After I turned in a decent performance in my grade school spelling bee, my mom had the dubious, gas-guzzling honor of driving my brother, sister, and me an hour and a half so I could compete in the bee the next rung up the illustrious competitive spelling ladder.
I was prepared.
I was a word wizard.
I was eliminated in the first round.
Up at the podium, bright-eyed and cocksure, I listened intently as the judge asked me to spell “respite” (pronounced “res-peht”). Respite. Respite… I had no idea what that word was.
I shamefully walked off the stage, — after my inglorious five-minute performance frozen as a statue and my thirty seconds as an ignoramus — I asked the judge to see the word. Even at such a young age I knew it was lame of me to do so, but I had to know. Lo and behold, they showed me “respite,” to which I replied, “Oh! Re-spite!”
Apparently, my brother and I had been studying the words with our own misguided mispronunciations, and we reinforced these naïve inaccuracies when we tested each other. As a result, we couldn’t recognize half the words as pronounced by the “professional” spelling judges.
From that day on, I have held mispronunciations in high esteem. The English language is such that its pronunciations change across words without any written cues, so people need to hear many words spoken in order to know how they are meant to be said.
When a college friend of mine mispronounced “debauchery” as “de-bauk-ery,” we teased him at first, but we realized soon after that he had never heard the word. He had only read it. Similarly, a lot of my non-native English speaker friends did not let their own level of education be limited by what they had heard. They swung strange words around fearlessly. Mispronunciation is not a sign of ignorance, but erudition!
I bring all this to light because, after a recent job interview, a developer asked me what the point was of some high-level mathematics questions in our recruitment process.
I told him that we want to avoid “spelling bee” questions — questions in which the interviewer asks the candidate some random syntax or function. These questions are innately flawed , since they depend on the person having come across that particular function or syntax and remembering the minutiae later. CS trivia, really. Might as well ask the countries involved in the Seven Years War or Pi to the tenth digit. In order to be fair, interviewers usually dumb down these questions to maximize the probability that a good candidate would come across the particular material at hand.
We dislike this method: in the real world, smart people will read whatever is necessary, have notes, and do what they must. A correct/incorrect answer will tell us very little unless the question is ridiculously easy or ridiculously esoteric (thereby devaluing its merit).
There’s a flip-side of the bad question coin: I once interviewed for a large consulting firm in Mexico City. The sole interview question was “how many street lamps are there in Mexico City?” I had already prepared for this asinine test with its equally abstruse cousins like “how many tennis balls can I fit in a bus?” or “How many cabs are there in New York?” and so I went on an admittedly long rant about how to get the best answer through various methods — the historical growth of Mexico after the Mexican Revolution, how to take the upper and lower bound solutions by various assumptions, and so on and so on. I did not get the job. Surprise!
This kind of question tests one’s ability to do simple arithmetic and make things up. At best, the questions are tests for the insane (“there’s a trillion people in New York, therefore…”). At worst, they’re cheap, faux-objective pedestals upon which interviewers can place their own gut feelings.
At Border Stylo, we much prefer to have conversations with people. Interviews are stressful, difficult events, so we try to get to know the person behind the questions, past the CV. Worthless “interview questions” and conversations are not mutually exclusive, but time is limited; the more time people take to guess how many street lights there are, the less time they have to tell you about what their new hobbies and lifelong passions.
Of course, we still do math, logic, and CS questions, but these are more tests of people’s ability to confront and attack problems than about whether they happen to have heard “respite” properly pronounced.
I realize that people will still ask spelling bee and street light questions, regardless how useless. But maybe, just maybe, there’s some MBA out there who will read this, put away the list of standard questions, and just try to get to know the person in front of them.
By the way, there are 13,000 cabs in New York City.*
Which is not at all what I would have guessed.
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