Category: Entertainment

Loyalties

I’m about to type a sentence that I never thought I would ever say:

“I will be rooting against the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals.”

If anyone had suggested to me that I would ever write those words in my 60+ years of being a basketball fan, I would have laughed them out of the room.

I was born and raised on New York sports. Both my parents and grandparents lived in the NYC area, and probably generations before them. My dad would tell me stories from when he was a kid of hopping on the bus over the bridge, and then taking the subway to Yankee Stadium, where he saw Babe Ruth play many times. He took me to many Yankee games as a kid, which cemented my loyalty to the Yankees. And we watched many Knicks games together as well.

I started following basketball, not just watching it with my dad, when I was around 10 years old. I was 12 when they won their first championship, with Willis Reed making his famous return from injury in Game 7 against the Lakers. Three years later they won their second, and last, championship. I was a Knicks fan for life.

Throughout most of the 70s and 80s the Knicks were pretty terrible – they had a few glimmers, but never got very far. In the early 90s the team looked much stronger with the team built around Patrick Ewing, but of course that was also the era of the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan. During Jordan’s brief retirement, the Knicks finally made it back to the finals, only to lose to the Houston Rockets. They remained competitive, but never reached the Finals again until 1999, where they lost to the San Antonio Spurs.

27 years would pass until they made it back to the Finals. A lot changed in the world in those years, and a lot changed for me: in 2008 I moved to San Antonio.

Supporting the Spurs is part of San Antonio’s culture. At first I still considered myself a New Yorker rooting for the local team. But over time, watching Tim Duncan, Manu Ginóbili, Tony Parker, and Gregg Popovich, I found myself becoming genuinely invested. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a Knicks fan who liked the Spurs and became a fan of both teams.

For years this was fine; I could root for both teams, as they rarely played each other in a significant game. That changed this past year, when the NBA’s new in-season tournament, the NBA Cup, had the Spurs facing the Knicks in the finals. I thought that this would be a dream outcome – “my” team wins no matter what! But as I watched the game, I found myself excited when the Spurs scored, and getting a little nervous when the Knicks went on a run. I realized that I was a Spurs fan first, and a Knicks fan second. The Knicks ended up winning, and it brought me no joy.

Which brings me to the title of this post: loyalties. Sports are known for the particularly strong and fervent loyalty of fans for their teams. Most fans bases are local, and I was no exception.

I’ve been a loyal Knicks fan for over 50 years, and I still support them. But my loyalty has shifted to my new home town team: the San Antonio Spurs.

Spurs in 6!

Day 35: Chopped Candidate

Have you ever watched the TV show Chopped? If you haven’t, it’s a competition among 4 chefs. There are 3 rounds, and after each round, one of them is chopped (eliminated), until one remains. The winner gets a cash prize. This would seem like a good way to determine who is the best of the group, right?

The problem is how the competition is run: each round the chefs are given a basket of “mystery” ingredients that they can’t see until the round begins. And more often than not, the basket contains, shall we say, “odd” combinations. One such basket contained blood orange syrup, the African spice blend ras el hanout, hot cross buns, and lamb testicles. The chefs can add other staple ingredients, but those four flavors have to be featured prominently in the result.

And if that isn’t difficult enough, there is a time limit that is always ridiculously short. The chefs had 20 minutes to create an appetizer from the basket I described above: 20 minutes to create a recipe, determine what other ingredients to add, prepare and cook the food, and then plate it for a beautiful presentation.

I must confess that I find the show very entertaining, and have watched countless episodes. And I’m not alone: the show has been running for 44 seasons over the past 11 years. But let me ask you: if you were opening a restaurant, would this be the way you would select your head chef? I would hope not! Any restaurant that would spring surprises on their chefs and expect them to deliver first-rate food in impossibly short time limits wouldn’t last very long.

Which brings me to the point of all this: if you are interviewing for a programmer, do your interviews actually determine how well they would be able to work in your team? How positive their contribution will be?

Making a candidate live code a solution to a problem they’ve never seen before in a short period of time with people watching their every keystroke is the software development equivalent to being on Chopped. I certainly hope that your work environment isn’t anything like that. So why would you think that a live coding session in an interview tells you anything about their potential?

What artificial scenarios like Chopped or live coding interviews do is test a candidate’s ability to handle stress. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with live coding, but then again I’ve never had test anxiety in school, either. I’ve seen many talented developers choke under those circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to have them on my team.

What does it say about your company as a place to work if the bar they have to clear is how well they can handle high levels of stress?

When I first started interviewing candidates when I was at Rackspace, the standard was to have one interviewer do a live coding challenge, and another ask one of those bizarre, abstract brainteasers (“Walk us through your thoughts…”). Once again, these practices just show how nervous someone is in what is already an inherently stressful situation. That link includes a juicy quote:

These types of questions are likely to frustrate some interviewees so watch out for those who aren’t willing to play the game. It’s an interview after all and you make the rules.

Mark Wilkinson, head of recruitment, Coburg Banks

It’s all a game to him, and if asking questions with no right answers eliminates potentially good candidates, tough. It sounds like he is more interested in seeing who can tolerate being bullied than finding the best people for his company.

After sitting through some of these types of interviews at Rackspace, I campaigned internally to change these practices, because I saw some intelligent and capable candidates get flustered and end up looking dumb. I found that there are better ways to determine if someone is a good addition to your team. Perhaps I’ll elaborate more about these in a future post…

All This for Nothing

Looking forward to a new episode of Breaking Bad tonight. Last night I re-watched the previous episode, and while it was superb from start to finish, one line struck me the most: Walt was lying on the bathroom floor, insisting that Skyler never give up the money, and says “Please don’t let me have done all this for nothing“. It was clear then that once he realized the end was near, he came back to his original motivation for entering the meth underworld: to provide for his family after his death. As despicable as Walt’s actions have been, you could at least understand how he rationalized the brutality of his reign as Heisenberg. As long as he knows that his family is taken care of, he can face his upcoming mortality.

Contrast that with Jesse’s melancholy: he did all this for the money, period. He did it to get rich, and now that he is, he realizes the cost to his own sanity to have left such a trail of bloodshed was too much. That’s why he gave away his money: maybe by enriching someone else’s life he might feel that his actions have brought some good to the world instead of just death and suffering.