That time when I failed the Microsoft interview

According to wikipedia, microscopic is considered up to 1 micron. [1] According to the Schwartzchild formula [2] r=(2Gm)/(c^2) so if I take the largest black hole the definition would allow, the mass would be about 10% of the moon. You'd feel 1G at about 60km distance because of it. But indeed, it would fall and take about 20 minutes to reach the core of the planet, while displacing a whooping 1gram of matter. Kind of funny how wierd this whole thing is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscopic_scale

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

I believe this would nucleate a cosmic string (and annihilate everything in its vicinity obviously)

Right, that was the Ballmer era, and when pg pronounced them dead. But I do think that perspective didn't appreciate the coporate Game of Thrones (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vk-D!,f_auto,q_auto:...) Ballmer had to play to pave the way for Satya to remake Microsoft from a Windows + Office company to an Azure + Windows + Office company.

I have some recent experience with this, as I used a couple Windows computers as daily drivers for a few years after my Intel MacBook broke, before switching back to Mac (via Apple Silicon) a couple years ago. I still use my Windows desktop for gaming and cross platform testing, since I can't use Linux yet due to the Nvidia GPU.

I think Windows has been getting more featureful lately, like the ability to link your phone, the ability to share files by short distance radio, and of course, some experiences entirely unique to Windows, such as Thunderbolt Share. A lot of the things you can do with macOS have some sort of Windows equivalent, even if it's more of an alternative workflow rather than a direct replacement. I never really felt like it was impossible to do things on Windows that I would have done on Mac, but I felt the difference everywhere.

Here's an example. macOS has had Spotlight for a pretty long time now. It can access any of my applications, or even any of my files simply by hearing the name, and nowadays (in the macOS 27 betas) it even has Siri. Maybe this counts as features. Windows does not have such a thing. Windows does have file search, but Explorer has to scan the directory tree each time, and the Start menu often doesn't find things well. (I recently heard they're looking to fix that, though?) There are third-party tools, like WizFile, Everything, PowerToys, now Raycast, etc. and I could perhaps look into those, but they just didn't seem to fit right.

I ended up organizing all the files I needed into a folder structure I could fully memorize, so that I could just recall the location of a file. That, to me, was faster than relying on search. In my opinion, that is somewhere Windows failed me. On Mac, I don't have to do that -- my files can be anywhere, organized however they were first created. It was such a relief to let go of all that folder structure once I moved back.

I will give Windows credit for allowing me to just start typing after hitting the Windows key -- that is almost entirely what allowed me to avoid the need for external tooling. That sort of thing is rare, though.

I will also note that the lack of QuickLook was annoying, but only until I picked up a piece of software from GitHub that scratched the itch well enough, and then I never really had to think about it again.

On to polish... I feel like Windows has terrible polish. I can feel every missed frame, every input delay, every animation glitch. The worst part is, it feels like every part of the OS is its own bespoke pile of hacks. The Start menu is not the Taskbar is not the modern Settings app is not Explorer is not the Notification Center is not Widgets is not the Win+Tab or ... like, fuck, dude. Then there's the administrative tools like Event Viewer, Task Scheduler, Microsoft Management Console, Group Policy Editor -- as you progressively peel back the modern abstractions, you reach a progressively more and more primitive base system with increasingly limited functionality, but of course, a lot of enterprise and business stuff.

This old tooling often doesn't work well on modern HiDPI displays either. Split views in those old apps are much more difficult to target because the dividers are sized in physical pixels. Lots of old software suffers from these problems, and the high-DPI scaling settings can be confusing (also, the filtering algorithm Windows uses to upscale pixelated bitmaps when you have it set to "System (Enhanced)" looks terrible to me).

To be fair, Windows has never treated high-DPI particularly well, because there are so many old low-level APIs and the way that software is rendered is simply the way that it is and it's just. Everything is so simple and straightforward, and that's the problem! Everything is so direct, so low-level, there's no room for the operating system to do the work for you. That's why there are all of these extra abstraction layers on top, that's why Microsoft keeps building more and more and more, but they're never quite happy with it and I'm not either. :/

I tried making a WinUI 3 app a few years ago. It was awful! Absolutely terrible. I was supposed to make the layout in this awful XAML format, and it took me forever to figure out how to do basic things like combine a tab bar into the title bar... and it was really difficult to understand how I was supposed to render dynamic content and. It just sucks :(

I also looked at the WinUI 3 library's XAML, did you know the text field widget's appearance is fully entirely implemented in that declarative garbage including the insertion caret and everything? It doesn't use the native OS facilities practically at all.

