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I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

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Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#461

Post by bgro »

This reminds me of all the people that memorize leetcode problems to pass FAANG interviews instead of actually working real problems. Yes, it’s cheating.

The consent is you’re given a random question and let’s see how you do under pressure to solve it. What creativity do you have? What can you remember? How do you interact with the interviewer?

Memorizing the question or the patterns commonly used and being able to regurgitate it out doesn’t make you good. You’re lying and breaking the agreed upon consent. You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just regurgitating out a string answer instead of creating the object oriented program you lead them to believe you have. This puts real programmers who don’t have time to memorize trivial work at a disadvantage.

Programming interviews need to be based on real world situations. If that’s not possible, memorizing a bag of tricks that aren’t useful or practical in the real world is not an acceptable solution.

(How about you do a paired code review instead? You’d see real code, show team work skills, and demonstrate your knowledge by the questions you ask or bugs you flag as potential problems.)

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#462

Post by zamadatix »

drewcoo wrote: post #338
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, we questioned a candidate the usual way with pertinent technical challenges and so on. Then when driving in a van to lunch (our habit was to do a social segment as well as technical) I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? and suchlike. He was charmed, we brainstormed some answers and had a fun lunch. Years later,…

The rope question is more of a Fermi question[1]. Not that they aren't commonly called [2] puzzlers, but I think the distinction is useful. Fermis are about estimating, and that's an actual skill - innumeracy[3] is real. What I would call puzzle problems usually involve some trick to getting the answer. If you can't figure out the trick, you're stumped. If you know the trick, you barely have to think to crank out the…

To me it definitely seems to be in the puzzler category based on those descriptions. The trick is realizing it's "just" asking you to solve the well known formula for radius to circumference, 2*pi*r=c, for c=6 would give r≈1 while you can ignore the rest of the information worded to trick you into thinking it's a complicated problem which would require a fancy solution. Of course if you're not dealing with geometry every day of your adult life it's more likely it leads to seeing what your general thought process is, such as "I'll fall back to Fermi Estimation to get a ballpark going".

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#463

Post by dragonwriter »

bgro wrote: post #461

This reminds me of all the people that memorize leetcode problems to pass FAANG interviews instead of actually working real problems. Yes, it’s cheating. The consent is you’re given a random question and let’s see how you do under pressure to solve it. What creativity do you have? What can you remember? How do you interact with the interviewer? Memorizing the question or the patterns commonly used and being able to r…

> You’re lying and breaking the agreed upon consent.

“Consent“ is a mutual agreement. If you haven't represented to the potential employer that you haven't studied the class of common interview problems, you have not broken any “consent”. In fact, given that employer are aware of the existence of numerous platforms that exist to prep candidates by practicing the class of problems, and indeed many use one or more of those platforms as part of their hiring funnel, that you have practiced on them is probably more of the base expectation than that you have not.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#464

Post by imgabe »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #179
imgabe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies can ask whatever they want. They will ask for two weeks notice but lay you off with no notice. Who gives a fuck what companies ask for? Don’t pretend they are an authority. They’re a bunch of idiots making it up as they go along like the rest of us.

I don’t disagree with anything you said. However, if the prevailing attitude was “fuck these companies that pay me these privileged tech salaries”, we’d all be treated much worse.

It's not "fuck them", it's just don't confuse a business relationship with a social relationship. Companies don't pay high salaries because they want to be nice, they do it because the market requires it. The second the market stops requiring it, they'll stop doing it. They'll treat employees only as well as the market and the law requires, employees should do the same or they'll be taken advantage of.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#465

Post by jimmaswell »

goodpoint wrote: post #456
jimmaswell wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech is one of the biggest success stories, if not /the/ biggest, of upwardly mobile meritocracy. Anyone with an internet connection can learn what they need on their home computer and probably make it if they have the ability and time. I hate this idea that everyone who succeeds does so only or even primarily by chance and privilege. Obviously those things will help you, but everyone I know who's tried in life has s…

> Anyone with an internet connection... More like 1) Internet connection 2) [cognitive] ability 3) time Add 4) physical health and safety 5) mental health 6) a job market that would actually hire you You can imagine tossing a dice for each requirement. Is that meritocracy? > I hate how these people try to take my accomplishments away from me This is a good example of self-serving bias. "self-serving bias as a phenome…

Obviously cognitive ability is important. Not everyone can do everything. The point is whether people can realize their potential to a reasonable extent, whatever that potential is, without their initial social status being a dealbreaker. And having seen a lot of cases of people lifting themselves up with programming, I'm inclined to think it's true here.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#466

Post by victor106 »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #155

IMHO, this was not cheating. This is a phenomenon called success. If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate. They just qualify as deserving. There are serendipities that separate those who succeed from everybody else who was deserving. Survivor bias [1]. Calling Eli was your serendipity. The…

This is not cheating.

Maybe I am being too cynical but I think the author knows this too but I think he wanted to frame it this way to get more attention and indirectly promote his company

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#467

Post by selcuka »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #455
codechicago277 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only mistake the OP made was in acting like they hadn’t seen the question before, but other than that everything was fine. These code screen questions are usually a basic gut check and the real evaluation comes later at the on-site. Honestly the interviewer did a bad job though because the question clearly gives an advantage to someone who has seen it before. Once I had a candidate struggle with my screening ques…

> The only mistake the OP made was in acting like they hadn’t seen the question before This. Everyone in the thread is claiming no wrongdoing on the part of the author. If I was in this position, I would excitedly inform the interviewer that I had seen the question before and then quickly write down the answer. But that would look be a lot less impressive than OP’s acting as he pretended to come up with the perfect a…

I would have done the same, but I can't blame the author either. He did come up with the solution on his own, after all.

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#468

Post by cobalt »

542458 wrote: post #153
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 v…

> At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. I really don’t think this is true. Are there any successful programming companies who just hire whoever for development work? All the top-tier ones have settled on being extremely selective. Of course, that could be coincidence or bias… but this practice is fairly expensive, so there would be nontrivial pressu…

top tier companies are also at the top. What they do doesn't necessarily make sense for everyone else

Re: I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

#470

Post by Cheezemansam »

jimmaswell wrote: post #406
bradlys wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from a worse environment than you and have risen to a higher position. (I was making $1m/yr last year - if you want any kind of token) I still don’t think tech is a meritocracy and will continue to know that. Do not buy into this delusion. Just because you made it - meritocracy it does not make.

What's your definition of a meritocracy then? There's going to be nepotism and other unfair advantages anywhere in life, but I'm only interested in where a natural born programmer with a computer, some time after school, and not much else can end up. I think in the majority of cases this person can at least get an in somewhere, and once you have an in in tech, you'll be recognized by your team/manager if you do great…

>once you have an in in tech, you'll be recognized by your team/manager if you do great work.

It is naive to think every work environment is like this.

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