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I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

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Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#351

Post by hunter-gatherer »

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…

I feel like everyone here is missing OPs point. It seems like they had a mostly typical interview, which the candidate had probably been through a bunch of but for whatever reason wasn't to intrigued by the company. Maybe the candidate thought it was too boilerplate... I don't know. But then during lunch, when a handful of collegues are casually throwing around brain teasers, the candidate realized he would like the atmosphere. This doesn't seem too wild to me. But then again, software engineers are some of the most sensitive people I've ever worked with.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#352

Post by belter »

randomdata wrote: post #336
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 like your approach, but step 3 should see the interviewer immediately let go, to be replaced by the candidate.

I like your approach, lets go for the 17th century rules...if we accept a duel it should to death or stop when blood is drawn :-)

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#353

Post by lelanthran »

HelloNurse wrote: post #193
lapcat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> caveat: I wasn’t hired using that test; I had been hired as a junior long before, based on my portfolio and a short interview That's always the catch. The founders and initial employees of a company never had to go through the crappy hiring process that the company adds later as it gets bigger. And then we claim that the tests make tech a "meritocracy" and "objective", but those at the top are exempt from the tests…

On a related note, evaluating the quality of tests is even more challenging than writing them. I recently tried interviewing for a growing small company, who nullified the initial good impression with a multiple choice test about certain technologies they were using, administered over the web by some test company. The best questions were "which of these four functions or classes do you use to do $common task with $fr…

>The best questions were "which of these four functions or classes do you use to do $common task with $framework", testing documentation speed reading skills rather than actual coding skills; other questions were ambiguous, debatable or completely wrong.

Sounds like testgorrilla. I swear they have a poor markov-chain based AI generating the questions.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#354

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cntainer wrote: post #273
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, we questioned a candidate the usual way with pertinent technical challenges and so on. Then when driving in a van to lunch (our habit was to do a social segment as well as technical) I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? and suchlike. He was charmed, we brainstormed some answers and had a fun lunch. Years later,…

add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be is this a technical puzzle/question? to me it reads like a middle school geometry question. it would be fun to discuss it with friends/colleagues but I wouldn't expect it during a software engineering interview

That's just the first question.

The follow-on is, if you add 6 feet and put your finger under the rope and pull up until it's tight again, how far have you raised your finger? 1ft? 10ft? 100ft? 1000 miles?

The answer to that is very difficult. There are several approaches.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#356

Post by JoeAltmaier »

akhmatova wrote: post #321
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, we questioned a candidate the usual way with pertinent technical challenges and so on. Then when driving in a van to lunch (our habit was to do a social segment as well as technical) I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? and suchlike. He was charmed, we brainstormed some answers and had a fun lunch. Years later,…

I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? I can only imagine being "charmed" by a question like if I was much younger in my career, eager to be seen as smart and in the company of like-minded folk. Nowadays... my focus is on solving problems... as in real problems, not made-up ones. Thankfully I haven't heard questions like this in ye…

Yeah it's easy to act all butt-hurt and be too good to even try. But how outrageous is it to imagine that folks who can solve such problems might be able to solve other problems?

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#357

Post by jedberg »

goodpoint wrote: post #349
jedberg wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#358

Post by jimmaswell »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #152
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.

> we don't live in a meritocracy

Nothing is perfect, but we do live in an approximation of a meritocracy, especially in tech. I had no special connections anywhere going into or coming out of college and ended up at my first company "the hard way". Any good references I made were only made through delivering results, I didn't know any interview questions in advance, and my college had no "prestige", certainly no Microsoft interviewers flying out to it - closest would be some waste of time joke of an "opportunity" I showed up to where IBM showed up to talk about their mainframes and AI stuff but offering absolutely no internship or job positions for software engineers. Coming from the tech desert of upstate New York, I actually had a lot of disadvantages working against me, working up from some low end job I only got half a year after graduating at a consultancy company to where I am now years later at a good remote programming position.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#359

Post by Agamus »

bricemo wrote: post #265
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…

I agree, this is definitely not cheating. This is interview preparation. When I prepared for my FAANG interviews I googled so many questions that I couldn’t find another blue link, they were all purple. I prepped for them all. The more you want the job, the more you prep

As the adage goes, success is all about luck. Oh, and hard work. And the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#360

Post by Jare »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #354
cntainer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be is this a technical puzzle/question? to me it reads like a middle school geometry question. it would be fun to discuss it with friends/colleagues but I wouldn't expect it during a software engineering interview

That's just the first question. The follow-on is, if you add 6 feet and put your finger under the rope and pull up until it's tight again, how far have you raised your finger? 1ft? 10ft? 100ft? 1000 miles? The answer to that is very difficult. There are several approaches.

I solved a very similar problem (in the context of a pathfinding and obstacle avoidance sim) 25 years ago, and I can probably describe the thought process and geometry in very digestible terms, but if I had to code it in a whiteboard I'd likely fail.
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