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I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

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Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#111

Post by BlargMcLarg »

joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

> Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interviews and tests?

Yes. You're at worst the average, at best part of the majority.

Almost everyone sucks at interviews and most job hiring processes are incredibly degrading. Feedback is terrible (includes no feedback). Hiring managers are all looking for different things, either subtly or wildly. Onus to get good at interviews is entirely on the individual, not on the company to make the process less of a hellscape. Hiring managers are largely biased, untrained, as are most interview processes. Many aspects of interview processes aren't even grounded in reality.

But almost nobody is talking about this as it's just something you "get done" and "bite through" once every N years. Plenty of perfectly capable people fall to the wayside and are told they are the problem. Or worse, you get a bunch of (LinkedIn) thought leaders trying to gaslight everyone into thinking corporate holds the truth and the remainder of us are peasants who simply don't understand.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#112

Post by akudha »

Longlius wrote: post #89

Every time the topic of cheating comes up on HN, I become increasingly disheartened by the amount of people chiming in who think it's not only alright to cheat but also laudable to do so. Ethics are foundational to engineering. Jettisoning them is a sign of a discipline in decline.

Cheating is bad - this is an overly broad and generalized position, isn't it? Lets say the blogger had seen that n+1 question online somewhere or in a book (instead of hearing from his friend), before the interview. Is he obligated to inform the interviewer in this case too?

There are many people who get stressed and can't really write good code in an interview setting, but are perfectly capable of writing great software otherwise. Lying in a software job interview (especially when you know you can do the job well, if hired) is totally different from lying in an emissions test like Volkswagon did.

As with most things in life, ethics isn't black or white, it is much more nuanced and complex. This is not to say that one should be unethical at every chance, just that reducing a hugely complex topic like ethics to binary is naive.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#113

Post by AshamedCaptain »

joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

I also need "time and space to think" (and so would most people), but given the choice between someone who needs time and space to think, and someone who doesn't (either works well under extreme pressure or is just that self-confident), who would you choose?

Sure interviews are unfair (there are many problems like the one described in TFA, as well as people who just practice the skill), but are there better options?

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#114

Post by playbooks »

The arms race of coding interviews legitimately keeps some of the best most experienced candidates out of the candidate pool, replacing them with newbies who have time to make cheat sheets with every new type of leer code question, and maybe that’s the goal. When question lookup, exchange, cheating etc happens, it makes interviewers pick and design increasingly harder questions over time. That makes it impossible to pass interviews without months of prep memorizing/practicing the majority of latest questions, or cheating. What you lose are ethical candidates, or those with better things to do on their hands. That may be a feature and not a bug - you are left with those who will do the grind and do whatever it takes, until burning out in their own turn. After all the most intense hiring competition happens right out of college - capturing the developers with little experience, a lot of energy, and complete nativité on burnout. The companies that cause the most burnout, are the most intense competitors in that space too.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#115

Post by zwischenzug »

whiplash451 wrote: post #62
Znafon wrote: post #14

I would not have though to use this formula. The sum of the integers grows as the square of n so if n is anything but small you will overflow and get an erroneous answer. This interview question has everything bad imo: no practical uses, test knowledge of math formulas (which every math/CS major would have but none of the self learning folks). It’s very easy to stress and fail when given such a test, and even already…

Let’s not overthink this. Microsoft is using this test as a low-pass filter to get rid of candidates who would: - not find any answer in a few minutes - find a wrong answer and argue about it in an obnoxious way Any reasonable answer would probably do. You would probably get more brownie points for asking what you need to optimize for (compute, storage) than providing what seems to be the best solution (using the sum…

Exactly. It’s basically fizzbuzz. The fact that he thought about this in advance and had an answer ready to explain is also a green flag for such an early filter.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#117

Post by lisper »

rvnx wrote: post #105
lisper wrote: post #92

Luck has played an outsized role in my life. Two notable examples: 1. In 1992 I learned that a colleague of mine was a member of the Magic Castle [1] and offered me a guest pass. I had a long-standing love of magic, and the chance to go to the Castle seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I invited some friends to go with me, and one of those friends asked if she could bring a friend, and of course I said yes.…

2. Google or Bitcoin sound like details compared to helping humanity to conquer new planets.

I didn't put my NASA story on the list because I consider my career there to have been largely a failure, but there is a luck story behind that as well: I never actually applied for my NASA job. I got it because I was a grad student and my Ph.D. advisor got offered a job (from one of his Yale buddies) and took me and another one of his students with him. And the only reason I had the advisor that I did was because I had applied to Stanford and MIT and both of them rejected me, so I was stuck at Virginia Tech. And the only reason I went to Virginia Tech instead of Stanford or MIT, both of which had admitted me as an undergrad, was because VT offered me a full scholarship and I have had a life-long aversion to being in debt.

Also, the girls at VT were better-looking. :-)

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#119

Post by yarg »

ldx1024 wrote: post #96
yarg wrote: post #32

/* Not sure if this is correct, but there should be a solution along these lines will explode if the array contains values outside of 1...n also, invalidates the array */ int v = values[0]; for(;;){ if(v == values[v])return v; int t = v; v = values[v]; values[v] = t; }

Try {2,2,1}

Yeah, at some point I'm going to need to accept that I'm too burnt out to code anymore.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#120

Post by rapind »

joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

It’s fair in that the company also suffers from the wrong talent measurements.

That they can get away with such a bad measurement though just shows that there’s a large gap between the costs per and profits per developer.

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