[throwaway12357]

I'm sorry but I can't help to find this situation ridiculous.

Unless you're from a very poor country there is no excuse for not having a working keyboard.

I don't know if that was part of the test, but if it was, it's worse than the big blue chip corps asking about the number of piano tuners. Which actually can be valuable at understanding how one reasons about unknown problems/areas.

About the server being slow, well I don't know the magnitude of the slowness or the anger, but unless you're a ramen fueled startup there is no excuse for having slow machines. It's management failure. It's a waste of developer time. Instead of coding the dev is having to deal with stress inducing constant 5 second hiccups or similar things.

Put yourself in the interviewee's shoes. Do you really want to work in a company that can't conduct a proper interview and has broken/slow hardware?

And yes, I do use vim and I do like w very much.

[knodi123]

> Do you really want to work in a company that can't conduct a proper interview and has broken/slow hardware?

Slow is relative. The employee in question was trying to figure out why a remote server was experiencing extreme slowdown. He ssh-ed in, but he was able to type far faster than the beleaguered remote could echo his keystrokes. So he needed to just carefully type his commands, wait for them to appear, and then press enter. Instead, he typed angrily and too quickly, swore at the connection, and eventually started slamming his keyboard in a fit of pique.

It was a totally reasonable real-world slow machine problem, and a totally useful insight into the mindset of a potential new employee.

Not egregious at all. We're developers, sometimes we have to walk into an annoying situation and deal with it like adults.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah but poor guy - in an interview situation the pressure is different and public. He might have done fine at his own desk.

[garmega]

It wasn't during the interview. According to knodi123's first comment it was during the guy's first week on the job.

>Joking aside, we once let a guy go during his 1 week probationary period because he got a little too angry at a slow server.

[Ma8ee]

I have been forced to work with really old computers connected to as old research hardware. At some point it is probably more economical to let someone figure out the interface and solder something together with an Arduino or similar so we can start using a new computer. But that point is never now. Until then we have this old chain of hardware just to get the data from the old machine via 5 1/4 floppy disks.