These sorts of “gotcha” tests are silly. People are complicated, with many different personalities and behaviors. I can think of many reasons an excellent engineer might choose not to fix a broken coffee machine, especially in the stress of an interview.

If you want to know how somebody will work on the job, ask them to demonstrate the skills used on the actual job. This is called a “work sample interview.” (Leetcode problems don’t count, because most jobs don’t look like that. Neither do whiteboard interviews, for the same reason.)

If you want to know how somebody will behave in various situations, ask them to describe concrete examples of how they’ve reacted to those situations. Listen for deflection to hypotheticals and redirect towards lived experience. This is called a “behavioral interview.”

Don’t use tricks and gotchas.

Is that a LinkedIn post? It's wordy, doesn't explain anything, and tries to be a simple remedy to a complex problem. A problem irrelevant to the task to boot.

Anyone who spends time fixing a coffee machine is not earning their extremely high staff engineer salary.

My time is not suited to fixing coffee machines. People paid literally 1/6th what I am are tasked for that.

I thought I'd more or less seen most MBA nonsense around these days, but oh boy this is something else entirely. In order to assess a candidate, you're gonna think in your head "what do I think this person would do if the coffee machine broke down". You base your hiring decision for a person you just met and know more or less nothing about on what you made up in your head in a complete shower thought scenario.

I’m not sure we can expect complete strangers who are not yet part of an organization to feel certain ownership that is necessary to take it upon themselves to try to fix something.

If you make it worse, for example, are they going to charge you for breaking it?

It’s kind of like when a kid, you don’t go into your friend’s house’s fridge unless you’re invited to open it, at least the first time visiting.

I have literally fixed a coffee grinder at one of the startups I worked at.

I think I would fail this test since most coffee machines are hard to repair unless it is something trivial and the idea of just repairing something is kind of odd. A better answer might be you work with the office manager, go to the store and grab a temporary one.

I also think this is a terrible idea for other reasons:

1. You are working at a small company and its easy to communicate, its broken and you are going to fix it. However, focus is critical even if it doesn't feel like it all the time.

2. It is hard to tell but it seems like saying you would talk to the office manager would cause you to fail but this seems like the most rational answer. You should work with them and see if you can fix it together or at least keep them in the loop.

Bias for action is great but you also need people who can focus, know what they are good at, and communicate with others.

edit: formatting (need to not post while raging)

Sure, fix the coffee machine with one hand while completing the leet code questions with the other hand in the limited time available for the interview.

Interviewer: Candidate seemed distracted and jittery.

I look forward to the next couple posts in this series: The Leaky Faucet Test and The Clogged Toilet Test.

This sounds like some stupid dating test. "I'll only marry a man who takes initiative so I'll break something a see if he fixes it."

I don’t drink coffee. Did I pass?

Seriously though, it’s not a good question since it depends not only on the person, but also on the organisation. Sometimes the right response is to try and fix it, sometimes to report it to office management, and even in some organisations they’ve been so on the ball there would be no reason to even report it because they’d havea repair organised already.

"if the office coffee machine broke down, how would the candidate react?"

I don't drink coffee, so I would have no idea it was broken in the first place.

But I think the correct answer to this is to check if something obvious is broken, and if you can't determine the issue within about five minutes, tell HR that it is broken. They'll know what to do.

What happens if I break your beloved coffee machine in the process? If I'm the new guy I'm not keen to find out.

I'd imagine that in almost every case that a candidate "passed" this test, they would eventually find themselves in a situation where a manager got control-freaky over them doing exactly that, and instead wanted the employee to do something else in the situation.

Enthusiasm is traditionally the straightforward signal to capture this.

I get that it’s intangible and could be faked to some degree but it also sometimes comes off so clearly and always leads to good outcomes in my experience.

Broken coffee machine? That’s a SEV0. Declare an incident.

Trying to service, or even just open up, any appliance at a workplace is against the Occupational Safety and Health regulations in my country.

I would just use the instant coffee that I keep in my desk drawer that I keep in case the machine breaks or the machine isn't stocked.

