Any place that fires me for calling bullshit — I would not want to work at anyway. Sayonara!
For example, say I was the interviewee and actually said of the SQL question: "Well, to be frank, that question isn't so good for understanding my SQL abilities." I don't think that would be rude or evidence of "being an asshole". A retelling of that story may simply be condensing it down to how that statement was interpreted: as a nice way to say, "that's a stupid question".
We shouldn't get too far into parsing what's in the story as a verbatim telling of what happened. We have the author's impressions of those events and their interpretations of the outcomes to drive home a larger point the author wants to make. That's it.
It's clear he's brilliant, and experienced, and seems like he's just refusing to "play the game". Speaking truth to power works if you know when to also NOT do it, or how to do it in a way that gets people to listen.
It doesn't really matter how brilliant a guy is; if he's not capable of "playing the game", then he's going to be (and WAS) out on his ass within a short timespan. That's a sink on my team's resources having to hire AGAIN and train AGAIN so short after his hiring. I don't want brilliant jerks, I'd rather have someone decent who can stick around by not getting himself fired for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.
Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.
As for management, perhaps we should coin the term "agreeable assholes" as a neologism for Machiavellian.
(I'm a disagreeable asshole)
Being an “asshole” relates to inter-personal relationships, it has nothing to do with facts or correctness.
This is always the right thing to do when you decided to sell yourself as a cog of a bigger machine. Some times, management is right and the know-it-all engineer isn't.
The goal of a company is to serve its customers and make a profit, not stroke managements egos.
And it sounds more like this guy pointed out what was wrong and maybe embarrassed people, but that doesn’t make him an asshole. It’s one thing to be mean or call people names, that’s an asshole. But this guy was an “asshole” because he was right and it embarrassed people? I’ve seen the type of management that is so insecure they can’t be pointed out what they are doing wrong, sounds more like what happened here.
A good company has management that has a thick skin and acknowledges its missteps and raises up talent. If you can’t admit an employee “lower” than you can point out your flaws and give you criticism, then you’re the problem.
It’s never a good idea to make someone feel extra embarrassed for an error. That’s how you get them to loathe you and to make them hide future mistakes from you.
I guess now I have an additional reason to ask, so that I can screen out the assholes that will say it's a dumb question...
So even if the candidate is not using an LLM, the interview process is so messed up now that people willingly go along otherwise they may be rejected for, you know, actually stating what their experience was like.
Funnily enough, that was a YC funded company that I was interviewing for, and I expected a lot better.
I wonder if the pushback is more of a common reaction from more junior interviewers or once that aren't very empowered and just need to go down a script and worry about getting in trouble if they deviate.
I had a systems scenario recently where I was expected to troubleshoot a MySQL master that was trying to backup via rsync to a hung NFS mount.
I successfully resolved the problem and only then detailed how messed up their design was to get into such a situation in 2025.
Another viewpoint I've seen when sharing this story is that the interviewer wants me to start with the "bad" implementation first, then we move on to the "proper" one, but what's the point if I actually have pointed out the flaws beforehand?
I won't disagree about it being messed up though.
For example, when asked how to go about replacing PostgreSQL with MongoDB, it'd be okay for someone fairly junior to either give a straightforward answer or to turn their nose up and say "eww, no" - but you'd expect someone with more seniority to instead flag that it was an unusual scenario and ask for more detail.
Prepare a vaguely-plausible reason (eg. "we're storing JSON documents and the team are more comfortable with Mongo's tooling"), and this can form the basis for a productive discussion which you can drive in whichever social or technical direction you feel is most appropriate.
Jerks come in all sizes.
They loved his attitude when it challenged broken systems, but the second he aimed that same energy at management's BS, he was out. Makes you wonder... is "culture fit" just code for "won't call out your boss"?
"It was very benign and was probably the most practical question I asked him! Let's say you want to randomly sample 1,000 users out of a table with a user_id column, e.g. so you can get a list of IDs to send a customer feedback form to. How would you do that?"
1. SELECT user_id FROM table LIMIT 1000 -- this gives unordered results, but is not truly random (it's dependent on database retrieval patterns)
2. SELECT user_id FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1000 -- this is uniform random, but it's expensive for big tables.
3. SELECT user_id USING SAMPLE reservoir(1000 ROWS) -- this is a fast and memory-efficient streaming method, i.e. Reservoir Sampling [1] in which n is treated as large and unknown (DuckDB supports this sampling method and others: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/samples.html) Reservoir sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling) was a hot topic among data scientists on Quora circa 2011.
Sometimes simple questions have deep implications.
Sure, on a case by case basis, it’s easy to make the argument that the smart asshole should’ve been more agreeable and tactful. But in the long term, keeping these managers hurts the company more and it’s how you end up with zombie orgs that scrape by.
bravesoul2•6h ago
upghost•4h ago