CodeSOD: House Cleaning

Gray had been an IT manager at an immigration agency for a few years, but was ready to move on. And for good reason: Craig had endured his fair share of helldesk nonsense and was ready to let someone else handle it. That meant sitting through interviews for his replacement.

Craig had given a fairly generous three months’ notice, and very quickly the remaining three months were taken up with interviewing potential replacements. Each interview followed the same basic pattern: Craig greeted the candidate and escorted them into the fishbowl-style conference room in the middle of the office, where a panel of interviewers ran through a mix of behavioral and technical questions. The interviews were consistently disappointing, and so they moved on to the next candidate, hoping for improvement.

After the first few interviews, he started coming up with questions about potentially terrible IT-related disasters. “You see an executive using scissors to cut the Ethernet cable. When you push them, they explain that they want to make their connection wireless. What do you do?” “It’s the holiday season and you see someone trying to extend the Christmas lights in the break room with a suicide cable. What do you do?” “You discover that one of the engineers has hidden a bottle of whiskey in the server room. What do you do?”

Craig continued to entertain this, but it didn’t get them any closer to hiring any of these candidates.

One day they brought in another candidate and Craig did the standard interview. He wasn’t really into the interview – the candidate’s resume wasn’t the best they’d ever seen and it only took a few minutes to determine that they probably weren’t the best fit for the role. So Craig spent the time thinking about what absurd question he was going to ask rather than what was happening in front of him.

His mind wandered, his eyes wandering around the office. They wandered to the corner office, also fishbowl-style, where the CEO sat. And then Craig realized that he didn’t have to make anything up for today’s interview.

“What would you do if you saw an employee cleaning his keyboard with Evian mineral water while sitting at his desk with the computer still on and the keyboard still plugged in?”

The candidate was stunned and just sat there. For a long time they just looked at Craig. Craig obligingly pointed back to the CEO’s office, where the CEO was busy doing precisely what Craig had described.

The candidate took in the scene. Saw the sign that said it was the CEO’s office. Saw not one, but two open bottles of Evian. Saw the water spreading everywhere because the CEO didn’t think about things like “keep some paper towels handy”.

The candidate turned to Craig and shrugged eloquently. There was a world-weariness in the shrug that spoke of long experience with these types of situations. It was the shrug of an IT manager who would keep a healthy supply of replacement keyboards, and never ever Give the CEO a laptop.

In the end, it was that candidate who got the job, not because he had the best interview or had the best resume, but because he knew what he was getting into and was ready for it.

The keyboard, however, was not so lucky. “How else would I have gotten the breadcrumbs out?” the CEO asked as Craig replaced the keyboard.