Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#261

Post by watwut » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 8:53 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #109

watwut wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manhole question is bad, because around half manholes im real world are squared. So the correct answer is that they are not in fact round and square works perfectly fine. Of course I know right answer, but it has zero to do with me being smart and a lot to do with me being in right culture and thus having heard about it before. Which is exactly what it test along with other brain teasers - have you encountered this s…

The correct question, obviously, would be "why in some places they make manhole covers round and which advantages and disadvantages over square ones they have?" Which, as any good question does, already contains part of the answer.

It could be coupled with following question: "why in some places they make manhole covers square and which advantages and disadvantages over round ones they have?"

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#262

Post by kamaal » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 8:58 AM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #252

solatic wrote: post #243

Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so willing to spend so much time. Already, they're up to a full day of interviews, which is ridiculous. One of the worst parts of current FAANG interviewing is how long it takes to get to the day of interviews, needing to take off from work to attend the interview…

One company wanted approached to interview me for the position of a "scientist". Their initial step of the interview process was to spend 4-6h on some "challenge" they designed. I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! I made a counter to their proposal as all my research projects are publicly available. My counter was similar to your proposition.…

>>I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does!

You had a lucky escape. I had the same from a company. Which was arguably a 2 full nights worth work if done right.

I took the challenge. Did it, it passed their functional test suite which they provided. Unit test cases, git repo, documentation etc etc all in place.

They came back saying it was not enough. So it's not like if you do the take home project, they let you in.

Also its a tad little irritating to make people work for so long, make them do everything. And even then with perfectly working solution turn them down.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#263

Post by DATACOMMANDER » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:05 AM UTC

yarrel wrote: post #41

sxp wrote: post #3

https://blog.usejournal.com/rethinking-how-we-interview-in-m... is the original post by a PM at Microsoft. It doesn't have any useful information about a pure technical interview for software engineering. >(Note: I started at Microsoft when we were still asking questions about why manhole covers were round, how many ping pong balls would fill a 747, and how to reverse a linked list. In 20 years here, I’ve yet to have…

The manhole and 747 questions test for obedience and bikeshedding, not problem solving. Likewise the linked list reversal question tests for lack of planning and critical thinking. These anti-skills will have been used quite regularly at Microsoft.

How does being able to reverse a linked list suggest that one lacks the ability to think critically?

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#264

Post by kluyg » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:08 AM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #250

kluyg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if only it was all unicorns and rainbows. What you describe is how I imagine they interview for director / VP positions. With hundreds (thousands?) of applications per day for software engineering positions, all with perfect resumes, what you describe just doesn’t scale. Software engineers do 1-2 interviews per week each, it’s part of the job. I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evening…

> I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evenings per week interviewing people. I’d rather spend time with my family instead. It seems to me this is an issue with your employer not the interview process.

I was referring to this: > invite the person for a two-hour interview, and schedule it during the call, first offering an evening time slot for the interview.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#265

Post by kamaal » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #193

baursak wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

>>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.

a. You can't iterate a 'String' backwards. You need to know the length first. And that requires traversing the string forwards at least once.

b. Once you reach the end you are wasting the effort of revisiting the elements, since you visited them already once.

c. A better option is build a build a double linked list, as you are traversing the list forward.

d. Once you have the double linked list ready, you have pointers to both start and end, and you traverse the way you like.

e. An even better way would be to design a data structure that contains all this meta data at String creation itself.

    Class CustomString {
        char* headPointer;
        char* tailPointer;
        int length;
        bool isPalindrome;
        char* string;
        /* Add your interview acrobatic things here */
    }

Stuff like this.

Now even though the answer in your comment is correct, they could reject you for not coming up with the answers I gave from point a through e above.

Now imagine some one telling you that, on these grounds, you don't know a semicolon worth programming and are probably a liar.

