You are not required to be honest with corporations, corporations are not honest with their consumers or employees.
That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
241–250 of 322 posts
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#242A 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…
> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer. I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture. IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer, the process is working as intended and I'd…
> IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer
Which is why I never lie in interviews. If I don't make your cut, I might be dodging a bullet.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#243As 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…
> 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 don't like when people get ahead by lying either, but nobody cares about your internship at the executive level. That one lie helped with the first job, but it doesn't explain all of the person's success. > There’s no reason to feel guilty about it. Even…
"if you never lie, you don't have to remember what you said"
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#244Wow, I got the same question, wonder if we interviewed with the same dude.
I have had an interview or two where I got a programming challenge, and I was able to solve it with intuition. I don't know exactly if I didn't explain my reasoning well enough, or if my code was just too messy even though the tests passed, but I didn't get the job.
Sometimes they want some insight into how you think, and they might not get it even if you solve it.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#245Just 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…
>The coding questions that require an "aha!" moment are very similar to brain teasers, and should also be avoided. The problem with these is that their solutions always seem trivial when you are shown them (or spend time solving yourself) and then mull over them for a while.
I've been doing "daily leetcode" for fun, just to remember how to write code manually without agents, and a few days ago they gave a brain teaser kind of task [1], for which the solution was just [2] (spoiler alert). It took me quite some time to come to that solution, and I'm not really sure I would've found it with all the stress of being on a real interview.
[1]: https://leetcode.com/problems/stone-game/
[2]: return True
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Doesn’t “enthusiasm to try and tackle somewhat abstract puzzling questions” act as a reasonable proxy for some of those attributes?
It does; the old school hackers, the people who built the computer and software industry, loved logic puzzles / brainteasers and elegant, high performance solutions to coding challenges.
Most of the pushback is from dull corporate programmers (no shame in that, so am I) who want to claim that they are hackers for the clout but aren't. Ironic that a site named Hacker News is almost entirely devoid of true hackers.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree strongly. Yes, in terms of benefit to yourself honesty may not pay off, but that's not why you should do it. You should be honest (and I try to be honest) because it's shameful to be a deceitful person. Virtue actually matters, it's not all about getting ahead materially.
But what if you know you could make a materially positive impact for the company? Then wouldn’t it be virtuous to play their recruiting game in such a way that you could make that contribution ?
Depends on your school of ethical thought. If you're a consequentialist, sure. But I'm very much not a consequentialist, so I don't think that it's morally correct to do a bad thing in order to achieve good ends.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#248Once 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…
This reminds me of the weirdest interview I ever had (boutique software agency, maybe 30 devs). I walk in, and the CEO's secretary hands me an IQ test and says I have one hour. I do the test, then I meet the CEO and we chat about general topics while she grades the test nearby. Then she announces my IQ, and the CEO says "hmm, yes, that's above the minimum I'd consider for a developer." Then for the last few minutes h…
I interviewed at IBM back in the mid-90s right out of college for "Internet consultant". I was given an aptitude test and the hiring manager said that I scored one of the highest he had ever seen. He then proceeded to not give me the job because I didn't have enough experience, which is something they already knew before making me jump through hoops. It was so dumb, but it pretty much exemplifies IBM-thinking.
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#249What? They were still asking these Mt Fuji ass questions in 2016??
Re: That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
You drop a microscopic black hole off a boat into the lake. Does the water level increase or decrease?
The water level decreases, along with the shore and anything with it falling within the event horizon. Any other apocalyptic brain teasers?
The intake rate of a microscopic black hole is too small to measurably absorb much matter before it falls through to the bottom of the lake until it reaches the center of the planet and oscillates there.
The more pressing thing is that every thing around the lake is irradiated by the evaporation of the microscopic black hole, which supposedly emits quite a lot of energy, as it falls through the bottom.