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Microsoft's Personnel Puzzle
theodp writes "CNET reports on Microsoft's reputation for arrogance in its personnel practices, citing the experience of Arthur Sorkin, who responded to an unsolicited invitation to interview with MS back in 2000. But instead of trying to sell him on the company or the job, interviewers challenged him with a technical 'pop quiz.' Sorkin, who holds a PhD in CS, withdrew his application. During the past year, Microsoft called Sorkin to say it had scheduled a phone interview with him for another job, although Sorkin hadn't applied for it and no one had asked if he was interested."
Don't bother. The interview has changed substantially since that book was written, and you won't be prepared if you expect all those odd brainteasers and "abstract reasoning" questions or whatever they heck they were. You won't get asked how to move Mt. Fuji, why manhole covers are round, or any of those other things anymore. You might get some puzzles - both work related and non-work related - but nothing like before.
Instead, be prepared to talk about past experiences and how you've handled various job situations. Behavioral interviewing. That's where it is now.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Their phone interview process was a good mix of explaining what it is they were doing and how I could help, and making sure that I was the right mix of skills and cleverness to fit in with the group.
I passed that round, and was invited to Redmond to interview in person. I found the whole on-site interview process to be a lot of fun -- I'd heard that the interview process was gruelling, painful, challenging, etc... but I thought it was fun. And shortly thereafter, they offered me the position.
Fully half the time I've spent talking to Microsoft has been on the topic of what they have to offer me, and it was considerable.
In the end, I decided not to relocate to Redmond, mainly because I wanted to finish up my BS (three semesters to go at the time, now one more), which I'd been working on part time for eight years, while working as a software engineer.
So I guess in the end, if you don't enjoy that kind of interview, maybe you're not really qualified, despite your education. There are plenty of places where all the cleverness in the world is worthless, but the skills required to earn that PhD are essential (I can't imagine working in an evironment like that... but hey, each unto their own).
Personally, I found the whole experience to be very positive, and if after I finish my BS, the PhD doesn't work out, I might be taking that permanent trip to Redmond after all.
-brian
Considering that PhD's are overqualified to teach CS 101, asking those types of questions are a straight insult.
Why take it as an insult? Perhaps the interviewer is forced to ask the question regardless of the candidate. It could also just be a test of arrogance, sometimes in the real world you're asked to do jobs that you might consider beneath you. Don't think a manager wants an employee that says "PhD's don't fill out TPS reports"
Besides if it's an easy question just answer and move on.
Morons do not get PhD's.
No, but people with no practical knowledge sometimes do. At least in physical sciences you can spend your graduate career focused on theory and similuation, without any actual hands-on experimentation. I'm assuming CS might have something similar where stuff is just described on paper with no actual coding done.
And no hand holding will get you that far.
There are some PhD's who just do what their professor tells them, that's what I mean by hand holding. Doesn't mean the person getting the degree is stupid, they've just never had to think creatively.
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Are you kidding?
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I'm a former Microsoft manager who has participated in over 200 interviews. I was also interviewed myself on several job moves within the company, and have been grilled by more than 75 interviewers who wanted to know what my skillset was. So I have a great deal of first-hand experience that I thought someone might find useful.
I won't defend the Microsoft interview practices, but I won't condemn them either. There are two huge benefits to this style of interviewing. First and foremost, it weeds out people with great resumes but who have made no real contribution to any kind of project, whether it was a school project or work project. I once had a guy hand me a diskette during an interview and he told me that it was some code that he worked on. I asked him where he had downloaded the code from, because I had no way of knowing if he wrote it himself or if he had just copied someone's work. I can put together a sweet portfolio of code in 15 minutes with Google. Microsoft wants people who can produce, and anyone who starts out every sentence by saying "Theoretically, it's possible..." is screwed.
The other big advantage to the Microsoft style of interviewing is that people who don't come from the "great institutions" of the world like MIT get a fair shot at a job. I went to a small, liberal arts college and my resume wasn't very impressive. But I had a key skill that they needed, I came in as a contractor, and within 6 weeks I had a full-time job with the company. I had a great 7 year run that I probably wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
But the system has it's downsides as well. One problem is that the interview system is applied universally across the company, and there are just some jobs that don't require deep technical thinking. It's inappropriate, for example, to use this technique on people who are primarily going to test software for a living. In fact, you want people who are more like "regular people" than programmers to test the code because then you'll get a better cross-section of the population involved in testing. I never respected a tester who told me that my program was broken because of some technical bug, but I sure listened if there were issues of usability involved.
Another problem with the interview system at Microsoft is that it's applied to internal candidates as well as external candidates, so your work history counts for very little when moving within the company. After a relatively long career in the company and getting sick of the group that I was in, I made one last attempt to change jobs. But I didn't have the heart to go through the long, arduous interview loops, so my heart wasn't in it. I really wanted to leave the company anyway and had a good excuse to do it, but there was nothing pulling me back in. After investing heavily in me as an employee who had gotten postive reviews throughout his career, I left Microsoft without anyone trying to convince me to stay.
One premise of this article is that Microsoft is arrogant. I agree that some individuals in the company are arrogant, and that some people use the interview process to prove that they are better than others, but as a whole I do not believe this to be true. I've personally dismissed people after the first interview because they just weren't going to cut it. Yes, that's judgmental, but it's also a very good business practice. Let's face it, even open source project discriminate based on ability.
I've saved my harshed criticism of Microsoft for last. In "the good old days", the interview bar was held high so that only "the brightest and the best" would be hired. In the late 90's (the dot com boom), the bar was lowered considerably so that we could get in enough bodies to do the work. But as a friend of mine likes to say "A pe