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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."
...but, isn't it arrogant of him to think himself above any kind of proficiency test? Does he think he's perfect and should be hired with no showing of his actual ability?
If somebody is sending you an unsolicited invitation for a job, then yes, you are above a profiency test. They invited you. Their goal should be to get you to take the job they are offering you.
There's a difference between you asking them for a job and them asking you if you want a job.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Well... I guess the fact that they quizzed him does not supprise me. I mean, any company of that size and public exposure will want to ensure high standards by screening even the most promissing and highly reffered applicants. The fact that they contacted him, does not mean they should not run him through this screening.
What is sucky about this is the fact that they scheduled him for an interview after he withdrew the application. That seems kindoff fishy, and I would not want a prospective employer retain and reuse my info this way after I told them to suck it.
I'm teminally incoherent
This should be Bad News for Microsoft, because in the end, any software product is first and foremost a reflection of what's in the mind of the developer. If you're hiring 2nd tier minds, you get 2nd tier software.
Even if a product is so big that one person can't understand it, you can still understand what you're working on.
This remind me of the "Joel on Software" article about python. Better software developers stay up-to-date because they want to. Lesser software develoeprs stay up-to-date because they have to.
Why would working at Microsoft be interesting, unless you're political?
When I worked for a particular company, we instituted a "programmer intelligence test". It didn't test nonsense like "Define Polymorphism", it had questions where they actually had to think like a programmer. I found that the more educated the person, the worse they did on the test! I had a number of PhD's get all affronted when faced when having to soil their precious fingers with actually proving they could think, rather than regurgitate the stuff they learned in college. My theory is that the really good programmers tended to want to get out into the world and learn practical knowledge, while the less proficient ones continued on to get "educated".
(Example question, since I know you're curious: You have triple redundant storage of certain critical data. Write a subroutine that takes three 32 bit integers and produces a result where each bit is "voted on" by the corresponding bit in the three inputs. This question is designed to see if someone can think in terms of bits. One fool actually wrote, "First convert input to binary")
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I had a friend who had a perfect quote for this sort of thing. "The left hand doesn't know which foot the right is shooting." It's an IPC failure. A "recruitment process" is designed to find good people. These are then handed off to a "hiring process", which begins with an "interview process". Unfortunately, the "interview process" recieves input from both recruitment *and* people walking in off the street. It's geared for weeding out the in-off-the-street group until all that's left is good people. That process doesn't know to act differently when fed a diet of people who are already known to be qualified, but aren't as desparate for a job as the street crowd.
It looks funny from the outside, because even though we know better, it's easy to think of any large organization (i.e., Microsoft) as a single entity, when it's actually a group of individuals flying in loose formation, each doing what they percieve to be their job. Sometimes two people's jobs in such an organization will run to cross-purposes.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
I'd feel better about it if I trusted the proficiency test.
Tests are a very rough measure of your skill. They're used to broadly separate candidates into maybe-acceptable and useless. You wouldn't make your decision based on it. You have to interview the person, and you can tell better from that than from the test whether he's any good or not. The tests are good only to weed out the obviously unacceptable candidates before you schedule an interview.
I've taken some of these, and sometimes they're an insult; they ask about easily-looked-up trivia. And there's a difference between solving problems and answering riddles. I don't much care for tests that are nominally testing my "lateral thinking", because I hate the idea of losing a job because I didn't get the joke.
Without seeing what this test looked like I can't support or condemn the guy. But let's just say that for some tests, yeah, I'd consider myself above it. Especially if I was invited.
You watch. They're going to start handing out tonnes of free development software to get people re-interested in developing for Windows. With web apps all the rage, who needs 95% of the market with desktop apps when you can develop with PHP, Rails or other open source tools and get 100% of the market with web apps?
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I'm sorry, but why should M$ or any company have to sell the job to a prospective candidate?
Because they cold-called him and invited him for an interview. Implication: "We know you're qualified, and we really want you to work for us."
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Having worked at Microsoft..... I am usually one of the first people to correct unreasonable attacks on them here at Slashdot.
However.... Microsoft IMO has a big problem. On one hand they keep saying that they want "out of the box thinkers" and on the other hand, they want a fair degree of conformity regarding playing politic, etc. So these pop quizes (which are often anything but technical) are just a way to pretend to satisfy the first demand while really satisfying the former.
Out of all the interviews I had, I only had one that was technically worth *anything.* In no other case did I feel like I could really have an intelligent technical conversation with the interviewer. So yes, I think that their interview skills need some work.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Because they want the candidate.
A company should try to sell itself to anyone they see as worth interviewing. The employee usually has the option to reject a job. Either they are already employed or they will have other offers.
If the candidate turns them down, they've lost that person possibly for good, which means they're missing out on the money they would have made from him.
Dude. You always fill out an application for a job, EVEN if invited for it. Its HR paperwork. He withdrew his "application" from the HR process after he decided he didn't want the offered job. He didn't send them a resume hoping for a job.
Have you never actually had a job before? I've had jobs handed to me, and then had to go through the whole process of being "interviewed", background check, tons of paperwork, etc. Large corporations have to show they hired fairly, hence even when a job is specifically for you, you still have to be chosen acceptable for the job by the HR folks.
Because the job market isn't tight. I recently got voluntary severance. I'd say 1/3 of the companies I applied to wanted to interview me, and I got cold contacted based on my resume several times. I found a job paying 15% more in under a month of searching. Unless you're coming straight out of college, or believe that HTML is programming, the job market is currently very good.
