61–70 of 322 posts
Now there I've made it much worse (or better!) than the actual reality, which is that there's just not enough quality engineering jobs no matter which way you cut it and all of this theatrics result from scarcity.
As I have grown older, I have realized dead-honesty is a false ideal to live by, especially when it comes to being rewarded in the capitalistic world. I know someone who reached executive level position in a major company and all of his career progress can be traced back to lying on his resume about a NASA internship he never got, which he conveniently purged later from everywhere. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think…
> You have 12 marbles and a balance scale. One of the 12 marbles is inconsistent with the others, meaning it could be heavier or lighter than its peers of normal weight. You are allowed to use the balance scale exactly 3 times to identify which of the 12 marbles is irregular AND determine whether it is heavier or lighter than normal. I also got this riddle, in 2015. I couldn't solve it. Tbh, I think it's a terrible q…
I have question for MS people. How do you guys view external contractors(the one with email address start with v-xxx) I was contractor for MS for a while and it was not a very positive experience. i was kind of being forgotten and only be mentioned when convenient. I went by months without any actual real work done.
(This was a long time ago, during the Ballmer era. Just my personal 2 cents.)
Of course I told the interviewer I'd heard it before and then gave the correct answer. In my case we just ended up chatting about previous experience instead of doing another brainteaser and I ultimately passed the interview, I think. But afterward the recruiter strung me along for weeks telling me they wanted to make an offer but not giving me one, and I ended up going to Microsoft instead.
Not the worst interview experience I've had, though. That would be the time I interviewed for a full time position after an internship and a group of guys who knew me and had worked with me all summer asked me a pointless brainteaser as the only interview question. I crashed and burned for a full 40 minutes in front of them. Humiliating, and pretty much a pointless hazing ritual as they offered me the job anyway. Luckily I got a better offer and was able to turn them down.
Here are some other brainteasers I've been asked in interviews. I actually think these physics based ones are fun (probably because I had no trouble solving them), but they're still terrible interview questions:
You're in a boat on a lake with a bowling ball. After you drop the ball overboard and it sinks to the bottom, is the lake water level higher or lower or the same?
Three balls are on three downward sloping tracks. One track is a straight line down to the end, the second is the same except for a small hill in the middle, and the third is the same except instead of a hill it has a small dip. All tracks start at the same height and end at the same height and cover the same horizontal distance. The balls are released at the same time and roll to the end without leaving their tracks. Which one gets there first?
And now after decades of research, we're still using magic potions that mostly don't make sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they know that if you had graduated, you would have, at every turn, mentioned the name and date of your degree, instead!
Eh? Would you? I have two degrees and I never mentioned exactly what they are on my CVs, literally just like above - "2010-2014 Computer Science at University X". I've reviewed countless CVs when I was a hiring manager for a few years too, and I don't really recall if people wrote down what they got, nor was it ever relevant for any position outside of intern ones.
Neither of you have mentioned the qualifications of the jobs you sought. Perhaps those companies did not require or factor-in the degrees of candidates. Perhaps they can open up LinkedIn and see whether or not you graduated. Perhaps they just called their sorority sister at the Registrar for an informal reminiscence about the weather in 2021.
I can understand if you want to put the year-range that you attended college. Perhaps you want to prove you graduated in 4 years, rather than taking 6. There are more people who are unwilling to put any year at all to their education, lest someone figure out that they are over 40.
The bottom line is that if you ask 5 people about résumé building and job interviews, you'll hear 6 opinions on what is right, what is wrong, what is legal, etc. There is plenty of bad advice, and narrow opinions, mine included.
What a great way to filter out talented people. Great times. Very character building.
Sometimes he asked the same question again and when someone remembered the answer, he still went "gotcha!" only with a changed answer.
The lesson I learned from that guy, was that sometimes a question says more about the person asking it than about the person answering it — more precisely that men with small egos bend reality to get the outcome they prefer.
The appropriate strategy with him was to ask in a Socratic way while stroking his ego: "But haven't you thought us X is Y? I would like to get it correct!", then he would squirm around and admit that yes, this is also correct.
This type of dynamic can also occur in interviews.
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 t…
I much prefer a pair programming interview or something where you can really see how they work through a problem they don’t necessarily have to finish or do perfectly.