Jeez, the text in the rejection letter is the same today as it was back in 2015!
You can not improve on perfection!
That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
131–140 of 322 posts
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#132Once long ago when I interviewed at Apple I was asked the classic "fork in the road, two guys, one always tells the truth and one always lies" riddle, with complete earnestness as far as I could tell. Possibly the single worst interview question I've ever been asked. 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 in…
Here a few additional teasers,
- How many golf balls fit into the plane
- How many gas stations exist in country (or alternative version with city)
- How many turns do you have to go on a gum machine until colour comes out?
Naturally they all evaluate properly the skills required for the job, and other professions get asked the same kind of stupid questions.
Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are unemployed and every opportunity counts, that is usually where the interview ends for me.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#133Counterpoint 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,…
> 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! Normally I'm completely in favour of being honest about this (and would almost certainly do it myself), but in the case of something as common as "finding primes" I'd think it's OK to just do it. Does any interviewer really expect that the majority of candidates h…
How many devs above 40 do you think still do leetcode to keep themselves entertained, especially if their daily work is doing CRUD stuff between corporate meetings?
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#134My favourite interview question that I received was when I was asked to write code that would serialize/deserialize a binary tree and was told it was fine to use "any programming language". They received a crash course in the power of Haskell ADT and `deriving (Show, Read)`.
Well, did they hire you? Don’t leave us hanging!
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#135> 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…
Probably explains why Microsoft hasn't made a good product in...as long as I can remember. It's all shibboleths and gate-keeping.
They are not the only ones, Google is famous for this kind of stuff, and then you look into Android code quality.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
First one water is lower. Ball is more dense than water, in boat displaces its weight in water, in water displaces it's volume Dip for hill roll is faster
Next bail 10 litres of water from the lake into the open-topped boat. What are the effects of the 10 litres of air displaced from within the boat?
Unless there was a butterfly in that part of the air .. not much.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#137A friend told me about his AWS interview experience. It was a case study describing a potential client, their needs, limitations, etc - trying to be “realistic”. In the end it came down to either pressuring the client to embark on a complex cloud transition in time for a major sports event (that was a make or break event for the customer) or, as my friend recommended, start with a PoC but do the risky transition afte…
I have kind of the same personal experience - a couple of days answering questions about the scalability and resilience of a fictional web app and enterprise integrations.
I’m very much a generalist and kept to standards and terms not specific to AWS infra. They ”passed” me but wanted a follow-up after going through some training packages to make sure I could translate everything to AWS.
At the time I was leaving a bigger software company , largely because I felt we completely locked down customers in solutions perhaps not in their best interest - so this put me off.
I realized AWS would be just the same, just on a different level.
And of course this makes sense - they want to sell their stuff!
I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!)
Sometimes I think "it's a UNIX system, I know this" but I've been caught by subtle differences before too. killall is very different between Linux and Solaris, for example. I would rather have not found this out on a client machine for the first time.
Another AIX different that caughts folks off guard, it uses COFF primarly, and its dynamic library models is closer to Windows, OS/2, Symbian, than classical UNIX with ELF.
Including the existence of import libraries, linker export files, and lazy dynamic loading of symbols.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Source: I used to work at the dumpster fire
I agree. Source: I am an Azure user.
As user I still find it less painful to use than either AWS or GCP, where I had worse experiences in platform complexity (AWS), or talking to bots for support (GCP).
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#140My favorite (probably apocryphal) Microsoft brain teaser question I've heard is, "If you had to move Mt Fuji, how would you do it?" I've never interviewed there, or been asked that question, but I think it would be a lot of fun to answer.
"I wouldn't even try it because I don't want to be deported from Japan."