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I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

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Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#341

Post by indrora »

drewcoo wrote: post #327
stevenjgarner wrote: post #155

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…

What was the point of the question? That would help determine whether or not this was cheating. Normally with things like this the interviewer claims to want to "see how you think." If some prepared rote answer passed this interview phase, at the very least, the interview failed to meet its stated goal. What's the difference between cheating and what's needed for your version of "success?" Can someone cheat their way…

These sorts of screener questions are at the level of "can you write a simple function and can you answer basic questions about it"

A surprising number of candidates I've seen interviewed cannot do the following, my code screener question: "Write a function that, given a set of integers, determines the amplitude (difference between biggest and smallest) of the set."

This is literally max(set) - min(set) in more words. I have seen countless people attempt this in different ways. My favorite was the guy that sorted the list and took the end values.

The worst is when I ask the follow up question: "where might I use this function?" I almost never get the answer of where I stole the function from (matplotlib): "the size of a graph", instead usually getting an "I don't really know".

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#342

Post by CTmystery »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #210
dekhn wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would have lost me (principal engineer) with those questions.

Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.

Agree that the amount of entitlement in this thread is wild. People, ostensibly respected principal engineers, will turn down jobs because they are asked a puzzle question during lunch. I _hope_ we are fortunate enough for this attitude to be a possibility in the next decade.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#343

Post by rileyphone »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #235
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.

Would have been a huge negative to me. I'm fine to chat with peers and discuss little riddles. That is not what's happening when you're interviewing me for a job position. You're not my peer. We're not having fun. There's a non-subtle implication that my ability to answer the riddle will impact whether or not I get the job. I would be very annoyed if someone asked a puzzle like this too. It's not a novel puzzle. It's…

Maybe its role is to filter for the right mindset.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#344

Post by dekhn »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #322
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.

> " You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? " You have to remember that, after about 2010, the software industry is mostly comprised of people who are after a paycheck and their actual interest in computers, STEM, and other nerd activates is kind of minimal. It came as a shock to me too when I realized that the old shibboleths of being a hacker had become largely absent in the softwar…

Well, if you're thinking I said what I said because I'm not a pre-2010 hacker with an interest in STEM or other nerd activities, you'd be completely wrong. I started hacking on UNIX systems in the late 1980s, got a PhD because I wanted to be a scientist, and only went to work at Google to get access to their computer farm (where I built what was the world's largest idle cycle harvesting system, for science, at the time) although the pay was quite nice!

No, I said what I said because it's hard enough to be "on" during the coding interviews and also "on" during the culture tests, to also be "interested" in your puzzle. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong signal to send. Lunch interview (and the transport to it) is about learning about other people in a fairly non-competitive way.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#345

Post by [deleted] »

LanceH wrote: post #224
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…

I answered one of those mind benders nearly immediately in an interview. I figured out the trick as they were telling it basically. They asked me if I had heard it before. I hadn't. A final interview with the CEO and he asked if I had heard it before and I said I hadn't. I later realized based on how they were asking if I had heard it before, they thought I was lying. The question: You get on a ski lift going up. It'…

[deleted]

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#346

Post by [deleted] »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #210
dekhn wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would have lost me (principal engineer) with those questions.

Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.

[deleted]

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#347

Post by goodpoint »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #210
dekhn wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would have lost me (principal engineer) with those questions.

Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.

> You don't like to socialize with peers

An interviewer is most certainly not a peer.

> with puzzles or tricky problems

Seeing a a middle school question as "tricky" it's a bit worrying.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#348

Post by cobalt »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #129
sverhagen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made me think of how courses take test questions straight from the class materials. And let's say I'm a big procrastinator, and I run out of time, studying the night before the test, and I decide only to go through the odd pages of my materials, and also let's imagine that the test writer, just by accident, took most (or at least, enough) questions from those odd pages, did I now cheat? (I think not...)

You cheated yourself out of knowledge acquisition by treating a course of education as only a means to get a certificate. That's cheating. You're supposed to study the whole course, the examination is a statistical test to see if it's likely that you studied, and can apply, the whole course. If you didn't study the course, you're misrepresenting yourself by during the exam. That's cheating (in a different way to the…

I highly doubt anyone will learn every bit of information in the book. I highly doubt anyone will remember every bit of information in the book. Which parts of it will be necessary are very dependent on one's future.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#349

Post by goodpoint »

jedberg wrote: post #264
LanceH wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answered one of those mind benders nearly immediately in an interview. I figured out the trick as they were telling it basically. They asked me if I had heard it before. I hadn't. A final interview with the CEO and he asked if I had heard it before and I said I hadn't. I later realized based on how they were asking if I had heard it before, they thought I was lying. The question: You get on a ski lift going up. It'…

I hate this question because it has an implicit bias that most likely the interviewer never saw. It's biased towards people who have ridden on a ski lift, which generally means someone wealthier. If you're a poor kid who's never been skiing, you'll have a harder time conceptualizing the answer.

Is that sarcasm?
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