Contrast this to Mac where you can just pull in the same system frameworks that the system itself uses, hook up some objects and delegates and such and you have a fully functional user interface that supports all system-level actions and accessibility features. And because everything is object-oriented, you don't have to constantly reimplement it all from scratch to do anything special!!

Oh, also, I hate rebooting Windows because it suuuucks at reopening my programs. Windows has a much fuzzier model of applications than macOS does, so you don't even necessarily know which processes to restart and how, and also none of the applications are necessarily going to restore their state properly because they weren't necessarily designed for it, etc. On Mac, I'm not afraid of reboots! I just close down the stuff I don't need to stay open, then just tell it to reopen my windows after the reboot. It's so much better.

As for capability... Windows is capable of a lot, especially since it's typically the one platform for developers to support (first/ever), and it can even do some things Macs can't yet (like Thunderbolt Share!), but I'm more often frustrated to find something available only on Windows, than I am grateful for practically anything Windows has ever done for me.

Windows absolutely has some good parts, and I know at least a few people who absolutely love the idea of the NT kernel, but the way the overall system is just seems really, stupid!! for lack of a better word. It feels dumb, maybe designed for dumb users, but... dumb nonetheless. I want to say braindead, it doesn't feel quite that bad, but Microsoft has been screwing up a lot more lately and that certainly feels kind of braindead.

People really like to make fun of Apple for "dumbing things down" and "treating their users like idiots" but I honestly feel like Windows is worse with that? At least I feel like an idiot when I use Windows because I don't understand how the people that made it even thought any of it up. After being exposed to the low-level primitives of Apple operating systems (I used to tweak iOS back when that was possible, before I ever had a Mac) even after growing up with the primitives of Windows, Apple just made so much more sense to me, and felt so agreeable and so much better compared to Windows that I have just never been able to understand where Windows even comes from. It literally feels so alien in the dumb way.

The worst part is a large part of the Internet will literally just gaslight me and say I'm an Apple sheep for agreeing so much with their software, but I just have nothing else!! Apple feels like one of my last hopes in this world for secure hardware and software that I own, and they've really been struggling to stay that way lately but I really hope they pull through, especially with the new CEO.

> [...] to explain to a developer why their code with 5 nested loops is probably not a good idea.

Funny anecdote about that:

I had written code with (in a nutshell) more than five nested loops because that's how password cracking works: try all the options. Someone in the presentation audience came from compsci education and asked if that isn't bad for performance. I really struggled to explain this basic logic of... like, yeah, it takes a while but what magic do you think exists to not do the password cracking algorithm (that indeed takes an indeterminate amount of time) yet get the password back from the hash (which was the objective of our research project)!

We got a good grade but I'm not sure if I was able to clear up this compsci student's confusion :p. They learned a theory but didn't know where to apply it

> However, in my experience, if an interviewer can't confirm basic knowledge of data structures and algorithms, then some lead ends up having to teach computer science [...]

Instead of making interviews a repeat of the exams that their diploma certifies, I'd suggest asking after the knowledge that you need/prefer them to have. E.g. we had a vacancy related to large-volume log data processing, so we gave people a challenge to answer simple questions about a large dataset which doesn't fit in RAM (e.g. "which city in the dataset had the most events"). The candidates, all in the last year or having finished compsci university, solved it in O(n) memory at best (some solutions were worse) instead of the O(1) solution¹ that seems obvious to me. They would, instead, split the dataset in a biased way and provide answers for the first slice only, often (not always) acknowledging it's a partial or biased solution and needs to be repeated for each slice, but not making the logical connection that if one can add up the results for the parts then maybe they could also just structure the code that way and process in a streaming manner for each record that comes in

I found it very insightful about candidates' ability to work with real-world data; that their algorithms class' theoretical knowledge doesn't translate if they haven't taught themselves that

Programming is commonly self-taught. I basically dropped out of high school to do a vocational school instead since I had already learned the basics, and there I'm not sure we covered algorithms for dealing with tree structures, I just know about that from the internet. In projects I've done for fun or for other jobs, it quickly becomes obvious which solutions perform and which ones don't. Looking up an existing algorithm to use is a lot quicker than knowing math theories and needing to learn programming from scratch still, so long as you know that performance in hot loops or UI threads is a thing to be aware of

¹ for(event in events){cities[event.city]++;} asort(cities);, excluding some wrapper code to e.g. associate event coordinates with a list of cities that we provided