Why don't we cut to the chase and just start hiring based on star sign? What a joke

Read this, and now I'm making a coffee in my working machine..

> Why not start by observing how they would react to a broken coffee machine?

Because you’re not hiring someone to fix your coffee machine which can’t be fixed without knowing the insides of the specific model of that specific brand.

I would offer to buy instant coffee at the local supermarket. What kind of bullshit trap is this? Do you really want to hire people by confusing and scaring them? It’s on the same level as the LinkedIn crap I see once a week.

I really don't like these kind of silver-bullet "hey look I easily solved a complex problem" self-congratulatory posts.

This feels like one of those things that should be openly explained as part of the culture instead of "guess our opinion". Anything else seems like reading the tea leaves that day to make hiring decisions.

Anecdotally, I've had two opposite experiences just like this. In the first I was walking and talking with the CEO about something important our team was working on when we came to a bunch of water on the floor (enough that clearly there was a problem like a broken pipe or fridge issue in the next room). He stepped over it but I stopped, completely distracted, and said shouldn't we do something about this? His response was short but poignant - he said we don't know the situation, we have great people that he trusts whose domain IS handling that kind of thing, and that there is only so much time in the day and that we, the CEO and a VP, needed to intentionally focus on big things only we could effectively handle even if that meant water on the floor for a little while longer.

I've also had the opposite experience where someone took it upon themselves to redesign one of the flows in our product because they (correctly) didn't think it served customers well. This person put a ton of good faith effort into this and produced a decent looking wireframe for a ux that didn't correctly understand how things work or what our goals for the project were. In fact this already had a good redesign that existed and was on the roadmap but he apparently hadn't been told about it. When he showed his design to people (directly to engineers asking them to build it instead of their actual tasks...) it caused a bunch of awkwardness for him and others. There was more drama after his manager continued to handle it poorly but all of it could have been avoided by more communication in any direction before deciding to just go do something outside of your normal zone.

These are just anecdotes but they highlight how I feel about this; I think "testing" people on how they respond to situations like this is both broken and disrespectful. The right amount of "just go fix it" is extremely subjective and depends on the culture of the company around you, how specialized the task that needs doing is, and the priority of what you could/should be doing instead.

To be clear I think a "doer" attitude is very valuable; I just don't think this is a fair or high signal way to evaluate it.

From TFA : “if the office coffee machine broke down, how would the candidate react? Would they try to fix it, or would they wait for the office manager or the founder to do it instead?”

I guess we know what kind of candidate you would be :)

The engineer in me would at least try to characterize the problem. It might be something simple! And to flip your argument around, if it’s something you can fix in a minute, it’s going to be more expensive to call someone else to do it.

It’s true in that there is comparative advantage in not doing it.

That’s what makes it a cultural scissor, and therefore a useful discriminator: there is no right answer, but there is definitely one kind of person these guys are selecting for.

I also like working with the kind of person who sometimes eschews comparative advantage. More than a decade ago, a startup I was at had our conference.

We ran barebones: front desk, ushers, lighting, everything. Run by members of the team. I was on engineering, at the front desk. It was great fun. Our customers loved it.

It would be good to message the person in charge of fixing or replacing it. All too often, others assume someone else already contacted them. Then, prepare a cup of tea and return to work.

Is this the same reason you wouldn’t pick up trash on the floor?

It is a "cultural fit" test, a cousin of "how many golf balls can you put in a manhole cover" or whatever. The question aims to figure out if you're going to take on certain tasks, and how you would take them on; especially in the frame of something outside your vocation, and if you're a "doer" or not. He states this frame explicitly in the post. Do you tackle the problem, and how, or do you throw your hands up, stating that it's someone else's problem?

You definitely will not get hired by that guy: you misunderstood the question.

So the CEO that stepped over the water didn't even tell anyone about the problem? That just seems wrong. Would this person call the cops if he saw burglars breaking into a neighbor's house? Some things are everyone's job to report even if someone else will clean it up.

Did anyone at the company with the guerilla design effort realize that there was a huge communication problem or did they just spank the guerillas?