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Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

businessinsider.fr

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Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#141

Post by TheSoftwareGuy »

avisser wrote: post #138
whack wrote: post #65

Here's what they are doing, from the linked blog post: > Our dev teams had taken to working with candidates to solve a bug or feature as part of the interview process. It was a collaborative effort with the candidate and the team working together to solve a real problem. Sounds like a great idea. Except it's so variable. What if you get lucky and you get a easy bug, whereas someone else gets something much harder. Le…

> taken to working with candidates to solve a bug or feature as part of the interview process This is unethical. How is this anything other than unpaid labor?

A little bit of unpaid labor is honestly fine. Especially since I can’t imagine this being easy to exploit in a way that really impacts a company’s bottom line.

It’s like getting a free sample of food at the store, before committing to a full purchase

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#142

Post by ensiferum »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #121
smsm42 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Facebook and the tech part was completely sane and appropriate, the technical task was a bit fizzbuzzy but not something you'd need to spend nights digging into obscure algorithms book, but rather simple task which required some thinking, but not too much of it. No experience with Google or Netflix. As of looking at CV, I've seen people with great CVs that proved utterly useless and of course the opp…

The issue with that is that if my CV is incredibly specialized in one area that happens to match the job I’m going for (eg compilers), why test my knowledge in designing things like a distributed system and in how great I do dynamic programming (that is not useful in my area)??? It feels like there is no verification at all of what my CV claims, nor does it give me a chance to show off the skills I’ve been working on…

Because at big corps engineers might get assigned interviews as a routine work. And any engineer has their favourite questions that they know the answer to. They dont want to take.the extra effort and come up with new questions just to adapt to your profile or expertise. It goes the other way around. I.e.the interviewer is not going to do.extra work to validate the candidate but the candidate has to prove him/herself. Take it or leave it.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#143

Post by bdhess »

cheschire wrote: post #96
robocat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modulus is a rabbit hole - the mod operator has different behaviour for negative parameters depending on the language (and presumably other language specific quirks?) Here's another one: when does the abs operator return a negative number?

Why make it a trivia game? Explaining the basics of how modulus SHOULD work is a fairly generic concept that is trivial for a lot of coders to describe, but impossible for non-coders. It's an ice-breaker.

Modular arithmetic ought to be explainable by anyone who’s studied basic number theory. Not just coders.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#144

Post by codyb »

cheschire wrote: post #96
robocat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modulus is a rabbit hole - the mod operator has different behaviour for negative parameters depending on the language (and presumably other language specific quirks?) Here's another one: when does the abs operator return a negative number?

Why make it a trivia game? Explaining the basics of how modulus SHOULD work is a fairly generic concept that is trivial for a lot of coders to describe, but impossible for non-coders. It's an ice-breaker.

Hmm, everytime I use modulus I need to double check whether it returns the number of times wholly divisible or the remainder.

I'm thinking the former without checking now.

Meanwhile, my last project has been to set up an entirely self hosted CI/CD pipeline using digital ocean, docker, jenkins, gitea, and docker registry to make changes to my websites I build with erlang, react, html and sass, so I _think_ I can create projects! (No guarantees).

The interview process is tough, and what do you want to root out more false negatives or false positives? It may depend on the size of the company. Google can probably shell out a few bucks to some putz who sounds impressive but isn't in the hopes they'll nab a few more great engineers at the loss of a few paychecks.

An early phase startup may not have that luxury.

Edit: must be tired since just thinking about fizzbuzz for two seconds clearly gives me the answer to what modulus returns ;-)

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#145

Post by Izkata »

robocat wrote: post #90
cheschire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just ask the candidate to explain how to use modulus correctly, and not even need to break out the markers.

Modulus is a rabbit hole - the mod operator has different behaviour for negative parameters depending on the language (and presumably other language specific quirks?) Here's another one: when does the abs operator return a negative number?

The differing behavior is because some of those implement remainder instead of modulus: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13683563/whats-the-diffe...

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#146

Post by YorkshireSeason »

JonathanMerklin wrote: post #50
lawn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He meant constant memory. It's to invalidate solutions marking items visited. I too got this question at an interview once, and failed. For fun I asked everyone at work and predictably nobody came close to figuring it out.

There was a blog post shared a while ago on HN where the author ranted that it was his least favorite interview question because the solution (fast/slow pointers) was - if I recall correctly - literally somebody's PhD thesis. There was a years-long window where anyone "clever enough" could have waltzed in with a one page paper. If you've never seen the pattern before, there is a very good chance that you're hosed. Ed…

The tortoise & hare algorithm [1] was not just discovered by some random PhD student, but by Robert Floyd, who won a Turing award.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd's_Tortoi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Floyd

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#147

Post by dom96 »

kronin wrote: post #124
mancerayder wrote: post #39

Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior engineer in the systems space I feel I shouldn't need to study days or weeks for fizzbuzz sorting algorithms questions that are designed to test comp sci recent grads. I have a proven career, and was never suddenly stumped in a project due to not being able to.…

I've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area. One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user…

I have very little experience with interviewing candidates, but how can you be certain these people were liars? Maybe they simply were having a bad day, or got too much in their head with stress during the interview. There are many factors at play when it comes to a bad performance and it's not always simply that the engineer doesn't know the answer.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#148

Post by kronin »

dom96 wrote: post #147
kronin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area. One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user…

I have very little experience with interviewing candidates, but how can you be certain these people were liars? Maybe they simply were having a bad day, or got too much in their head with stress during the interview. There are many factors at play when it comes to a bad performance and it's not always simply that the engineer doesn't know the answer.

I give them a chance to judge their own skillset. After looking at their resume, I have an idea based on the projects they take credit for, what their experience level should be. If what they state lines up with their resume, and they are unable to answer a simple question, with multiple hints and help, then I absolutely assume they are a liar (edit: or delusional, which is even worse. An expectation I have of seniors and above is to have some idea of knowing what they don't know).

It would be unreasonable for me to pass them through an interview that the other members on the team passed through based on "oh, they had a bad day".

Since you haven't been on the other side of the table, have you had coworkers who obviously were at a position above their skill level? Who allowed the rest of their team to carry them?

I've had periods wherey personal life has affected my productivity. That doesn't preclude my ability to write an algorithm that reverses a string nor write a simple SQL join. I don't ask brain teasers. I ask questions related to what the engineers under me will be expected to solve every day.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#149

Post by senorsmile »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #134
smsm42 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I just realized "regex parser" can mean either "parsing some text using regex" or "code that compiles regex syntax into some kind of data structure but does not actually do anything else". The latter obviously is a much easier task.

The question was: Write a method that can take in a regex and a string and return whether the string matches it, with the regex limited to the characters . * ? (And backtracking is definitely where I started coming unstuck)

Ah, that's definitely different than I understood your first post. You're writing a regex to match a given type of string. The regex parser is in the language itself, consuming what you've written and evaluating it.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#150

Post by 0x445442 »

kronin wrote: post #124
mancerayder wrote: post #39

Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior engineer in the systems space I feel I shouldn't need to study days or weeks for fizzbuzz sorting algorithms questions that are designed to test comp sci recent grads. I have a proven career, and was never suddenly stumped in a project due to not being able to.…

I've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area. One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user…

> Couldn't code a simple reverse string algorithm

You were interviewing senior engineers with Java experience and they couldn't come up with Assert.assertEquals("radar",StringUtils.reverse("radar"));

I suspect you were actually looking for the implementation of StringUtils.reverse() and if that's the case then you were focused on the wrong skills.

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