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Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

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Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#301

Post by em-bee »

ghaff wrote: post #299
em-bee wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if i am looking for a different job, i'll not just interview with one company, but several. even more so if i still have a job and i really need to weigh the options to decide if the new offer is really better. there is only so many days i can take off. with two weeks holidays, i might spend all of my holiday budget for this year.

I'm not sure what you think is a reasonable alternative. In general, having some F2F on-site interviews is in everyone's interest. I'll agree that there should be some reasonable pre-screening before everyone makes a significant time investment. But the reality is that if you're job hunting you may well have to take some time off--especially if the opportunities aren't local.

i was mainly responding to this: I think asking candidates to get a day off for interviews, which happens like once per year or even less often for each candidate is more reasonable than asking your employees to work evenings each week.

by stating that it is most certainly not just once as i am likely interviewing for multiple jobs.

i don't know what the solution is, but i think it is reasonable to say that some compromise is necessary, and as much as i value your (and my) time with family, if we want to grow our team so that we are not having to work overtime as much and actually get more time for our families, then we'll just have to make some sacrifices.

apologies for being a bit polemic.

actually, i do have a solution for myself. i only hire young people fresh out of university who don't have a job yet. higher positions are filled from within. ask me in a few years how well that's going.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#302

Post by [deleted] »

pytester wrote: post #212
recursive wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a few days to explain the business rules. It's probably better to use a well understood general structure.

It isn't that hard to isolate a block of code that addresses a small cross section of your business rules and ask a candidate to do something meaningful with it.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#303

Post by ghaff »

em-bee wrote: post #301
ghaff wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you think is a reasonable alternative. In general, having some F2F on-site interviews is in everyone's interest. I'll agree that there should be some reasonable pre-screening before everyone makes a significant time investment. But the reality is that if you're job hunting you may well have to take some time off--especially if the opportunities aren't local.

i was mainly responding to this: I think asking candidates to get a day off for interviews, which happens like once per year or even less often for each candidate is more reasonable than asking your employees to work evenings each week. by stating that it is most certainly not just once as i am likely interviewing for multiple jobs. i don't know what the solution is, but i think it is reasonable to say that some comp…

>i think it is reasonable to say that some compromise is necessary

I'm honestly not sure it is. Half-a-day to a day of on-site interviews (possibly after a phone screen) is how most companies have been filling professional roles for decades. Certainly it's an easier process for people doing it out of university. And it's easier to do locally when a candidate can often just take a few hours off. But, while many debate some of the specifics of how companies screen for technical talent, I don't see widespread pushback against candidates coming in for on-site interviews of some sort.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#304

Post by em-bee »

solatic wrote: post #300
kluyg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 evenings per week interviewing people. Why are software engineers doing interviews at all? What makes software engineers qualified to interview people (especially when you consider the need to avoid hiring bias, problematic statements by interviewers that expose the company to legal…

i am right now preparing to fill two positions, and i am looking to interview at least half a dozen people maybe more. due to my schedule i can't really interview more than one per day, so this is going to take a week or two.

i do want the opinions of the people already on my team, because a big part of the interview process is to find out how well they work together. for me hiring is a team decision, not a top down mandate. so yes, all of my software engineers will be doing interviews. there is no way around it.

on the other hand i agree with you. these rounds of interviews should not happen to often. if our team grows, i expect to add two more positions every quarter. (i don't know how realistic this is, but this just to give you an idea of how much interviewing workload i expect.)

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#305

Post by em-bee »

elcomet wrote: post #259
kluyg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you work on evenings? Interviews can and should happen during the day

it depends on how many candidates you have. a few months ago i was hiring for a position, where i didn't get a single candidate who was able to take time off work. (ok, i had one who took an extended lunch break, but the rest were evening or weekend only)

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#306

Post by solatic »

haspok wrote: post #284
solatic wrote: post #243

Dogfooding 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 very much disagree with you: the more experienced the candidate is, the more the interview is about the company and the work environment, not just the candidate. I.e. it is a two way street, and the candidate has to decide in the end whether he/she wants to work for that company or not. There is simply no way a 1 or 2 hour interview can provide this information - this is why you need more time, and this is why I do…

If you're Microsoft-sized, then if anything, your interview process should be less strict, not more strict. At organizational scale, enforcement processes become more important than culture. That means building out custom standardized entrance exams, regular "induction days" with mandatory internal courses for new hires (wherein it is your job in the first few weeks or even months to just go to those courses during normal working hours), deployment pipelines which guide new junior hires by enforcing minimum test coverage, style conventions, passing static code analysis, etc.

