Contact Calls

Tags: social interviews

Animals communicate with each other. Shocking, right? Birds, in particular, enjoy communicating outside of my window while I’m trying to sleep in. (First world problem, I know.)

Animals don’t chatter for the sake of noise. They have points to make. I recently read Vocal Matching in Animals in American Scientist Magazine. The author provided a succinct overview of animal contact calls, calls used to establish, maintain, or regain contact among groups of animals. I couldn’t stop thinking about text editors while I read.

the finding that vocal matching of contact calls often occurs among members of social groups that work together, or among members of mated pairs that rear young together, corroborates the idea that vocal matching specifically facilitates cooperative, mutually beneficial interactions.

First, matched calls present an efficient way to identify group members, particularly in large groups when not all individuals are familiar with one another. Because matched calls emerge through the process of imitative learning, which often requires sustained social contact, they reflect the social experiences of the signaler and effectively encode aspects of that individual’s social background. Thus, matched calls might provide listeners with information about individuals within their larger social network with whom they are less familiar, permitting listeners to quickly determine whether another animal has experience with, and therefore belongs to, their social group. This idea is known as the badge, or password, hypothesis.

—Kendra Sewall, Vocal Matching in Animals

Different social groups within our large technical community have different matched calls used to claim and confirm group membership. Many groups have multiple matched calls that can be used for identification purposes.

Programmers size each other up to establish dominance across a number of qualities and preferences. Ralph might ask John for his preference in version control systems, and Ralph will judge John based on his answer along a specturm like the following:

"Huh?"

Is John an intern? If so, we can mold him. If not, he’s an idiot.

"I don’t really see the point."

Definitely an idiot.

CVS, Subversion, Source Safe, any other last gen system

OK, he has a brain. Kinda old school, maybe.

GIT, Mercurial, TFS, any other current gen system, and here’s why.

He paid attention during the last decade. Good sign.

(Most) Unix guys won’t actually shun someone for answering the classic "emacs or vi" question "incorrectly". The incorrect answer is "none of the above". Using either emacs or vi means that someone is familiar with the common editing tools on a unix machine, and that means "they might be one of us". A unix sysadmin candidate who starts rambling through the process of downloading files to his Windows ME desktop with FTP and editing them in Notepad will never, ever, ever be a unix sysadmin in any reasonable organization.

I have no idea what sort of matched calls a group of Oracle DBAs or Cisco Network Engineers would use to judge one another.

It’s OK to remain ignorant of a group’s matched calls if you’re legitimately not in or interested in their group. These are secret handshakes, and you don’t need to know ‘em if you don’t need to use ‘em. Try to weasel your way in to a group with brute force and dumb luck, on the other hand, and you’ll commit credibility suicide.

Interviewing always consumes a huge amount of time and generally makes everyone involved hate life for a while when done poorly. On top of that, most organizations stretch out the firing process such a long time, often approaching infinity. You’re better off saying no to the occasional good candidate if it means never hiring a terrible candidate in an organization that is slow to fire, so the interview process is all about finding reasons to say "no".

Interviewers don’t know they’re mimicking the animal kingdom, but the first few questions after a round of pleasantries cut to the heart of a candidate’s experience. A candidate’s chances die a quick death if those matched calls don’t get answered appropriately. For example, here’s one of my least favorite interviewing experiences:

Me: "I see you have experience with AOP. That’s great, not many people have that. I used it on my last project and loved it. What implementation did you use, what kind of aspects were you writing, and at what point cuts would you apply them?"

Her: "… [silence] … I didn’t really write the AOP parts, but I was familiar with them in the project."

Me: "Ah, I see. Well, we’ve got a whiteboard here. Can you draw or talk about the concepts that make AOP interesting? Maybe some of the classic example use cases, or how they were used in your app?"

Her: "… [uncomfortable silence] … I don’t really know anything about AOP."

I didn’t throw her resume into the air and walk her out the door immediately. I wanted to, but that would be rude, and that’s not good for anybody. For all I know, her sister, cousin, neighbor, or college friend would be a great fit at the company, and I don’t need anyone hating us, even if they are personally a terrible fit for the group. Even still, the interview was effectively over in the first two minutes. She failed the first matched call question in such an over the top way that no amount of stellar answers could bring her back into the hire column.

(And if you want to read more about sorting resumes and interviewing, click those links to read what a real pro has to say about those topics.)