the point. Instead, the point is to see if they can demonstrate their ability to say things like:

* why did you use these lengths and angles? If I were to make this modification, would it have structural or design implications?

* I like the structure overall, but you have "<N>" of some substructure. Why did you pick that quantity? What changes would you make if the client requested more or less to keep a similar feel?

The person would then be able to demonstrate that they don't know NOTHING about bridge building and simply recreated a thing they luckily knew the shape of, but instead dig into first principles, emergent properties, tradespaces that emerged from their design decisions, and why they navigated said tradespace how they did.

> What an odd response

Right, I'm talking about how social skills are an important part of being in a workplace - you do, after all, interact with your coworkers up to 40h a week - and then this fellow tells a story about how he as a senior engineer told a new hire they were "fucking irritating" him as a demonstration of his superior social skills, and now you're trying to pull this? Unbelievable.

> It's simply bullshit

> makes you and your company look like a fucked up hiigh school, full of pedantic pedgagogy

> You don't have sales people do quadratic formulas

> Disgusting

You're quite unpleasant, and arguing directly in bad faith

> Engineering skills are highly valued for engineering roles

And the ability to communicate is a critical Engineering skill. How on earth everyone in this thread thinks asking an Engineer to talk for 45 minutes about a problem is analogous to asking a sales crew to derive a quadratic formula would've been beyond me, but I've seen about 100 strawmans in this thread.

Design work is not a VERY small slice of the pie unless you're entrenched in some org with humungous momentum and years of technical planning accomplished for you. In that case, you can probably afford to hire anti-social fucks who will just sit in their cave and code by themselves, never collaborating, failing to share critical business knowledge because talking to someone else isn't in their job description.