Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#321

Post by apple4ever » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

kluyg wrote: post #246

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…

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…

Absolutely.

That being said, if a candidate just couldn't take off work for whatever reason, I am willing to do an evening interview.

Gotta be flexible, on both sides.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#322

Post by simonswords82 » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 8:29 PM UTC

bicubic wrote: post #309

simonswords82 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever sat on the hiring side and had just one new hire not work out, you would understand your throw away statement is actually more absurd than asking for free work. Let's flip the scenario and go your way instead... Imagine being a programmer applying for a job and not being asked to demonstrate your skills at interview. The interview goes well, and you're offered the job. You give your 4 weeks notice on your…

I'm more often on the hiring side of the table than on the other. Probation periods exist specifically to address the issue of hiring false positives, and they work fine. Your story is only possible if the interview process failed miserably. If your process sucks and results in a lot of false positives, that's your problem. Don't use it as justification for milking candidates for unpaid work towards actual deliverabl…

One must not use probation as a get out of jail free card. We used to think the same way you do, we ultimately realised we were wrong.

Probation exists to be used only extreme circumstances, not as a catch all for "hey, sorry we made the wrong hire". It's more expensive to hire a candidate and kick them out on probation than to avoid making the wrong hire. This is another reason my approach works - we don't "milk" free labour, we don't need it. Our interview ensures we make the right hire first time, every time and part of that process is some "real" work.

Our interview process is awesome. Refined over a period of 10 years. Candidates learn something, we learn something, we collaborate with them. We often have candidates, even those who do not receive a job offer, compliment us on our process.

I'll write our interview process up one day and share it on HN so others can benefit.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#323

Post by phillipcarter » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 10:55 PM UTC

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.

No, this is describing the PM interview process. Source: I’m in this org at the company and have interviewed candidates under this model

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#324

Post by shostack » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 12:01 AM UTC

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 actually something I've encountered outside of interviews in day-to-day work with teams.

When the topic is something where I know some underlying complexity exists, or the stakes are high, I often want to spend a bit of time thinking it through by myself because that's how I think best about those sorts of problems.

I've encountered friction at times with those that aren't familiar with and/or care about the underlying complexities and just want to talk high-level and make decisions and move on. Sometimes it is important to make quick decisions to avoid analysis paralysis, but often it is worth giving those who do best thinking through things on their own a chunk of time to go off and do what they do best. I wish more people took that into consideration when conducting brainstorms.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#325

Post by khazhoux » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 12:16 AM UTC

josephcooney wrote: post #286

twblalock wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, always. It is company policy. Google takes its standardized interview process more seriously than any other company I've heard of, except maybe Palantir.

So, you're telling me they made Vint Cerf do a whiteboard interview?

I don't know, someone would have to ask Vint. But it is a plain fact that Google interviews the engineers of a potential acquisition. For a small company, they'll pick and choose which ones to keep. For a large company, I don't know. The CEO may or may not go through the full interview process -- I've seen it both ways, seems to depend on whether they're buddies with the VP.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#326

Post by khazhoux » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 12:17 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #70

jghn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you mention Google, my understanding is that you still go through the standard hiring process

Again, always? If they buy the company that you built specifically to get access to you, do you think you'll still end up getting screened out by some junior dev on a whiteboard? All policies have exceptions. Your goal is to be exceptional.

> If they buy the company that you built specifically to get access to you, do you think you'll still end up getting screened out by some junior dev on a whiteboard?

In this case probably not, but you'll have to do several rounds with the VPs. Of course the tenor is very different, more conversational / situtational instead of technical questions. But you're still being sniffed out. Unless you're already pals with the VP.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#327

Post by HillaryBriss » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 1:19 AM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #241

HillaryBriss wrote: post #110

> ... Second, we run through a real problem the team is trying to solve — improving satisfaction, increasing retention, boosting usage of a service or feature. The fact that it’s a real problem that we’re working on helps foster a collaborative conversation. maybe I'm reading too much into this but ... for some reason, none of these questions are highly programming-centric (e.g. implement a sort algorithm, build a B-…

I don't think those human-centered metrics can be classified as marketing. Is marketing the business of satisfying customers?

maybe 'product development' ?

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#328

Post by kamaal » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 9:48 AM UTC

zbentley wrote: post #289

kamaal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

> 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. That's not at all true in many languages. If a candidate asked "is this string's length known without an O(N) operation on the number of characters in it?" (or knew the answer for the default string constructs in the language they were using for the problem) I'd consider that…

>> Interviewers who do that are doing themselves and their candidates a disservice.

Bad news is people who work at FAANG companies think they are the best of the human race there has ever been. And you have to the give the answers they want.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#329

Post by pytester » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #277

pytester wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that hard to isolate a block of code that addresses a small cross section of your business rules and ask a candidate to do something meaningful with it.

Then the complaint will be "they gave me a question about a really specific and hard to understand part of their code. It would have been easy to solve if I had familiarity with the concepts involved. Why didn't they just ask a similarly complicated question about strings instead?"

That would be the complaint if you didn't isolate the code and explain the task properly.

If you can't do that then you should probably worry about your own skills before testing somebody else's.

Re: Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

#330

Post by recursive » Tue, Jan 01, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

pytester wrote: post #329

tome wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the complaint will be "they gave me a question about a really specific and hard to understand part of their code. It would have been easy to solve if I had familiarity with the concepts involved. Why didn't they just ask a similarly complicated question about strings instead?"

That would be the complaint if you didn't isolate the code and explain the task properly. If you can't do that then you should probably worry about your own skills before testing somebody else's.

That's not really actionable. Even if my skills aren't up to pytester's standards, we still need to recruit developers now. And for what it's worth I doubt I'll ever be able to explain most of the tasks our business is doing what you refer to as "properly".