Gladwell: "Can you drive a stick?"
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Do You Know How to Drive a Manual Transmission?
n Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’s excellent new book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creators, and Winners Around the World, the authors suggest alternative questions for job interviews. For example: What tabs are open on your browser right now? (In my case: a draft of an upcoming Revisionist History episode, a Youtube video of a Canadian businessman who personally sponsored 50 Syrian refugees, a journal article on the merit of homework, and the Car and Driver review of the new special edition Golf R.)
Cowen and Gross think this kind of indirect question is a better way of assessing someone’s interests and curiosity than simply asking them a direct question. I agree. The standard interviewing process—with its conventional set of easily anticipated questions—is just too easy to game. (“Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” “In your chair!”)
This reminds me of a question I used for years in interviewing potential assistants: Do you know how to drive a manual transmission? If you said no, you didn’t get hired.
I know that sounds terribly arbitrary. But here’s my reasoning. It is not necessary to know how to drive a stick in the 21st century—particularly if you’re 22 years old. So the only people who do are those who are willing to take the time to master a marginally useful skill. Now why would a 22-year-old do that? One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.
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My litmus test for the past handful of job interviews has been humor. Say some at least marginally funny shit and see what happens. Do they at least appreciate the attempt? Kick the can down the road a little with you? Clam up? Get put off? How they handle it can tell you a hell of a lot more useful information than whether they drive a manual.
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He thinks standard interview questions are too easy to game, then turns his interviews into games of finding who’s dad owned a manual transmission hobby car.
@Horace said in Gladwell: "Can you drive a stick?":
He thinks standard interview questions are too easy to game, then turns his interviews into games of finding who’s dad owned a manual transmission hobby car.
Right? Gladwell does this shit, he has one idea and then for completely arbitrary reasons he leans full-on into it. On his podcast he did the same thing with a Google car. He took a ride in one, and because he was in one, he decides that this is completely the future, the people who drive themselves are losers and that kids born today will never get a license and how interesting is that. Because he took one fucking ride in a self-driving car.
Please love yourself.
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I guess I missed all of Season 6 of Revisionist History, I'll have to fix that. I really enjoy it, even if some episodes have my shaking my head at his logic. Still...
For interviews, there was a period in my career where I had to conduct a ton of interviews to staff up a large IT team. Nearly each one I would start off with a friendly but odd question. For example, this one guy was a great software engineer but he got a doctorate in oceanography many
moonstides ago... so I started out just asking him what that was all about. I found out the best hires were those who got along with the team the best... in IT, you can usually learn what you don't know while on the job. -
@Horace said in Gladwell: "Can you drive a stick?":
He thinks standard interview questions are too easy to game, then turns his interviews into games of finding who’s dad owned a manual transmission hobby car.
Right? Gladwell does this shit, he has one idea and then for completely arbitrary reasons he leans full-on into it. On his podcast he did the same thing with a Google car. He took a ride in one, and because he was in one, he decides that this is completely the future, the people who drive themselves are losers and that kids born today will never get a license and how interesting is that. Because he took one fucking ride in a self-driving car.
@Aqua-Letifer said in Gladwell: "Can you drive a stick?":
@Horace said in Gladwell: "Can you drive a stick?":
He thinks standard interview questions are too easy to game, then turns his interviews into games of finding who’s dad owned a manual transmission hobby car.
Right? Gladwell does this shit, he has one idea and then for completely arbitrary reasons he leans full-on into it. On his podcast he did the same thing with a Google car. He took a ride in one, and because he was in one, he decides that this is completely the future, the people who drive themselves are losers and that kids born today will never get a license and how interesting is that. Because he took one fucking ride in a self-driving car.
I guess he hasn’t spent 10000 hours drawing conclusions yet.
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I guess he also doesn’t interview too many Europeans. At least in Italy where I visit often, manual is still the default transmission in a car. I’m sure it’s true all over Europe.
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These days it seems most employers/recruiters use computers to screen candidates before a human interviewer gets to talk to one. Computers are not that good (yet) at letting interesting personalities or outside-the-box thinkers through preset filters. Chances are good the truly interesting candidates are blocked by software before getting to any human interviewer.
