"F*@#!"
Despite Employee 322's best efforts to smother that outburst, clearly somebody had heard him, because right away he heard a chair creak in his direction. He waited.
Employee 343's face appeared around the corner in slow motion. He had to be careful, of course, so he tried his best to appear lost in thought, while accidentally happening to just spot him whilst doing so. To Employee 322, he just looked constipated.
Employee 322 looked at Employee 343 without really looking at him. The latter raised an eyebrow the teeniest millimetre. In response, one corner of Employee 322's lips turned upwards the teeniest millimetre. With that exchange, the two of them were practically hugging. Employee 343 was putting everything on the line with that overwhelming show of emotion. And it was all because they were best friends in a workplace where friends were frowned upon, let alone best anything. Employee 343 was risking his job sympathizing with Employee 322; he could lose it to a program any time. Employee 322 smiled an internal smile of gratitude and walked off before he could get his friend into further trouble.
"All work is charity." The unwanted voice of his Hitlerian father banged on his mind's door. Indeed, papa, indeed. Sighing, he trudged at the slowest possible pace he could without setting off slacker alarms, to the basement where the room lay. Why oh why did it have to be his turn today? He sighed again, and entered the room.
It was pitch dark. Fumbling around for a switch, he stubbed his toe against a raised cable and cursed loudly. An idea cut through the pain: what if he complained to the top brass about the room being biased against able bodied people? Short of being a bat-human hybrid, there was no way groping for a light in a dark room was safe. But he knew that keeping the lights always on would have the environmental ethics guys swarming all over the office in no time. The fines would be steep, perhaps impossible to pay.
He chuckled. Let them squirm trying to choose between the rock and the hard place. Personally though, he preferred hard places. A rock was a rock was a rock. But a hard place could be anything. Perhaps it could even be something nice. Naturally, his mind drifted to sexual innuendo. The predictability of his thoughts alarmed him; maybe he was due to be roboted out after all.
Click.
Warm yellow light flooded the room. It was bare except for what looked like a towering vending machine to one side. The Questioner, Employee 322 called it. He fancied the name had a vaguely menacing air to it that fit perfectly.
Apparently, the buttons on the machine had text on them once. Employee 13, that know-it-all SOB had deigned to confide in him. Voice lowered to a whisper, but head still tilted towards the ceiling to make no doubt of his superior status, he had told him:
"Clearly, knowing what each button does would bias you in some way. You'd pick whatever test sounded nice to you in that moment in time. I mean, I would achieve the closest thing to randomness that the human brain possibly can, but you, " a waggling eyebrow had dismissed Employee 322's worth for all eternity, ".. you would probably pick the biggest sounding word."
"No offence, " he added offensively.
"Also, and you wouldn't have caught this, I'm sure, just writing something like 'click this' on each button wouldn't work either. That would bias the interviewer for or against the language of the button text."
When Employee 322 had not responded with a suitable degree of awe and admiration, Employee 13 had stopped talking to him. All's well that begins well.
All the buttons looked the same, grey - that'd change to a lighter grey when the LED was snapped on, except for the green button that started the interview. Employee 322 let out the most heartfelt of sighs and hit the green button. The Questioned hummed and purred into life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the adjoining wall, was a man. Candidate 5872. He was surrounded by a circular wall of smooth, featureless white. He had absolutely no reason to be nervous, but apparently his trembling fingers hadn't received the memo. He shoved them into one of his sweatshirt's numerous pockets.
Sweatshirts. His grandmother had caught a glimpse of him getting ready to attend the interview, and she'd asked him:
"Are you prepared?"
He'd laughed heartily at that question. Would you prepare for winning the lottery? Then she'd turned a critical eye over his interview costume. A grey sweatshirt covered with possible food stains, a hoodie and a decade old jeans didn't make the best impression. But she had turned away without a word because even she knew how it worked.
When interview standardization had first become a fad, beauty - and attractiveness and presentability if you will - had been the first to go. It was a well known confounding variable; candidates who were more beautiful, or presented themselves more attractively were much more likely to be hired, all other things being equal. The solution: the interviewer would never see the interviewee, and vice versa.
Employee 322 watched a 3D hologram of his first high school crush shimmer into existence. It was awkward because he hadn't seen her since high school, so the 3D hologram was of a fifteen year school girl in uniform. He told the schoolgirl:
"Alright, Candidate 5872. Before we start with standardized testing, you have one minute so summarize your skills and experience."