Your hiring needs should reflect the size of your organization, and your hiring process should reflect your hiring needs. If you hire relatively infrequently then it makes sense to go over individual resumes and have infrequent evening interviews. If you need to hire hundreds of people this month just to negate churn then you have the resources to build out the kind of enforcement-process-oriented above since you surely need that kind of infrastructure anyway. Everything in between is just a matter of degree and where your company is on the process-vs-culture balance as a function of its size.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#307

Post by dave1999x »

kronin wrote: post #202
a-dub wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup... and I don't know, for someone who has "300 people" worth of interview experience, you sure don't seem to be demonstrating in this thread the sort of level headed temperance and soft skills I would expect. I'm joking. (sorta) I'm glad to hear that you tailor to the resume, that's actually better than most and my favorite approach. But if I had a dollar for every time someone walked out of an interview with a br…

My interview covers coding, data structures, algorithms, system design and data modeling. I attempt to tailor to the candidate, but there needs to be some level of standardization to be able to justify to the recruiters why a candidate didn't proceed. Just because a candidate fails or falls short in one area doesn't mean they are cut, but it's a pretty large red flag if a candidate purports to know something, both on…

I've never counted but I must have done way more than 300 interviews. I have interviewed at 3/5 of the FAANG.

Coding: on a whiteboard or with someone watching over you has no correlation with performance on the job.

Data structures: questions usually end up so contrite that they have no bearing to real-world situations. That or based on luck of seeing an remembering the right one. Data structures usually go hand in hand with algorithms.

Algorithms: questions become more like trivia or reinventing something that has likely got research papers on it. Oh, you want me to invent an algorithm I've never heard of on a whiteboard with your clues?

System design and data modelling: the kind of thing you can do in an interview lacks real-world data. No empiricism. It's all about the trade-offs.

Tailoring to the candidate introduces inconsistency and unfairness/luck.

What if these "seniors" and "architects" are frauds?! How else could they hold down a job for 20 years and not be able to answer my questions? They must be really bad!

Lucky my interview process is really great and I always hire the good ones. I track every rejection and I have proof that they never amount to anything!

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#308

Post by dave1999x »

kronin wrote: post #166
0x445442 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interviewing for some core, low level algorithm development then fair enough but I suspect if that's the case you could come up with something a little closer to the real life domain. It's not that I think the question is too complicated, just not the best marker. In my mind, more relevant questions are ones that demonstrate real life experience in the field. For example, populating a tree of objects in a h…

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…

Did you know in .Net strings are immutable? Neither did the guy at Google when he asked me to do some "in place" string fiddling algorithm or that guy at Amazon who wanted to reverse the strings in a sentence (yes there's a trick to that one found in some 80s programming book)

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#309

Post by bicubic »

simonswords82 wrote: post #258
bicubic wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being a carpenter applying for a job and being asked to make a small bedside table for free. So the employer can sample your skills before committing to a full purchase. Absurd.

If you ever sat on the hiring side and had just one new hire not work out, you would understand your throw away statement is actually more absurd than asking for free work. Let's flip the scenario and go your way instead... Imagine being a programmer applying for a job and not being asked to demonstrate your skills at interview. The interview goes well, and you're offered the job. You give your 4 weeks notice on your…

I'm more often on the hiring side of the table than on the other. Probation periods exist specifically to address the issue of hiring false positives, and they work fine.

Your story is only possible if the interview process failed miserably. If your process sucks and results in a lot of false positives, that's your problem. Don't use it as justification for milking candidates for unpaid work towards actual deliverables.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#310

Post by lawnchair_larry »

cududa wrote: post #215
kettlecorn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that it should mostly be software engineers designing the software engineering interview process.

At Microsoft many senior devs eventually go into the PM track (while still actively writing code) because there’s more salary there

No there is not.
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