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That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

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Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#11

Post by xelxebar »

arcfour wrote: post #8
tyre wrote: post #3

A classically terrible interview question. Solving riddles in realtime is almost never a real job skill. _Maybe_ in an incident, but you’d be relying on tooling and experience, not an intern. Same with leetcode at startups. It makes no sense. You’re almost certainly not going to do algorithms work. It’s only relevant if you’re looking for people willing to grind bullshit, which is certainly some jobs, but, again, you…

The speed with which I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact during an incident, for example, is orders of magnitude faster than the speed with which I would figure out which of 12 marbles is slightly heavier than the others.

> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact

Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#12

Post by georgemcbay »

Life lesson learned for OP, when it comes to tech interviewing:

(1) the riddles you already know you answer after some staged deliberation to pretend you are working it out from first principles using your genius brain (bonus points if you can work "first principles" into the conversation).

(2) The riddles you don't know the answer to are the ones you say you already read in a book or online and repeat this until you get back to a (1)

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#15

Post by saintfire »

georgemcbay wrote: post #12

Life lesson learned for OP, when it comes to tech interviewing: (1) the riddles you already know you answer after some staged deliberation to pretend you are working it out from first principles using your genius brain (bonus points if you can work "first principles" into the conversation). (2) The riddles you don't know the answer to are the ones you say you already read in a book or online and repeat this until you…

This was the real riddle all along.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#16

Post by buildbot »

Counterpoint to many responses here - when I have interviewed people, it’s a really positive signal if the candidate says they have already seen a problem- the we can move onto something more interesting! Not solving does not mean failure either. As a candidate myself I always mention if I have seen similar problems, such as finding primes - real example, and I was hired on that loop at Microsoft!

On the other hand, if I heard that a candidate had not mentioned they had the same question twice, or later let it be known they already knew the answer, I would lose a lot of trust in them.

Be honest; it’s more likely you will be hired by honest people.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#17

Post by Waterluvian »

jameshart wrote: post #9
tyre wrote: post #3

A classically terrible interview question. Solving riddles in realtime is almost never a real job skill. _Maybe_ in an incident, but you’d be relying on tooling and experience, not an intern. Same with leetcode at startups. It makes no sense. You’re almost certainly not going to do algorithms work. It’s only relevant if you’re looking for people willing to grind bullshit, which is certainly some jobs, but, again, you…

This was an internship interview over a decade ago. Nothing wrong with a brain teaser interview question under those circumstances. What would you rather ask an internship candidate? They don’t have work experience or real world skills.

I’d be unsurprised if an interviewer who thinks that trivia isn’t a goofy waste of time also believes that young people don’t have real world skills. But a good interviewer would probably spend time getting to know the candidate’s character.

Something I’ve learned from years of mentoring teens and raising kids is that there are qualities you cannot teach, and they’re enormously more valuable than any technical skills. I’m confident I can teach just about anyone any of the skills Microsoft employees find themselves milling away at. But I can’t teach that fire a 10th grader has where they go home and spend their entire weekend figuring out how to make their idea work in Java, even though they barely understand programming, and then swarm you at the door next week to proudly show it.

That’s the kind of quality you seek to find in an interview. All the other stuff can be taught to anyone.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#18

Post by mircerlancerous »

Sadly I've seen this kind of interviewing from lots of places; maybe it's a technique they teach in college or something.

Interview questions like this are useless as they are not an accurate approximation of a real work scenario. I've frozen up at a whiteboard in an interview before, and then figured it out on the drive home.

The best approach I've found is to do a send home quiz, and then ask them questions about the quiz to test understanding. The test also shows coding habits, which tells you a lot right there.

Bonus: put some typos in the quiz that don't matter. Red flag for the people that get hung up on that.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#19

Post by prewett »

xelxebar wrote: post #11
arcfour wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed with which I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact during an incident, for example, is orders of magnitude faster than the speed with which I would figure out which of 12 marbles is slightly heavier than the others.

> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.

Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#20

Post by skittleson »

I really loved to work there. I knew alot of friends, toured the campus, and even worked with prior employees that had good experiences. Every product before 2015 was beautiful (i still miss my Zune).

Then they broke me. I tried to give feedback on the products, interviewed, and really tried to reach out to them. Mostly ignored (except Outlook team, thanks ). The heavy marketing and tech debt within Windows is what did it for me. Rant over.... the interview felt like some trick questions at that time.

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