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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

#331

Post by ptd »

scarface74 wrote: post #213
cududa wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay candidates for doing take home tests

It’s not a “take home test”. Half the purpose of live pair coding is to see how the candidate thinks. It’s a relatively simple project with a skeleton of a class and failing unit tests. They have to fix the code to make the unit tests pass. If they get through that, I give them a second set of failing unit tests that they have to make pass by fixing the class without breaking the unit tests.

Ah, I also thought you meant a take home test. Do you work for a big company? I’m trying to picture how that interview style would scale. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#332

Post by pytester »

recursive wrote: post #330
pytester wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the complaint if you didn't isolate the code and explain the task properly. If you can't do that then you should probably worry about your own skills before testing somebody else's.

That's not really actionable. Even if my skills aren't up to pytester's standards, we still need to recruit developers now. And for what it's worth I doubt I'll ever be able to explain most of the tasks our business is doing what you refer to as "properly".

I joined a team two weeks ago that built a fairly complex machine learning pipeline. One week in I was told I needed to help interview a candidate.

I lopped off a block of the code, made it run without the rest of the code base and explained what it was supposed to do. This wasn't that simple, but could still be explained in about a minute to somebody with familiarity in ML (assumed; that's what we're hiring for). I then challenged the candidate to spot any bugs and implement a feature.

This really wasn't that hard. I've done the same thing twice before in two completely different industries.

Why would that be impossible for you?

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#333

Post by dang »

kamaal wrote: post #328
zbentley wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a. You can't iterate a 'String' backwards. You need to know the length first. And that requires traversing the string forwards at least once. That's not at all true in many languages. If a candidate asked "is this string's length known without an O(N) operation on the number of characters in it?" (or knew the answer for the default string constructs in the language they were using for the problem) I'd consider that…

>> Interviewers who do that are doing themselves and their candidates a disservice. Bad news is people who work at FAANG companies think they are the best of the human race there has ever been. And you have to the give the answers they want.

Please don't post like this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#334

Post by scarface74 »

ptd wrote: post #331
scarface74 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a “take home test”. Half the purpose of live pair coding is to see how the candidate thinks. It’s a relatively simple project with a skeleton of a class and failing unit tests. They have to fix the code to make the unit tests pass. If they get through that, I give them a second set of failing unit tests that they have to make pass by fixing the class without breaking the unit tests.

Ah, I also thought you meant a take home test. Do you work for a big company? I’m trying to picture how that interview style would scale. Thanks for sharing.

Well, the first time so saw it Done was for the only large company I ever worked for - what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech company). But on the other hand, the department that I was hired into was actually a recently acquired small company with four developers and the manager was the founder of the original company - so take that as you may.

But, just because a company gets big, doesn’t mean that you can take hiring less seriously. You still have to be sure that you hire the right people. A false positive - hiring someone that can’t do the job - is worse than a false negative - not hiring someone who would be a good fit.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#335

Post by oarabbus_ »

denzil_correa wrote: post #252
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…

One company wanted approached to interview me for the position of a "scientist". Their initial step of the interview process was to spend 4-6h on some "challenge" they designed. I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! I made a counter to their proposal as all my research projects are publicly available. My counter was similar to your proposition.…

>Interview is a 2-way process and it seems a lot of people have bought into some of the kool aid.

What too many people choose to forget or ignore is employment itself (at least in CA) is a 2-way process. The employer is not doing you a favor by employing you, despite how many people have drank the kool-aid to the contrary. You and the company have entered into a mutually beneficial agreement. Unfortunately, many people don't have the means or desire to walk away when an employer veers into "you should be thankful we let you work here" territory.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#336

Post by ptd »

scarface74 wrote: post #334
ptd wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I also thought you meant a take home test. Do you work for a big company? I’m trying to picture how that interview style would scale. Thanks for sharing.

Well, the first time so saw it Done was for the only large company I ever worked for - what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech company). But on the other hand, the department that I was hired into was actually a recently acquired small company with four developers and the manager was the founder of the original company - so take that as you may. But, just because a company gets big, doesn’t mean that you can take hiring…

Generally agree except for the last sentence. What if the false negative is Elon Musk? Netscape could have hired him, but they passed. You can always fire a bad hire. You can’t reinterview Musk when you realize your mistake.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#337

Post by scarface74 »

ptd wrote: post #336
scarface74 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the first time so saw it Done was for the only large company I ever worked for - what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech company). But on the other hand, the department that I was hired into was actually a recently acquired small company with four developers and the manager was the founder of the original company - so take that as you may. But, just because a company gets big, doesn’t mean that you can take hiring…

Generally agree except for the last sentence. What if the false negative is Elon Musk? Netscape could have hired him, but they passed. You can always fire a bad hire. You can’t reinterview Musk when you realize your mistake.

Even though most people work “at will”, firing someone always has consequences.

- There are usually HR policies around firing people that takes awhile and a lot of paperwork.

- You open yourself up to lawsuits whether they are successful or not, it still a hassle and has costs.

- you increase the amount you have to pay to your states unemployment insurance fund.

- It puts a chilling effect on other employees. They think they can easily be fired to.

- if the employee is really bad, they do “negative work” and put more work on the other employees who have to work around them or redo their work.

Very rarely will one employee that you don’t hire make or break an established company.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#338

Post by thewhitetulip »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #292
thewhitetulip wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different experience. They gave me a lot of time but either I don't know python at all, or they didn't. they asked me to build something. I used dictionaries and wrote the code in ten minutes. Both interviewers wouldn't believe that the code could solve the problem. They later told me that dictionaries are not used in practical applications. Never understood why. Are dicts not used in "real life"?

Dictionaries are used ALL the time.

Exactly! I was sitting there wonderinf if they understood doctionaries at all. My guess is that they came from Java background and thus don't use dicts as default as HashMaps aren't native basic data types

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#339

Post by thewhitetulip »

MrMember wrote: post #318
thewhitetulip wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different experience. They gave me a lot of time but either I don't know python at all, or they didn't. they asked me to build something. I used dictionaries and wrote the code in ten minutes. Both interviewers wouldn't believe that the code could solve the problem. They later told me that dictionaries are not used in practical applications. Never understood why. Are dicts not used in "real life"?

I'm not sure I can think of a python application I've worked on that didn't use dictionaries in some way.

Exactly! That's what bothered me, plus the fact that they didn't understand my code of 10 lines.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#340

Post by thewhitetulip »

andrewflnr wrote: post #320
thewhitetulip wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different experience. They gave me a lot of time but either I don't know python at all, or they didn't. they asked me to build something. I used dictionaries and wrote the code in ten minutes. Both interviewers wouldn't believe that the code could solve the problem. They later told me that dictionaries are not used in practical applications. Never understood why. Are dicts not used in "real life"?

The most charitable explanation I can think of is that they have a very narrow idea of "practical application" where the performance of looking stuff up in hash maps all the time is not good enough. If that's the case, they should have been more specific, and asked for specific improvements. Otherwise, they're full of shit.

Yeah, that's what I thought. She kept yapping about how this is not a performance tuned code blahblah
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