I hope you understand what's going on here. Every body can be rejected if they don't cut through your cookie cutter.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#266

Post by jrx » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:25 AM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #252

solatic wrote: post #243

Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so willing to spend so much time. Already, they're up to a full day of interviews, which is ridiculous. One of the worst parts of current FAANG interviewing is how long it takes to get to the day of interviews, needing to take off from work to attend the interview…

One company wanted approached to interview me for the position of a "scientist". Their initial step of the interview process was to spend 4-6h on some "challenge" they designed. I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! I made a counter to their proposal as all my research projects are publicly available. My counter was similar to your proposition.…

I can share with you one hiring insight I have that goes against your sentiment. I've been hiring for hedge fund research roles for the last three years interviewing ~30 candidates over that period.

What I've learned is that it is a very weak signal to talk to candidate about "their research" unless it's immediately and directly applicable to what we were doing as a company, so that we can talk about it as equal experts, which never really happened in our case. Previous research done by candidate was, like research almost always is in a narrow and specialize niche. Every candidate I was talking to was very good with talking about their research and from my perspective at the time of the interview it was impossible to validate and evaluate their claims. That conversation could convey the character of the candidate but I couldn't evaluate their ability to do new research.

Instead, presenting candidates with the same problem, that in our case took around 3 hours to solve, in our case proved a good way to compare candidates a bit more objectively and test how they approach solving problems they haven't seen before which is more applicable to what they'll be doing on the job.

The downside of that process is that during three hours you can only test so much, but hiring is a really hard thing to do right and we didn't want to take more of candidates time as we did value it highly and found that to be the sweet spot for us.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#267

Post by chrisbennet » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:25 AM UTC

throwaway169169 wrote: post #211

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.…

> You DID look at the CV before bringing the candidate in, didn’t you? I would like to speak to this after interviewing at a few places recently, including Google. I don’t think a single interviewer looked at my resume. I’ve developed a sizable open source project that is used by real people for over a decade. If the company really wanted to know if I could write code they could just go and look at it. Instead they a…

I think they have a policy of not reading your resume so as not to bias the interviewer. Seems crazy I know.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#268

Post by pdimitar » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #85

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #14

> But the aha moment for me was that not everyone does well in those fast-paced brainstorming sessions. A lot of people (including me) prefer to sit with a cup of coffee and some data and try to think things through. This is me. Hard to get that across in an interview, but once people work with me, they're cool with me coming back an hour later in an email with some thoughts on the last meeting topic. They know and r…

I’ve never done any leetCode style interviewing or studying, but from what I have heard, it’s all about “pattern matching” and knowing how to solve similar problems. I have done plenty of architecting. A large percentage of architectural problems that you are asked to solve have already been solved. After enough years at enough different companies and reading enough architectural books, it’s just pattern matching and…

Can you recommend several such books?

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#269

Post by chrisbennet » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #20

sxp wrote: post #3

https://blog.usejournal.com/rethinking-how-we-interview-in-m... is the original post by a PM at Microsoft. It doesn't have any useful information about a pure technical interview for software engineering. >(Note: I started at Microsoft when we were still asking questions about why manhole covers were round, how many ping pong balls would fill a 747, and how to reverse a linked list. In 20 years here, I’ve yet to have…

Manhole question is bad, because around half manholes im real world are squared. So the correct answer is that they are not in fact round and square works perfectly fine. Of course I know right answer, but it has zero to do with me being smart and a lot to do with me being in right culture and thus having heard about it before. Which is exactly what it test along with other brain teasers - have you encountered this s…

Data point: There are triangular manhole covers on my street.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#270

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #262

denzil_correa wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One company wanted approached to interview me for the position of a "scientist". Their initial step of the interview process was to spend 4-6h on some "challenge" they designed. I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! I made a counter to their proposal as all my research projects are publicly available. My counter was similar to your proposition.…

>>I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! You had a lucky escape. I had the same from a company. Which was arguably a 2 full nights worth work if done right. I took the challenge. Did it, it passed their functional test suite which they provided. Unit test cases, git repo, documentation etc etc all in place. They came back saying it was not enoug…

I had one which took a similar effort, passed all their unit tests, then they went into radio silence and after trying to understand what was going on, the only feedback I got was "we were expecting something else".

Further inquires about what was wrong, given that it was working as per specification got zero answers.