yeah I can't say much about Pivotal labs aside from the unusual interview that I was a part of and the conclusions that I drew from that experience. It's certainly possible that I was imagining things but I strongly suspect they were poking and prodding to gauge my level of "reactivity" to various political statements. I understand why they felt the need to make me jump through those hoops. They felt the need to try to filter out ahead of time those individuals who are likely to express strong or controversial opinions during the course of their total engagement with the company. This makes sense because to run a pair-programming shop you have to try to build a community of relatively like-minded people who "get along" sort of like you're running a college fraternity. Polarizing issues/debates can lead to friction within these tight-knit fraternal organizations so it does make sense to try to weed out individuals who don't already have an understanding about that, and how else could you do it if not by testing them ?

I'm not saying they did something untoward in their interviewing process I'm merely pointing out that this whole hidden layer of social filtering must out of necessity exist in pair-programming organizations in order to nip drama-potentials in the bud before they have a chance to come to fruition. This is something that remote work shops simply don't have to worry about which is a major strategic advantage currently misunderstood in the popular tech media space but extremely well understood by those who are actually running successful remote teams.

In other words because their core programming methodology (pair-programming) involves forcing individuals to share more casual interaction than what would normally occur in a traditional office environment organizations like Pivotal are forced to be proactive about filtering for "casual social behavior traits" in their never-ending struggle to to maintain a harmonious drama-free zone. This puts pair-programming shops at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to sourcing talent because

A. they're drawing from a smaller talent pool, and

B. they have to care more about how the candidate behaves socially in casual 'off the record' situations.

It's my opinion that the added advantages which supposedly spring from working at the same desk with another skilled individual are more than offset by these hidden constraints which the whole business is subjecting itself to.

I didn't mean to imply that there's "emotional drama" within Pivotal labs in particular, but I did mean to imply that remote shops don't have to worry about that issue nearly as much as pair-programming shops because of the "always on the record" nature of modern group collaboration infrastructure.

I would also like to point out that the true 10x developers out there are statistically more often the personality types who are likely to express controversial opinions or touch on polarizing issues. This has been a truism throughout recorded human history when it comes to extremely brilliant individuals.

http://37signals.com/remote
< recommended reading even for pair-programming die-hards

(I'm not connected with the author of that book in any way)