> ... Second, we run through a real problem the team is trying to solve — improving satisfaction, increasing retention, boosting usage of a service or feature. The fact that it’s a real problem that we’re working on helps foster a collaborative conversation. maybe I'm reading too much into this but ... for some reason, none of these questions are highly programming-centric (e.g. implement a sort algorithm, build a B-…
Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
241–250 of 348 posts
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#242When I interviewed at Redmond 15 years ago, it was the recruiter who asked me a bunch of techie questions then decided to bring me out for a whole day of onsite interviews. During that I recall it was only a director of SW who asked me some mentally crushing questions about subtleties in how the Windows kernel fiddles with files. As I said, I was a UNIX developer who didn't know those bottlenecks in the Windows kerne…
I caveated I know networking better than most but I'm by no stretch a network engineer. They agreed and explicitly stated the position was on the systems side and it was fine.
The interview was only an hour and half. About 30 minutes into they ran out of questions and started to get bored. They tell they're all studying for their CCIE's and decided to start borrowing questions from the final exam.
They decided to play "lets stump the Cisco guy". And did they? YES! Did they stop? NO! This was 7+ years ago and I'll never forget how uncomfortable and bad that interview was. They managed to dredge up all these arcane, stupid questions, some of which bore no practical function.. and listened to me "I dont know" for a solid hour
I'm sure it left them with a bad impression of me, and it certainly left me not wanting to work there.
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#243One of the key issues in recruiting is how to make hiring decisions quickly. Good candidates don't have the patience for your internal politics to resolve over a month or two to figure out whether they're getting an offer or not; they're just going to interview with other places in the meantime who will beat you to the punch.
Take a resume off the pile. Email or text to schedule a call. During the call, talk about relevant experience / past projects, what each side is looking for, etc. Make a decision during the call whether you want to invite the person for a two-hour interview, and schedule it during the call, first offering an evening time slot for the interview. In the first hour, talk about culture, problem-solving and teamwork approaches, engineering attitudes. In the second hour, pull out an actual current problem and solve it collaboratively. If all goes well, send an offer, and offer to set up a dinner to talk about / negotiate the offer.
It should not take more than a few hours to make a decision on someone; it should not require a candidate to take paid time off. Your hiring pipeline's average lead time should be measured in days.
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#244Great, 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…
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#245> But the aha moment for me was that not everyone does well in those fast-paced brainstorming sessions. A lot of people (including me) prefer to sit with a cup of coffee and some data and try to think things through. This is me. Hard to get that across in an interview, but once people work with me, they're cool with me coming back an hour later in an email with some thoughts on the last meeting topic. They know and r…
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#246Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so willing to spend so much time. Already, they're up to a full day of interviews, which is ridiculous. One of the worst parts of current FAANG interviewing is how long it takes to get to the day of interviews, needing to take off from work to attend the interview…
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#247Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so willing to spend so much time. Already, they're up to a full day of interviews, which is ridiculous. One of the worst parts of current FAANG interviewing is how long it takes to get to the day of interviews, needing to take off from work to attend the interview…
I'm currently interviewing and so far I have had a 48 hour weekend project, a 3 hour code assessment, and I'm expected to endure 3 days of interviews. I'm fairly close to throwing in the towel and saying I can't be arsed with this.
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked a candidate to implement an algorithm that reverses a string. I don't see that as a complicated problem. It's literally a for loop, and based on how they choose to implement it you can ask about implications of append vs. prepend, etc. I didn't ask them to implement dijkstra's algorithm, or even something as "hard" as breadth-first or depth-first search (which I feel any senior that deals with trees should be…
What I'm interested in from a senior engineer is how many systems they've designed, implemented, deployed to production and supported in their careers and what their specific roles were in those projects. If I can't get an idea from their resume I wouldn't contact them for an interview. As for the interview itself, well I've never needed to ask someone to reverse a string to determine if they're going to be of value…
What I'm interested in from a senior engineer is how many systems they've designed, implemented, deployed to production and supported in their careers and what their specific roles were in those projects. If I can't get an idea from their resume I wouldn't contact them for an interview.
And when their resume looks good and claims they are an expert, and you call them in and talk to them and they say they are an expert, and you start by opening a warmup question on the most basic levels of their expertise and they totally flunk it on multiple levels - unable to even handle the situation with tact or diplomacy in any way, are you still going to trust what they say about the systems they've "deployed and supported"?
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must admit I didn’t figure that one out till I saw the solution which was a “oh duh” moment. I don’t think i would have ever stumbled upon it without lots of hints during an interview.
The constraints, if correctly stated, can help a lot to figure what to do if you take a look at them closely. In constant memory there's not that many things to do, a single pointer clearly won't be enough as you can't recall if you already visited the node or not, so `K>1` pointers must be used. If any two pointers moved at the same pace they would be duplicated and the second won't give any information. That and th…
Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers
#250Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so willing to spend so much time. Already, they're up to a full day of interviews, which is ridiculous. One of the worst parts of current FAANG interviewing is how long it takes to get to the day of interviews, needing to take off from work to attend the interview…
Yeah, if only it was all unicorns and rainbows. What you describe is how I imagine they interview for director / VP positions. With hundreds (thousands?) of applications per day for software engineering positions, all with perfect resumes, what you describe just doesn’t scale. Software engineers do 1-2 interviews per week each, it’s part of the job. I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evening…
It seems to me this is an issue with your employer not the interview process.