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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."
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.
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?
Thats right. A PhD in CS does not make a great programmer. A PhD trains and qualifies you to carry out research. A PhD creates knowledge instead of regurgitating it.
No, it's not arrogant at all, considering he did not solicit the interview. If a company said to me out of the blue, "We're really impressed with your skill set and would like to speak with you about a job opportunity", then ambushed me with a pop quiz when I got there, you can bet I'd be offended.
With an opener like that, my expectation would be that they already had a good handle on my skill set through a referral, my published work, or some other means. Here's a dating analogy: You see an attractive woman at a bar, and offer to buy her a drink, complementing her good looks. Then you ask if she has any photos of her relatives, because you want to be sure that if you eventually breed, your offspring won't be ugly. Wouldn't you expect a slap in the face?
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He has a record that speaks for itself. He jumped through enough hoops to get the PhD, and he erroneously believed they recognized his established experience, given that they contacted him.
/.'ers complained about somebody who had great credentials but didn't actually know anything. There are some PhD's earned their degree by being handheld by a professor and just following what he says. They may know what they researched well, but the insight needed to expand just isn't there.
And how many times have
Further, some of these technical interviews are there to identify if a person has the skills for a specific job. Somebody can have a PhD in chemical engineering and published articles on polymers, so would sound like a wonderful candidate. However, they may not fit into the specific job because they focused on polymer reaction simulation, and not on high temp polymer behavior, or understand the mechanical properties.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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
> What, you think because you have a PhD, your feces doesn't stink? Guess what -- it does.
> 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 don't suppose it occurred to you that there's more to CS than programming.
Did you give these educated people a chance to ask you some questions that require thinking like a PhD?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Actually Microsoft is testing how quickly you can come up with a solution to a problem they have presented you with.
Judging by their products, this should be a valuable skill at Microsoft.
If you were looking for a job that required long term dedication to complete a goal and the ability to coordinate many tasks at the same time in order to achieve something coherent and complete, then you would consider the ability to achieve a Phd. in Computer Science, along with the track record of the candidate.
No, Microsoft doesn't operate that way. Sell a faulty product to the customer, get a list of problems back, dole out the list to employees, put the fixes in patches, lather, rinse, repeat.
Microsoft is trying to recruit the people who come up with a quick fix, not the people who think long term. Their recruiting techniques seem to be in line with their development techniques.
If you want long term thinking, go work for IBM's mainframe division.
This particular PhD builds Air Force and financial simulations, and wrote significant portions of Solaris kernel code for Veritas VxVM.
If you were interviewing Codd for a database gig, would you grill him on manhole covers & mysql syntax?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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?
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.