Dear Mr. Architect!
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminium, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminium, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.
Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.
While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.
Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.
You must be thrilled to be working on an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.
P.S.: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.
P.P.S.: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.
“This button turns on the light in the hallway. Sometimes it brings the whole house down on you, but we haven’t found a way to reliably reproduce this. If that happens just crawl from under the rubble, rebuild the house, and try again. This time the light should turn on.“
“Oh, and send us the log messages.”
This hurts in special ways
I’ve spent the last 4 months living this. Thank you I hate it.
EDIT: Actually my entire career, but most painfully the last 4 months. I hate it. And, yet, I must eat, so I endure.
Dear Mr. Customer,
Thank you for reaching out to me. I’ve created a design to your specifications, and included some notes in this message.
To accommodate for the number of bedrooms being unknown, I’ve included 1024 bedrooms in the design. If you don’t need the extra rooms, you can simply leave the doors closed. You won’t even notice they’re there!
This design is flexible in order to balance cost vs features. For example, the house can be built from cheaper materials like OSB or cardboard, or more expensive materials like aluminum or andesite. I’ve also made the design modular, so you can include only the features you need (for example, a roof).
In terms of maintenance fees, we can offer you a low-cost yearly management service, so you need not worry about maintaining the building. Our firm will definitely be around in 6 months still, we’re pretty sure of it.
I was not able to get a hold of your family, but I collected some feedback from my girlfriend and two cats. My girlfriend was indifferent, but the cats were unanimous in wanting green carpet. Please offer my most sincere regrets to your wife in this matter.
I didn’t have the specific fridge connection you requested. I would have built a custom connector, but my boss insisted we cobble together something using 18 different preexisting connectors. It should keep things cold, but the refrigerator door will open inwards.
I’ve included the blueprints below. Please ignore the tear stains.
But before I hire you, can you please build a small house or a shed or a trampoline to show me that you have the skills of an architect. The exact details of what to build will be given to you when the test assignment starts.
This is for free of course.
Given the number of people in our last round of hiring who completely failed at producing said shed this step was 100% necessary.
That smells of managerial incompetence, or an architect not doing his job.
Or the technical challenge being ridiculous like a lot of them are. If you have that many people failing it, that tells me some or all of these things are true:
- Management, or whoever they hire for handling candidates, is not screening them well
- The challenge is needlessly complex
- The challenge requirements are not clear
- The company expects absolute prod-ready perfection but told the candidates “don’t spend more than 2-3 hours on this,” despite it taking one of their own engineers 6-8 hours
- The salary is way too low and they’re not getting candidates that fit their demands (e.g. wanting “senior” while offering “junior” salaries)
Seriously, some tech companies think they shit gold and give ridiculous challenges that reflect that delusion.
Source: been in tech since 2005 and in a terminal since I was 12.
and in a terminal since I was 12.
That’s a long time to wait at an airport terminal! Is that Tom Hanks movie based off your life?
As a builder, I have had this scenario play out dozens of times. Clients paying millions for design and being shocked at what they get. My favorite was the charity that the architect spec’d custom handmade tile from Italy for… in a service bathroom lol. 40k to tile one wall of a bathroom for a charity that struggles to keep its doors open.
