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I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

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Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#151

Post by giaour »

pc86 wrote: post #125
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #79

I wouldn't consider it cheating. It was either a stroke of luck, or MS wasn't really doing an especially good job of reviewing their tech questions. A big part of programming (in my book) is finding the way that works; using whatever path is required. If you peek through a hole in the curtain to do so, then that's fine. Knowing about the curtain, and the hole in it, is part of engineering. I remember taking a photogr…

I don't think you can consider two people, at least a year apart from each other, being asked the same question "not doing an especially good job of reviewing their tech question."

I was also asked that question during my Microsoft phone screen in 2021. I think there's a fairly shallow question bank

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#152

Post by BrianOnHN »

keraf wrote: post #58

I actually cheated on an online assessment for one of my first programming jobs. It was my dream job and really wanted to get into that company. Under the pressure, I just couldn't figure out the solution to the last challenge which was a recursive algorithm. Normally, I would be able to do this but I just got stuck and in a moment of panic, I StackOverflow'd the question on a secondary device which provided me the e…

People who get "recommendations" don't feel guilty at all for their unfair advantage.

So please, more of this! Let the kids know that we don't live in a meritocracy!

Otherwise, the good ones will become discouraged and we will all lose.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#153

Post by 542458 »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #147
pc86 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.

>Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive. This gets repeated over and over, makes sense rationally on a superficial level, but falls apart once you think deeper into it without substantiating it with evidence. We don't work on a binary false positive / true positive scale. We don't know the efficiency of each v…

> At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire.

I really don’t think this is true. Are there any successful programming companies who just hire whoever for development work? All the top-tier ones have settled on being extremely selective. Of course, that could be coincidence or bias… but this practice is fairly expensive, so there would be nontrivial pressure against it. Furthermore, I think a lot of people can attest to working with both very good and bad developers on the same team - so even inside a workplace you see a range of individual productivity.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#154

Post by buzzdenver »

lrvick wrote: post #134

One time a company I interviewed with asked me obscure algorithm questions about playing card shuffling. As a former professional magician I knew the optimal answers instantly and could jot them down straight away. They had allocated an hour for answers I wrote in a few minutes. I could have told them I had a massively unfair advantage, but I did not bother. They were visibly impressed and told me I was moving on to…

Can you elaborate on what made the question obscure? I'm asking because I used the question "print out the first 52 numbers in random order"in interviews before, and the answers seemed to give a good hint about understanding of basic CS concepts.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#155

Post by stevenjgarner »

IMHO, this was not cheating. This is a phenomenon called success. If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate. They just qualify as deserving. There are serendipities that separate those who succeed from everybody else who was deserving. Survivor bias [1]. Calling Eli was your serendipity. The opposite is also true: killer asteroids hit the planets of otherwise deserving individuals and initiatives. I was co-founder of a municipal fiber-to-the-home initiative in 1996. We had both a winning technical recipe and also a financial engineering recipe. (Extremely rare even today) We were then fortunate enough to acquire a customer that was a newly minted public company, representing a whopping 65% of our business. Banker's dream, but in actuality a big mistake. Then the double-whammy of fraud by that public company (wiping it out completely before our contract was realized) AND the dot-com crash. Killer asteroids are real.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#156

Post by belter »

IshKebab wrote: post #137
belter wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As unethical as the hundreds of interviewers who pretend to believe that the candidate in front of them, just somehow managed to find within minutes the solution to some programming puzzle, and not through hundreds of hours of mentoring and self-practice. I would propose to change coding interviews to the following scheme: Step 1: Interviewer ask a coding question. If candidate is able to answer correctly then move t…

I agree that interviewers asking stupidly hard questions that they wouldn't be able to figure out in an interview is a problem, but I don't see how your solution would remotely work. How would you ensure the questions are equally difficult?

If the candidate can manage the question the Interviewer should be able also. After all he/she was already hired.

If a company decides to approach hiring with the naturally confrontational approach of, "let me find out in 60 minutes if you are smart enough to work here", I don't see why it should stop there.

After all recruiters always mention, it is good for you if you are also inquisitive, show interest in the company and ask questions :-))

Why can't a candidate also check if their future managers and the company are worthwhile to work there? It is always mentioned that a candidate is a much interviewing the company as the company is interviewing them...

Now...how many interviewers are suddenly uncomfortable? ;-)

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#157

Post by paxys »

lynguist wrote: post #46

Why are all the other comments so negative and stuck up whether it constituted “cheating” or not? That wasn’t the point of this story. It was a beautifully well written account on luck and how sometimes the things align. The interviewee at the time was receptive towards the kind of questions that are asked at Microsoft and got the right one. Good luck. And then he passed a 6 hr on-site interview as well! No luck at a…

If it isn’t a relevant part of the story then it shouldn’t be in the title. People get justifiably annoyed by clickbait.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#158

Post by throwaway09223 »

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…

Interviews often aren't fair. However, they don't have to be quiz-style.

When I conduct interviews I simply have conversations to explore subjects as if I were talking about an issue with a coworker. I tell them directly that my goal as an interviewer is to give them an opportunity to showcase something they know so I can say good things about them. I give the interviewee a choice of subjects and I let them change the subject. If the interviewee doesn't know something, I explain it. We work together, as partners, to find their strongest area -- and then we pursue it until we reach a limit.

I also tell them that I will keep exploring the subject in question until we run into things they don't know, or that I don't know. I reassure them that I expect to reach a point in our conversation where we just say "I don't know" and that it's totally OK and expected.

After the interview, I assess the communication. What did they know? What did they ask? And perhaps most important: What did they learn? Were they defensive about the boundaries of their knowledge, and how did they deal with that?

I find I usually have a very detailed understanding about the interviewee's areas of competence as well as their communication abilities. A strong communicator and learner is far more valuable than someone who can recite a few technical details.

I think quiz or challenge style interviews are easier. The interviewee doesn't need to be skilled and doesn't need to risk exposing their own ignorance on a subject - often nontechnical recruiters administer these. They can be used to maintain an illusion of superiority on part of the interviewer and company. It's perhaps a similar defensive dynamic as which keeps peer teams from openly interacting and problem-solving, when teams challenge one another with problems rather than opening up about what they know and what they want to know.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#159

Post by Sesse__ »

ppsreejith wrote: post #66
jwilk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with wraparound semantics, you can't compute n(n+1)/2 naively, because (n(n+1) mod N) / 2 ≠ n(n+1)/2 mod N. So actually not knowing the formula is kinda advantageous, because computing the sum as 1 + 2 + … + n (with every addition mod N) gives you the right answer (mod N).

You could delay division by 2 until the end. I.e ((2 * S mod N - n*(n+1) mod N) mod N) / 2 Where S is the sum of the array achieved through iterative addition with every addition mod N and N > 2n.

Or you can assume N is less than 2^31, and clear out the top bit in the final answer (because that's the only place the wrong values can come from). Which is admittedly pretty hackish, but…

Edit: The simplest solution is probably just doing (n/2)*(n+1) (assuming n is even; move the division for n odd).

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#160

Post by samatman »

mewse wrote: post #150
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 once worked at a tech-focused games company (sadly no longer existing) which had the best interview process I’ve ever seen. They had this massive programmer test. It was something like 40 pages long, hardcopy, double-sided. With answers needing to be written on the test generally in essay format; no computer allowed (and so no real coding involved; it was all about concepts and not about syntax). It covered everyth…

Do you mean by hand, with a pen?

The least I would do is politely decline such an interview. I would be sorely tempted to give them the choice between letting me use a keyboard or hearing from an ADA lawyer.

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