A chair is an underrated essential item for a programmer; consider how much time is spent in it.

Things came to a head when I moved recently. Whilst lugging around all those boxes and furniture my back insisted on telling me it is in poor health. I arrived at this situation by sitting in a large, very impressive, leather executive chair which my cousin lent me whilst he is overseas. It really looks and feels great to project that successful-man-with-CEO-chair aura when people walk in the room; but was terrible to actually sit in over time - being quite a short fella perhaps didn’t help. I was adopting such a curved slouch that I was even slotting a cushion in behind me to fill some of the gap.

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Describes a Skype interview for a SFO startup in 2007. It was a friend-of-family for an unadvertised position on the other side of the world, so please don’t judge me on my performance; instead take away that I found the challenge fun and wrote it up.

Initially I was a fan of these tests as I saw it could screen out colleagues who could talk the talk but not walk it. But the pendulum has swung too far now and online tests are used to lazily filter candidates with long challenging tests of skills they will rarely, if ever, actually use in the role—before they even know if it is a job they want.

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