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Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

businessinsider.fr

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Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#191

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pgeorgi wrote: post #140
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with that is that if my CV is incredibly specialized in one area that happens to match the job I’m going for (eg compilers), why test my knowledge in designing things like a distributed system and in how great I do dynamic programming (that is not useful in my area)??? It feels like there is no verification at all of what my CV claims, nor does it give me a chance to show off the skills I’ve been working on…

In larger corporations it may not be 100% finalized where you would end up. Knowing that yes, you master compilers (that's usually quickly determined, potentially fast enough for you not to notice it since you live and breath compilers), have basic knowledge in smashing together enough html tags to build a simple dashboard but you never had to deal with processes that spanned multiple computers, allows more flexible…

I’m not going to take the job if I don’t wind up in a group working on problems that interest me. That is part of the bidirectional interview right? I hesitated even applying to a big Corp until a few people there convinced me they had problems right up my ally. I don’t want to work at big corp just to be working at big corp!

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#192

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ensiferum wrote: post #142
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with that is that if my CV is incredibly specialized in one area that happens to match the job I’m going for (eg compilers), why test my knowledge in designing things like a distributed system and in how great I do dynamic programming (that is not useful in my area)??? It feels like there is no verification at all of what my CV claims, nor does it give me a chance to show off the skills I’ve been working on…

Because at big corps engineers might get assigned interviews as a routine work. And any engineer has their favourite questions that they know the answer to. They dont want to take.the extra effort and come up with new questions just to adapt to your profile or expertise. It goes the other way around. I.e.the interviewer is not going to do.extra work to validate the candidate but the candidate has to prove him/herself…

The one size fits all interview at a big corp is game-able at least, with plenty of practice material available online. It isn’t a huge hurdle if you have a month or two to practice, but that makes the whole process even more questionable.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#193

Post by throwawaymath »

baursak wrote: post #177
kronin wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the start of the coding interview. It moves on from there. This candidate didn't even ask if he could use Apache commons, and I hadn't yet specified that he couldn't use a 3rd party library. So yes. He failed on many counts. 1) not asking clarifying questions 2) not being familiar with some well-known libraries 3) not being able to implement a basic reverse string 4) not being able to explain whether or not a si…

How many times in your job did you have to implement reversing a string without calling a library?

I understand the class of rebuttal you're invoking here, but reversing a string is extremely easy - with or without a library. This is not an academic problem designed to see if a person can study prior to an interview. This is a first pass question designed to see if a person is even acquainted with basic programming. Any such question you could devise would be similarly patronizing or orthogonal to the exact work done on the job.

And yet, despite how easy the question is people still fail it. It's frankly absurd to me that a senior software engineer can fail this question. It's practically a freebie slam dunk for anyone with basic competency. Briefly drop that you can use your language's core function or method to do it. Then declare a new array and iterate through the string backwards, appending each character to the new array. When you're done, collapse the array to a string.

In other words, it's testing if you can write a for loop. How many times in your job do you expect to implement a for loop? I use for loops quite often.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#194

Post by Kephael »

epicureanideal wrote: post #160
m0zg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's neither. There's a DP solution for this problem and a recursive solution without memoization (with exponential complexity). The shortest solution I have seen was 18 lines of code.

Please show me a regex parser in 18 lines of code! Even 36! I did this exercise once and it took 100s of lines, I think using C++... but it's been a long time. Maybe it's significantly shorter in Python? But still 18 lines is impressive.

This is LeetCode #10, this is a common question.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#195

Post by kettlecorn »

DylanDmitri wrote: post #88
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #53

I noticed that the two people quoted are both PMs. So does this have any relevance for software engineers?

Yes, these are software engineering interviews. It's the PMs who are designing and refining the process though.

It seems to me that it should mostly be software engineers designing the software engineering interview process.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#196

Post by a-dub »

kronin wrote: post #178
a-dub wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that you're not just crap at interviewing? Assuming people are lying is both extreme and presumptuous, no? Also, are your people actually reversing strings by hand every day? I sure hope not!

Since you're attacking me, do you have any experience screening resumes? Phone screens? In-person interviews? Have you had the experience of a candidate that has apparently "done it all" on their resume, and confirmed their skill level when asked in-person, only to see them struggle with the simplest question in an area they deem themself an "expert" in? I've interviewed well over 300 people, for positions from junio…

Yup... and I don't know, for someone who has "300 people" worth of interview experience, you sure don't seem to be demonstrating in this thread the sort of level headed temperance and soft skills I would expect.

I'm joking. (sorta)

I'm glad to hear that you tailor to the resume, that's actually better than most and my favorite approach.

But if I had a dollar for every time someone walked out of an interview with a braggadocious claim like "they couldn't even do X, they must be lying" but then answer "no" to "did you ask them anything else?". I'd be rich.

Reversing a string is a bad example, it is dead easy. But it seems a lot of people have random substitutions for it of varying obscurity and difficulty.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#197

Post by burtonator »

mancerayder wrote: post #39

Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior engineer in the systems space I feel I shouldn't need to study days or weeks for fizzbuzz sorting algorithms questions that are designed to test comp sci recent grads. I have a proven career, and was never suddenly stumped in a project due to not being able to.…

I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS...

After about 5 minutes of this I literally said:

"Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds".

I no longer keep small tactical issues in my head. It's pointless. Now I try to understand the system as a whole.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#198

Post by mattnewton »

burtonator wrote: post #197
mancerayder wrote: post #39

Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior engineer in the systems space I feel I shouldn't need to study days or weeks for fizzbuzz sorting algorithms questions that are designed to test comp sci recent grads. I have a proven career, and was never suddenly stumped in a project due to not being able to.…

I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS... After about 5 minutes of this I literally said: "Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds". I…

It could be _because_ they read your resume that they asked those questions, to see if they believe it. People heavily embellish their degree of involvement in projects all the time.

Or they could just be asking gotcha trivia. It’s hard to tell.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#199

Post by gcb0 »

burtonator wrote: post #197
mancerayder wrote: post #39

Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior engineer in the systems space I feel I shouldn't need to study days or weeks for fizzbuzz sorting algorithms questions that are designed to test comp sci recent grads. I have a proven career, and was never suddenly stumped in a project due to not being able to.…

I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS... After about 5 minutes of this I literally said: "Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds". I…

I guess people who allowed hacks like adding -1 fridge to get a free tv in earlier online stores could also claim "but they have build online stores that moved thousands of sales every minute"

;)

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#200

Post by pytester »

solveit wrote: post #183
a-dub wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that you're not just crap at interviewing? Assuming people are lying is both extreme and presumptuous, no? Also, are your people actually reversing strings by hand every day? I sure hope not!

I mean, people shouldn't be reversing strings by hand, but being unable to do so is also very worrying. Not because manual string reversal is an everyday problem, but because you need to do similarly complicated things all the time . In fact, you need to do them even if you're not a dev, it's just that devs share a common language that makes string reversal a sensible problem to ask in an interview.

>you need to do similarly complicated things all the time

My policy is to ask about those things instead. The ones you'll actually do rather than the ones that are, at best, tangentially related.

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