Even if it was poor, the company would need to sell itself to me. Thats what the interview process is for- for both sides to sell themselves. I need to convince the other company that they want me. They need to convince me that I will enjoy working there. If we don't both convince the other, we each try again.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Q: "How would you move mount Fuji"?
A: "First, I'd question the business case for moving mount Fuji."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I recognize that this question should demonstrate your creative problem solving, but it seems to me that 9 times out of 10, a lot of technical "problems" out there are created by extremely stupid business requirements wich all too often come from extremely stupid business people. It's amazing sometimes how speaking to them in thier own insipid psudo-language (especially in front of thier peers) can slap them into reality. Granted, they won't stay in reality long, but the fresh air and change of scenery can do them some good with repeated visits:)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
One of my friends worked for Google, and he told me their stories. We both worked for Microsoft. Google is FAR more arrogant. Among other things, they decided to open a branch in India because they've "exhausted the talent supply in the United States." This is all the more remarkable because they only have a few thousand employees, only a few hundred in NYC. Apparently they've got all 300 or so good programmers in NYC. That certainly came as a shock to me, especially considering that most other places in NYC pay MUCH more than Google does. Perhaps they've exhausted the supply of talented people willing to work for half the industry standard wage?
In any case, arrogance breeds downfall, soon enough. Most of the Microserfs I met were not terribly arrogant, not moreso than your average techie at least. Though Google loving seems to be the order of the day, I'm not such a fan. A company valued at 100x earnings that thinks it vomits sunshine, well, granny's pension fund is going to lose some money.
If there's a more striking ancodote than this about the difference between a competent engineer's view of the world and Microsoft's, I've yet to read it.
It's all here. Mr AC, obvously a thoughtful and experienced engineer, thinks about good design from the ground up, making sure the subsystems are modular and robust and that the entire device is practical. The Microsoft interviewer doesn't give a toss about whether it's stable or not - just whether it has connectivity enough to sync with Outlook.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Were you interviewing for a developer or a program manager (PM) position? If you were getting interviewed for a PM, then your answer was inappropriate for that position. PMs are supposed to design features on an item and how to intergrate it with other things to "add value". If you were interviewing for a developer position then I think the answer you gave was spot on. In that case you had a shoddy interviewer who should not have been on the developer interview loop.
Who gives a crap about Microsoft.
You must be joking. The old Italian Job was a classic, the new one is utter garbage. Not a seeming redeeming aspect. For another shitty remake, see the War of the Worlds. The sooner Spielburg is ousted as the overrated hack he is, the better.
This is a tricky question, and I think both the candidate and you missed the key. The key is design. You have to elicit the requirements from the interviewer and design around them.
Talking about WIFI at the end is just a way of saying, "you forgot to ask me what I want."
This question tests whether you realize that design must be responsive to requirements. Most geeks don't.
I feel compelled to counterbalance the slew of disconcerting responses by pointing out that some companies hold their employees to a code of ethics.
We have in our employee handbook clear ethical codes of conduct that include treating our customers in a fair and honest manner. After all, no one wants to feel they were screwed over. This is especially true for companies that actually rely on customers to renew lucrative maintenance contracts and application upgrades on the account of positive experiences.
Having said that, even if your company expected all of you to be honest, disputing your fellow salesperson during their presentation smacks of poor judgement on your part, and a lack of professionalism on the part of your company. By professionalism, I mean the entire briefing should be smoothly run, yet deliver correct information. It is important that the presenter is in control, so establish protocols to interrupt so the salesperson can elect when to pause to speak with you, if it can't wait to the end.
1. Have Japanese government name a much small mountian, Mt. Fuji.
2. Move that mountain.
3. Declare that you have moved Mt. Fuji.
4. Charge everyone as if you have moved the bigger mountain.
How would you move Mount Fugi?
By realising the truth. The mountain moves, as does the world it stands on.
There is no spoon.
He'd already stated his problem to be solved - an in-car coffee maker. So the candidate is expected to treat his customer as an idiot and grill him for hidden / forgotten / unstated requirements? If he did that with every question the interview would take a week and he'd look like a pedantic lawyer more than anything else.
No, I think the candidate got it right - if they want a more specific answer, then they need to ask a better question.
Windows Server 2003 is a bloated, unmitigated piece of shit. It's nearly impossible to use because you can't find anything in the hundreds of services, management consoles, menus and dialog boxes, ALL of which have some kind of effect on each other.
It needs to be shrunk about fifty percent to be usable. That would put it somewhere around Linux which is at least comprehensible.
And it's unreliable - it screws up even in an college training lab doing canned exercises. And when it screws up, you can't possibly find out why or where, so a reboot is the only thing that might shake it loose - until the next time - which will be within a few days at most.
And Longhorn promises to be even worse.
More desktop apps for Linux? How many does the average end user actually use? Almost everything the average user is likely to use is already included. How much would the equivalent software COST on Windows? Ten grand? Twenty grand?
What IS needed is more enterprise level apps - which is no problem since the Java tools to build same are becoming available from dozens of open source projects.
RAD tools? RAD tools lead to crap software because design takes a back end to "get the shit out the door". This is WHY Windows is crap - their design practices (and hiring practices which is the point of the discussion) are crap. RealBASIC? Gimme a break. I don't how much you twist and pull BASIC, it's a crap language not intended for serious development work.
Stop cashing those Microsoft propaganda checks and get a clue.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!