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Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

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Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#311

Post by user5994461 »

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…

Red flag: invalid metrics exception

1.5M lines is the output of a team of hundreds of developers over years. I don't believe anyone would write a million lines during a job.

2PB a month, is 125B documents at 16kB each, or 50k documents per second. That's decent. That's where it starts to be interesting in elasticsearch or hadoop.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#312

Post by denzil_correa »

jrx wrote: post #266
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 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 expe…

> That conversation could convey the character of the candidate but I couldn't evaluate their ability to do new research.

It all depends on the questions asked to the candidate. You don't ask them about their research which is publicly available in any case. You ask them questions that let them reveal their thought process about their research. Now, it's up to the interviewer to come up with good questions to make this happen. The interviewer has to be well prepared and think about questions. You don't need to be an expert to ask good questions.

I'd like to reiterate that this applies to research/scientific position where pushing the boundaries is a crucial aspect of the job. In case you are looking for a very specific skillset, things may be different.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#313

Post by user5994461 »

kamaal wrote: post #274
sk5t wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over what period of time did you write 1.5 _million_ lines of code for this one project?

Nothing to take away from the original posters work. He indeed might have written that much code. But in most cases. Its not very difficult to write 1.5 million lines of code for any project if you are writing code of the style AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcherFacadeInitializer That sort of the code is basically 90% auto generated by the IDE. You write the remaining 10%. As a matter of fact I would find…

The IDE can generate "headers" for a new file, it's not gonna generate tens of thousands of new files by itself, let alone in a meaningful structure.

I don't think a developer would write a million line at work in their entire lifetime.

I'm not saying it's impossible to achieve. I've seen outsourcing agencies deliver 100k lines with just a few block copy/pasted many many times, but that's neither working nor maintainable software.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#314

Post by user5994461 »

jasonkester wrote: post #57
khazhoux wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you apply for a full-time software engineering position at a large company today, you will be run through the all-day series-of-hourlong-interviews, even if you are a referral. It is possible for the hiring manager to work closely with recruiter and recruiting coordinator to craft a more customized interview process, but that's rare (and, impossible at a place like Google, which decentralizes hiring). The value of…

You use the term "apply for a job", which might explain the disconnect. The post you reply to isn't about applying for jobs. You don't want to "apply" for things. You want your google VP to be having a beer with your ex-boss and worrying that his pet project was going to fail because they just can't find a guy who can really $X. But your ex boss knows a guy who absoulutely can $X, and just finished $X'ing his company…

That's completely inapplicable to permanent positions. The current company of a prolific employee is not gonna lay him off and send him to a competing company.

It can make sense for consultants, doing short gigs here and there. People can refer you elsewhere when the current work is completed, they ain't gonna keep you anyway.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#315

Post by jeklj »

kronin wrote: post #124
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've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area. One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user…

It’s really incredible how common those people are, and how they’ve managed to eke out a living. The thing that has surprised me most is that there is no predictability to how a candidate will perform on a simple programming exercise, new grads are equally likely to pass as people with 15 years’ experience. (The failure modes are different though, new grads spend lots of time talking through every variable assignment etc; experienced people tend to throw every technique at the wall when they encounter an issue instead of slowing down and thinking through what they’re doing)

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#316

Post by seanmcdirmid »

creato wrote: post #276
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The hiring pipeline at every big company I've been at is not always the same. Yeah, part of it is always just a big funnel that takes general applicants in and assumes they might end up anywhere in the company. But, there is also going to be a way for specialized teams to hire specialized candidates. If you find yourself in the big funnel, by all means, just tell them you aren't interested if that's not what you want…

Yes, I already did this with Amazon who hires for specific roles, but the recruiters I’ve dealt with seem to be into bait and switch (substitute very appropriate role I applied for with something completely inappropriate).

The job opportunities are definitely out there, but many of them really require a referral (the JDs aren’t posted), and even then you might have to do a generalist interview because the company is not capable of doing anything else.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#317

Post by JustSomeNobody »

enraged_camel wrote: post #245
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…

This is fine in most situations, but sometimes companies want people who actually have experienced in a given problem domain, and generally speaking, if you have to "sit with a cup of coffee and some data and try to think things through" that implies a lack of experience, which may not be desirable to the interviewer.

I'm one of a couple domain experts on my team. I am well respected as such. The reason I "sit ... coffee.. think things through" is because I am doing a mental impact analysis. How are the suggestions going to affect the system as a whole. One simply cannot know these things off the top of their head in a meeting for a system of any meaningful size.

It is precisely because of my experience that my team is OK with me taking an hour to ponder.

Edit: Let me clarify one thing. I'm not talking about situations where, say, the PO comes and asks, "Hey, JustSomeNobody, why does the system do this under these conditions?" I know the answer to this. If they want logs for that specific instance, I can get them. What I'm talking about is, when the PO calls a meeting and says, "I just got off the phone with , they want these changes to the system. What will it take?" I don't answer these questions, definitively, without thinking about them. That does NOBODY any good. I'll sometimes give a few initial thoughts for the sake of the meeting, but that's it.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#318

Post by MrMember »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #273
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 had a different experience. They gave me a lot of time but either I don't know python at all, or they didn't. they asked me to build something. I used dictionaries and wrote the code in ten minutes. Both interviewers wouldn't believe that the code could solve the problem. They later told me that dictionaries are not used in practical applications. Never understood why. Are dicts not used in "real life"?

I'm not sure I can think of a python application I've worked on that didn't use dictionaries in some way.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#319

Post by burtonator »

user5994461 wrote: post #311
burtonator wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Red flag: invalid metrics exception 1.5M lines is the output of a team of hundreds of developers over years. I don't believe anyone would write a million lines during a job. 2PB a month, is 125B documents at 16kB each, or 50k documents per second. That's decent. That's where it starts to be interesting in elasticsearch or hadoop.

This is a partially valid point... let me restate.

About 200K lines of code is auto-generated.

A more appropriate estimation would probably be about 400k lines per year as some of this code did a big mass migration and refactoring during this time but I wrote that code as well. Just in the past.

KLOC is a shitty metric anyway.

I'd rather write 100 KLOC that worked vs 10000KLOC that was horrible.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#320

Post by andrewflnr »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #273
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 had a different experience. They gave me a lot of time but either I don't know python at all, or they didn't. they asked me to build something. I used dictionaries and wrote the code in ten minutes. Both interviewers wouldn't believe that the code could solve the problem. They later told me that dictionaries are not used in practical applications. Never understood why. Are dicts not used in "real life"?

The most charitable explanation I can think of is that they have a very narrow idea of "practical application" where the performance of looking stuff up in hash maps all the time is not good enough. If that's the case, they should have been more specific, and asked for specific improvements. Otherwise, they're full of shit.
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