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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

#161

Post by girvo »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #110
cronin101 wrote: post #77

My 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)`.

I'm so glad most of my technical interviews weren't about trying to remember things I once learned in college (15-20 years ago now) and never had to use in practice. It's been either practical "build a simplified webshop" tasks, or just an interview talking about my previous experiences. There was one where I had to do a fizzbuzz on a whiteboard but that was about it.

The one time an interviewer started describing fizzbuzz as a problem for me to solve, I said “oh FizzBuzz?” And he said “oh never mind then” haha.

Got the job offer too, though I didn’t take it

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#162

Post by inigyou »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #143
anonym29 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You drop a bowling ball off a space boat into a black hole. Has the amount of mass inside the universe increased, decreased, or stayed the same, ignoring the effects of all other changes?

You drop a black hole the size of a bowling ball into a frontier AI startup. At what point does NVIDIA give you $200bn?

At the point nvidia's office becomes part of the accretion disk.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#163

Post by pjmlp »

rel_ic wrote: post #160
pjmlp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideal would be if the questions are actually job related, how many other professions do you think get these kind of stupid questions? Since we are it, lets make Jeopardy for getting a job.

Companies are groups of people behaving a certain way, and jobs are behaving that way. As an outsider, you don't know what the job is. If the interview is a bunch of questions you think is stupid, then the job is probably doing a bunch of stuff you think is stupid. If you want the money and prestige anyway, then learn to do the stupid stuff.

Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out.

Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#164

Post by DC-3 »

Aachen wrote: post #127
ventana wrote: post #81

Just don't ask brain teasers when you conduct an interview; I believe they give no valid signal at all, and I also believe Microsoft does not ask them anymore. The coding questions that require an "aha!" moment are very similar to brain teasers, and should also be avoided. When I conducted interviews for FAANG, I asked somewhat simpler coding questions, something around DFS and/or topological sorting (without calling…

> something around DFS and/or topological sorting (without calling it by name, of course), because those are thing which you might actually need to implement at work: people sometimes traverse JSONs, and people sometimes resolve dependencies. No one has ever told me "oh, I know this problem, it's DFS", because surely I know they know it. Well, I've been coding for 15 years (of course walking through data structures,…

Several times I have implemented topological sorts and parsers as part of routine work in very ordinary tech jobs. I think it is absolutely incorrect to say that these tasks are tantamount to implementing your own crypto. They are not things you do every day, but they are basic informatics and to be honest if a developer told me that they could never conceive of implementing them in their job I would be inclined to regard them as someone who was working without a full toolbox, so to speak.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#165

Post by paulcole »

pjmlp wrote: post #157
paulcole wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the comment I was replying to: > 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 This person is close minded and is filtering themselves out of the process. This is ideal. Are you saying you’re against all open-ended questions in the interview process?

Ideal would be if the questions are actually job related, how many other professions do you think get these kind of stupid questions? Since we are it, lets make Jeopardy for getting a job.

Again, I’m not saying that job related questions are bad. I’m saying that these types of questions can be good. You can ask more than 1 type of question!

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#166

Post by paulcole »

pjmlp wrote: post #163
rel_ic wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are groups of people behaving a certain way, and jobs are behaving that way. As an outsider, you don't know what the job is. If the interview is a bunch of questions you think is stupid, then the job is probably doing a bunch of stuff you think is stupid. If you want the money and prestige anyway, then learn to do the stupid stuff.

Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out. Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.

You understand that this is a job interview working as intended? You may be awesome at the work but your values do not align with the company’s and it’s best if you don’t work there.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#167

Post by FartyMcFarter »

pjmlp wrote: post #156
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're specifically talking about people who are interviewing for jobs - I'd expect a lot of them to have done leetcode before the interviews. Also: when we think about whether we've seen a problem or not before (in order to be honest during an interview), presumably this includes all problems we have a significant memory of, not just problems we've seen recently.

Really, do you expect folks to dust off their algorithms and data structures from 30 years ago, instead of what they have been doing the last decade on the job? Love to know how many do build bridges, repair cars,..., on their spare time for job interviews.

If you expect Leetcode-style problems in the interview and are actually interested in doing your best there, why wouldn't you prepare for that?

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#168

Post by bitwize »

sgarland wrote: post #158
anal_reactor wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wrong, especially at the time. I excel when I'm given my own chunk of job to work on with certain degree of freedom. I don't butt uninvited into other people's decisions, I expect others to do the same with me. I totally suck at meetings where the goal of the meeting is to make sure that everyone feels like their voice is being heard. IMO diving people into small groups, sometimes groups of one, with API between…

> I totally suck at meetings where the goal of the meeting is to make sure that everyone feels like their voice is being heard. Those are the worst. No, I don’t feel like I need to let Bob feel heard. Bob wants to create a nightmarish stack involving ElasticSearch and Kafka for a problem that grep and a flat text file could realistically handle. I have already explained to Bob that his solution is unnecessarily compl…

But is your solution scalable? Resilient against injection attacks? What about o11y? Is literally anyone besides you going to be running these searches? If so, you're going to want to put a UI around it and that means thinking about scalability, data sanitization, and o11y. Maybe Bob knows something about the scope of the problem that you don't?

Look mate, software is business and business is marketing. If your solution really is better, you need to market it as such, even to the Bobs of the world. Especially to the Bobs of the world. If you couldn't present it in a way such that it's obvious to Bob and everybody else that your solution is better, that's a failure on your part, not Bob's, the other participants', or the meeting organizers.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#169

Post by pjmlp »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #167
pjmlp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, do you expect folks to dust off their algorithms and data structures from 30 years ago, instead of what they have been doing the last decade on the job? Love to know how many do build bridges, repair cars,..., on their spare time for job interviews.

If you expect Leetcode-style problems in the interview and are actually interested in doing your best there, why wouldn't you prepare for that?

That is the thing, I don't expect them, other than for newly graduates without anything else to show their value for.

Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

#170

Post by pjmlp »

paulcole wrote: post #166
pjmlp wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out. Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.

You understand that this is a job interview working as intended? You may be awesome at the work but your values do not align with the company’s and it’s best if you don’t work there.

I do understand that these are stupid ways to achieve that goal.
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