The schoolgirl figure nodded and waved. Employee 322 snorted in disgust. They'd still not got it right. Yes, the interviewer shouldn't be able to see the interviewee, but speaking to a wall didn't make for the best interviews. Humans needed visual feedback - they'd need a human figure for the interviewer to address, but this human figure would have to be completely neutral in the interviewer's eyes. If seeing the figure made any part of an EEG light up, it wasn't right. Neural tech hadn't however progressed to the point that somebody could just plug in a chip into a brain and spit out a neutral hologram. So, the brass did the next best thing: surveys.
Just for giggles, Employee 322 had described his high school crush in his neutral hologram survey. A decision he now ranked among the three best of his life because it made things so much more entertaining. Some days he hated the girl, and some days he loved her, but she was always entertaining.
A sound suddenly enveloped Candidate 5872. It was a voice; a voice neither male nor female, a voice neither cruel nor compassionate, a voice neither loud nor soft, a voice neither friendly nor cold, a voice without direction. Obviously, it was designed to be completely unprejudiced - it would neither soothe a candidate's nerves, nor boost a candidate's confidence, it would do nothing but convey the meaning of the words it spoke.
"You. Have. One. Minute. To. Speak. About. Your. Skills. And. Experience."
Taking a deep breath, the candidate marched into a vigorous self-eulogy.
"I have worked for years and years in C# and have mastered it to the point that I can design a better language with all its strengths but none of its weaknesses."
"I work with the leading titans in the field to deliver cutting edge top of the line frameworks that are future proof, robust and self un-attenuating."
This wasn't what Employee 322 heard at all. The Questioner was designed to compensate for articulatory privilege. What if the poor sap being interviewed was great at his job but poor at speaking about it? Totally unfair right? That's what the brass had felt at least, and now the Questioner compensated for it.
The schoolgirl only said:
"C#... Skill... Networking..."
Then she giggled and fell silent, an action eerily reminiscent of the whir of an old desktop computer that was just going into hibernation.
Employee 322 ticked a box and turned to the grid of grey buttons in front of him. Which one should he press today?
Meanwhile, Candidate 5872's mind was racing. What would his test be like? It would be completely random of course, and possibly something never asked before, but speculation was fun. Would he have to take off his clothes and put them on again, like this neighbour's nephew's son he knew? Or would have to make four and a half circuits of the interview chamber without pause?
Suddenly he recalled the tragic story of a man who'd tried to game the Questioner. Everybody knew that the Questioner compensated for known handicaps. So this man had deliberately broken his foot and slipped a disc before the interview, hoping that this would narrow down the kinds of tests he could be asked to perform.
Wrong, he was so wrong.
A neither male nor female voice had asked him to sit down on the ground. It had then coolly and crisply instructed him as to the right way of doing so without further injuring himself. And then it had asked him to count the blinking lights behind his back without turning around or getting up. Since he could hardly do either of those things, he had failed the test. Some people believed the Questioner was a demonic instrument with supernatural powers. Candidate 5872 wasn't among those people, but he shuddered.
The omnipresent Voice spoke again. (Was it ever silent?)
"Take. Your. Shoes. Off. Chuck. Them. Across. The Room. Pick. Them. Up. Wear Them. Then. Repeat. Process. 14. Times."
Candidate 5872 smiled; he had heard weirder. But something was wrong. He was caught up in a moment of regret. As a child, he'd often taken his slippers off and tossed them through the window into his cranky neighbour's balcony. The neighbour's dog would hear the slap of rubber on concrete and would come yapping to see. Every time, without fail, to his everlasting hilarity. He'd become something of an expert at taking footwear off and chucking aforementioned footwear, all in one motion and at rapid velocity. When had he stopped doing this? Why had he stopped doing this? Man, oh, man, oh man. It had been years! His footwear chucking skills would have become rusty.
He took a deep breath and forcefully recalled the holy tenet of standardized interviewing: Practice Makes Imperfect. If it's a skill that has been improved with practice by a significant fraction of candidates, then it's a skill that cannot be tested on. Everything would be fine. He knelt to take off his shoes.
Employee 322 watched the schoolgirl sway her hips from side to side. He noted the amplitude and frequency of the swing into a tablet computer. Another sigh, a particularly vicious one, escaped his lips. It was always the same. He was not to know exactly what the interviewee was being tested on, because that would break the other holy tenet of standardized interviewing: The Double Blind Principle, so he would see a normalized version of the interviewee's performance. The schoolgirl's hips swayed hypnotically. He wondered what hologram Employee 343 saw.
