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I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

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Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#141

Post by mirekrusin »

keraf wrote: post #58

I actually cheated on an online assessment for one of my first programming jobs. It was my dream job and really wanted to get into that company. Under the pressure, I just couldn't figure out the solution to the last challenge which was a recursive algorithm. Normally, I would be able to do this but I just got stuck and in a moment of panic, I StackOverflow'd the question on a secondary device which provided me the e…

If you were allowed to use stackoverflow at work for those 4 years, I'd say it was all fair.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#142

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Longlius wrote: post #89

Every time the topic of cheating comes up on HN, I become increasingly disheartened by the amount of people chiming in who think it's not only alright to cheat but also laudable to do so. Ethics are foundational to engineering. Jettisoning them is a sign of a discipline in decline.

Cheating is foundational to the nepotistic foundational structure of Western Capitalism, so maybe not surprising to find it lauded here?

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#143

Post by abvdasker »

The unfairness doesn't derive so much from the act of cheating. It's more that he got the answer ahead of time because of his connection to someone at the company. When people talk about certain inequities in tech demographics I think it's not unreasonable to point to situations like this as part of the problem.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#144

Post by belter »

buran77 wrote: post #84
ignoramous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's harsh because TFA does mention that they feel outright uncomfortable (even after 18 years!) how big a role luck played in them clearing that fizzbuzz interview question: > I've struggled with this a lot over the years, but I finally decided to share my story. I don’t think I would have made it past the first round of interviews at Microsoft if I hadn’t gotten so lucky. So pretty much, my entire career is built…

Out of pretty much all the people I know, I can't think of any successful career not pivoting on one such fateful moment of "luck". One lucky question/answer, one fortunate encounter, one near miss. Of course we'll never know how the road not taken looks like. Any moment could actually be a pivotal one but most are very unassuming and only the memorable ones stick with us, making them feel more important. Also, as so…

> Out of pretty much all the people I know, I can't think of any successful career not pivoting on one such fateful moment of "luck". One lucky question/answer, one fortunate encounter, one near miss.

You are so correct (at proper timestamp): https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I?t=211

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#146

Post by psyfi »

joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

> Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then?

They are not, and no company cares about fairness

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#147

Post by BlargMcLarg »

pc86 wrote: post #128
joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.

>Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.

This gets repeated over and over, makes sense rationally on a superficial level, but falls apart once you think deeper into it without substantiating it with evidence.

We don't work on a binary false positive / true positive scale. We don't know the efficiency of each variable going into the equation with which we filter false positives. Layering proxy on proxy doesn't guarantee an increase in the ratio of true positives to false positives. All these variables are costly and subject to diminishing returns. At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire.

If you're a big corp like MS getting at least a few dozen candidates after initial automated filters, that's one thing. If you're a relative no-name with a handful of candidates and a fat management layer pulling these shenanigans, it's about time we get real and call them out.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#149

Post by 542458 »

pc86 wrote: post #128
joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.

Yeah, I think this is the crux of it. Hiring sucks for everybody involved. I hate it because the process is ugly and the cost of failure is enormous (emotionally to me, financially to my budget, and personally to my reputation).

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#150

Post by mewse »

joeman1000 wrote: post #104

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interview…

I once worked at a tech-focused games company (sadly no longer existing) which had the best interview process I’ve ever seen.

They had this massive programmer test. It was something like 40 pages long, hardcopy, double-sided. With answers needing to be written on the test generally in essay format; no computer allowed (and so no real coding involved; it was all about concepts and not about syntax). It covered everything; math, physics, logic, sound, calculus, hardware, etc. The thing was so long that we estimated it’d take a really strong applicant about four hours to complete the whole thing if they somehow were experts on all the topics simultaneously.

We informed the applicants about the test’s length upfront; that it was designed to be a 4 hour test, and that they were only going to get to spend one hour and that we absolutely didn’t expect them to know everything (or even most things) on it. That the point was for them to pick the questions they were most interested in and to only work on those ones.

And then we never formally scored the test.

Instead, we basically used it as a conversation-starter for the interview which immediately followed the test, using it as a springboard to talk about their understanding and skills and why they had selected to do one section over another, or about particular questions which they’d provided interesting (or problematic) answers to.

The “here are a whole lot of questions, answer whichever ones you want, you can’t answer them all and we’re not scoring you on how many you get right” approach always felt kind of ‘fair’ to me in a way that pure interviews or coding questions never did, for me.

(caveat: I wasn’t hired using that test; I had been hired as a junior long before, based on my portfolio and a short interview, and the folks who did get hired via taking the test may not have liked it as much as I did. But I loved that it didn’t hang everything on a single gimmick code question the way I’d seen from a whole lot of other companies)

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