[picks_at_nits]

And yet... At the end of the story, all three participants (recruiter, company, and candidate) have failed to get what they want.

Somehow, this does not come across as a fantasy being played out, more of a cautionary tale.

[supercoder]

I dunno, the interviewer provides the template code as ECMAScript 2015 ?

Seems incredibly bleeding edge for an interview question.

And then the start of his reply is 'Using babeljs.io, I’ll write this in ECMASCript 2015 notation.', which is weird given the example code was already implied to be in this.

[nostrademons]

In the story, the very next day The Carpenter got a generous contract from FOG, a stealth startup doing very interesting work, and promptly forgot all about Thing. It sounds like he got exactly what he wanted.

[picks_at_nits]

That might be a red-herring. When times are good, people get positive reinforcement for doing bad things. Thing might hire the next programmer, and the Carpenter gets the next job, and everybody assumes that the right best way to conduct an interview is for both people to “flip the bozo bit” on each other as soon as possible.

Then when it becomes hard to find good people, Thing suffers because they are too quick to reject people based on one answer. And if the Carpenter finds there are few jobs that suit his criteria, he has trouble getting one with the style of answer he tries to jam into every question.

That’s a bit of a metaphor for how many (but not all) companies become internal shit-shows in tech. They get a lot of positive feedback (raising money, adulation from HN) for their tech, but meanwhile are terrible managers.

It takes great discipline (and possible great mentoring) to say to yourself, “things are going well, but what am I doing wrong that I just happen to be getting away with?"

[nostrademons]

You bring up a good point, but it's not one supported by the text of the story. Perhaps that's why it's a good story: everybody reads into it their personal experiences and assumes it means what they want it to mean.

FWIW, the meaning I took away from it is "Well, this is a cool way of looking at things. Some people will run away screaming, some people will appreciate it. If you want a happy life, find the people who appreciate it and don't worry so much about the people who don't see things your way."