Despite Employee 322's best efforts to smother that outburst, clearly somebody had heard him, because right away he heard a chair creak in his direction. He waited.
Employee 343's face appeared around the corner in slow motion. He had to be careful, of course, so he tried his best to appear lost in thought, while accidentally happening to just spot him whilst doing so. To Employee 322, he just looked constipated.
Employee 322 looked at Employee 343 without really looking at him. The latter raised an eyebrow the teeniest millimetre. In response, one corner of Employee 322's lips turned upwards the teeniest millimetre. With that exchange, the two of them were practically hugging. Employee 343 was putting everything on the line with that overwhelming show of emotion. And it was all because they were best friends in a workplace where friends were frowned upon, let alone best anything. Employee 343 was risking his job sympathizing with Employee 322; he could lose it to a program any time. Employee 322 smiled an internal smile of gratitude and walked off before he could get his friend into further trouble.
"All work is charity." The unwanted voice of his Hitlerian father banged on his mind's door. Indeed, papa, indeed. Sighing, he trudged at the slowest possible pace he could without setting off slacker alarms, to the basement where the room lay. Why oh why did it have to be his turn today? He sighed again, and entered the room.
It was pitch dark. Fumbling around for a switch, he stubbed his toe against a raised cable and cursed loudly. An idea cut through the pain: what if he complained to the top brass about the room being biased against able bodied people? Short of being a bat-human hybrid, there was no way groping for a light in a dark room was safe. But he knew that keeping the lights always on would have the environmental ethics guys swarming all over the office in no time. The fines would be steep, perhaps impossible to pay.
He chuckled. Let them squirm trying to choose between the rock and the hard place. Personally though, he preferred hard places. A rock was a rock was a rock. But a hard place could be anything. Perhaps it could even be something nice. Naturally, his mind drifted to sexual innuendo. The predictability of his thoughts alarmed him; maybe he was due to be roboted out after all.
Click.
Warm yellow light flooded the room. It was bare except for what looked like a towering vending machine to one side. The Questioner, Employee 322 called it. He fancied the name had a vaguely menacing air to it that fit perfectly.
Apparently, the buttons on the machine had text on them once. Employee 13, that know-it-all SOB had deigned to confide in him. Voice lowered to a whisper, but head still tilted towards the ceiling to make no doubt of his superior status, he had told him:
"Clearly, knowing what each button does would bias you in some way. You'd pick whatever test sounded nice to you in that moment in time. I mean, I would achieve the closest thing to randomness that the human brain possibly can, but you, " a waggling eyebrow had dismissed Employee 322's worth for all eternity, ".. you would probably pick the biggest sounding word."
"No offence, " he added offensively.
"Also, and you wouldn't have caught this, I'm sure, just writing something like 'click this' on each button wouldn't work either. That would bias the interviewer for or against the language of the button text."
When Employee 322 had not responded with a suitable degree of awe and admiration, Employee 13 had stopped talking to him. All's well that begins well.
All the buttons looked the same, grey - that'd change to a lighter grey when the LED was snapped on, except for the green button that started the interview. Employee 322 let out the most heartfelt of sighs and hit the green button. The Questioned hummed and purred into life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the adjoining wall, was a man. Candidate 5872. He was surrounded by a circular wall of smooth, featureless white. He had absolutely no reason to be nervous, but apparently his trembling fingers hadn't received the memo. He shoved them into one of his sweatshirt's numerous pockets.
Sweatshirts. His grandmother had caught a glimpse of him getting ready to attend the interview, and she'd asked him:
"Are you prepared?"
He'd laughed heartily at that question. Would you prepare for winning the lottery? Then she'd turned a critical eye over his interview costume. A grey sweatshirt covered with possible food stains, a hoodie and a decade old jeans didn't make the best impression. But she had turned away without a word because even she knew how it worked.
When interview standardization had first become a fad, beauty - and attractiveness and presentability if you will - had been the first to go. It was a well known confounding variable; candidates who were more beautiful, or presented themselves more attractively were much more likely to be hired, all other things being equal. The solution: the interviewer would never see the interviewee, and vice versa.
Employee 322 watched a 3D hologram of his first high school crush shimmer into existence. It was awkward because he hadn't seen her since high school, so the 3D hologram was of a fifteen year school girl in uniform. He told the schoolgirl:
"Alright, Candidate 5872. Before we start with standardized testing, you have one minute so summarize your skills and experience."
The schoolgirl figure nodded and waved. Employee 322 snorted in disgust. They'd still not got it right. Yes, the interviewer shouldn't be able to see the interviewee, but speaking to a wall didn't make for the best interviews. Humans needed visual feedback - they'd need a human figure for the interviewer to address, but this human figure would have to be completely neutral in the interviewer's eyes. If seeing the figure made any part of an EEG light up, it wasn't right. Neural tech hadn't however progressed to the point that somebody could just plug in a chip into a brain and spit out a neutral hologram. So, the brass did the next best thing: surveys.
Just for giggles, Employee 322 had described his high school crush in his neutral hologram survey. A decision he now ranked among the three best of his life because it made things so much more entertaining. Some days he hated the girl, and some days he loved her, but she was always entertaining.
A sound suddenly enveloped Candidate 5872. It was a voice; a voice neither male nor female, a voice neither cruel nor compassionate, a voice neither loud nor soft, a voice neither friendly nor cold, a voice without direction. Obviously, it was designed to be completely unprejudiced - it would neither soothe a candidate's nerves, nor boost a candidate's confidence, it would do nothing but convey the meaning of the words it spoke.
"You. Have. One. Minute. To. Speak. About. Your. Skills. And. Experience."
Taking a deep breath, the candidate marched into a vigorous self-eulogy.
"I have worked for years and years in C# and have mastered it to the point that I can design a better language with all its strengths but none of its weaknesses."
"I work with the leading titans in the field to deliver cutting edge top of the line frameworks that are future proof, robust and self un-attenuating."
This wasn't what Employee 322 heard at all. The Questioner was designed to compensate for articulatory privilege. What if the poor sap being interviewed was great at his job but poor at speaking about it? Totally unfair right? That's what the brass had felt at least, and now the Questioner compensated for it.
The schoolgirl only said:
"C#... Skill... Networking..."
Then she giggled and fell silent, an action eerily reminiscent of the whir of an old desktop computer that was just going into hibernation.
Employee 322 ticked a box and turned to the grid of grey buttons in front of him. Which one should he press today?
Meanwhile, Candidate 5872's mind was racing. What would his test be like? It would be completely random of course, and possibly something never asked before, but speculation was fun. Would he have to take off his clothes and put them on again, like this neighbour's nephew's son he knew? Or would have to make four and a half circuits of the interview chamber without pause?
Suddenly he recalled the tragic story of a man who'd tried to game the Questioner. Everybody knew that the Questioner compensated for known handicaps. So this man had deliberately broken his foot and slipped a disc before the interview, hoping that this would narrow down the kinds of tests he could be asked to perform.
Wrong, he was so wrong.
A neither male nor female voice had asked him to sit down on the ground. It had then coolly and crisply instructed him as to the right way of doing so without further injuring himself. And then it had asked him to count the blinking lights behind his back without turning around or getting up. Since he could hardly do either of those things, he had failed the test. Some people believed the Questioner was a demonic instrument with supernatural powers. Candidate 5872 wasn't among those people, but he shuddered.
The omnipresent Voice spoke again. (Was it ever silent?)
"Take. Your. Shoes. Off. Chuck. Them. Across. The Room. Pick. Them. Up. Wear Them. Then. Repeat. Process. 14. Times."
Candidate 5872 smiled; he had heard weirder. But something was wrong. He was caught up in a moment of regret. As a child, he'd often taken his slippers off and tossed them through the window into his cranky neighbour's balcony. The neighbour's dog would hear the slap of rubber on concrete and would come yapping to see. Every time, without fail, to his everlasting hilarity. He'd become something of an expert at taking footwear off and chucking aforementioned footwear, all in one motion and at rapid velocity. When had he stopped doing this? Why had he stopped doing this? Man, oh, man, oh man. It had been years! His footwear chucking skills would have become rusty.
He took a deep breath and forcefully recalled the holy tenet of standardized interviewing: Practice Makes Imperfect. If it's a skill that has been improved with practice by a significant fraction of candidates, then it's a skill that cannot be tested on. Everything would be fine. He knelt to take off his shoes.
Employee 322 watched the schoolgirl sway her hips from side to side. He noted the amplitude and frequency of the swing into a tablet computer. Another sigh, a particularly vicious one, escaped his lips. It was always the same. He was not to know exactly what the interviewee was being tested on, because that would break the other holy tenet of standardized interviewing: The Double Blind Principle, so he would see a normalized version of the interviewee's performance. The schoolgirl's hips swayed hypnotically. He wondered what hologram Employee 343 saw.
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