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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."
They found his comments on Slashdot.
"unsolicited invitation to interview"
Sounds like Spam!
There is an entire book called "How Would You Move Mount Fuji?" about Microsoft style interviews. It even gives a list of their favorite questions, and is a must read for anyone who intends to interview there.
...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?
When was the last time the Borg asked if they could assimilate you?
internet like monkeys'
Must be one hell of a player!
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
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?
I had an interview for a co-op marketing position with Microsoft. The interview went well, I was getting along with the interviewers and we were have a good conversation, and then they asked me the last question......
"How on earth could you ever work for Microsoft, the big evil company??"
Probably the best question I've ever been asked in an interview.
posting AC....
Microsoft also displays a (surprising in my view) amount of arrogance with it's "Partner" companies. I'm a research engineer at a very large chip company and have been invited many times to internal dog and pony shows where Microsoft presents future plans and projects (such as Avalon and Indigo for Longhorn).
This assumption that everyone wants to work for Microsoft that was mentioned in the article was also very evident to me in this venue. They believe that everyone wants to use Microsoft's approaches and products, just because it is Microsoft who is backing it.
Now that may have been true in the 1995-1999 era, but it certainly isn't today, seems many of the upper management is living in the past or is shielded from reality.
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?
The son of a colleague interviewed with both Google and MS and got job offers from both companies. He took the MS job because he felt the Google folks were more arrogant than the MS folks. The Google folks were quite shocked that he turned them down.
It's only one anecdotal data point, but it does suggest a simple fact of life. Success breeds arrogance whether a company is "evil empire" or seeks to "do no evil."
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The issue has come to the fore in part because of comments made this month by internal Microsoft recruiter Gretchen Ledgard, who blasted some of her company's managers as "entitled, spoiled whiners" who assume that everyone wants to work for Microsoft.
Unfortunately typical of a company that is and/or thinks like a monopoly. There isn't very good business practice in just being arrogant (in the midst of well-known bugs in your own software especially!) and I don't think I know anyone who would want to work for a company that behaved in such a way -- not a professional image I'd want to be associated with!
Among the charges leveled at Gates, Ballmer and crew: Job candidates have been turned off by Microsoft arrogance...But he is one of many observers within and outside of Redmond who's raising questions about the way the company recruits and retains its work force
Reading the article reminded me of what I've heard about Google employees. I can't see Google leaving much room to be arrogant when they allow their employees to spend part of their work time on their own personal projects. I certainly don't hear this about Google and I think they are very good reasons why.
Of course, Microsoft, which is seeking to defend its turf in operating systems while expanding into newer areas such as desktop search, isn't alone in facing a tougher climate when it comes to competing for employees.
When you've got Desktop Search really being pioneered by Google in addition to their excellent search engine I'm sure if I was choosing a company to develop for I'd be choosing the one that was doing well from the get-go regardless of who was around longer. I'd rather go on with company that does real innovation and I'm sure that's why all these other individuals aren't signing on board.
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 know, it's not just about the money. If that's all that matters, find somewhere else. I don't want to see such people in MS.
I love working here. The people are amazing, the area is beautiful, it's easy to get excited about what you're working on, and the culture can be incredible. (more so in some places than others though - I absolutely LOVE hanging out over with the Xbox guys, cause there's always an atmosphere of fun over there)
And yes, I used to bash MS a few years back. Not anymore though.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
He didn't ask for the interview with them; they asked him to come to an interview. If somebody asks me to come for an interview, I'd damn well be pissed to have to explain to them why they asked me to come in.
Infuriate left and right
A friend of mine went to the Microsoft job fair booth with a hand-scribbled resume on notebook paper. In the "objectives" section he wrote "to get free stuff." As a joke, he gave it to them and took the available booth swag.
He got an email asking for an interview.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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.
"Ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has only been one answer to that question!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The reason I generally pass on PhDs when looking to hire. At several companies I've worked at, the SOP is to send candidates a programming test (filled with questions that are very relevant to what we do, not BS C++ idioms and quirks).
More times than not, a PhD who has applied at the company will get the test and complain loudly that they don't have time to fill the test out. Which is simply code for arrogance on their part or a lack of understanding of what is important in "the real world."
As far as quizzing onsite, the fact of the matter is that if you are good at what you do and are in it because you like it, pop quizzes are fun, not a reason to think of your employers as arrogant. When I was grilled for 7 hours at my current place of employment, the thought that was going through my head wasn't "wow, these assholes are arrogant." It was "wow, these guys are all totally brilliant. I definitely want to be surrounded by coworkers that are as smart as them." When the offer letter came, I accepted in a heartbeat.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
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
Most asses have 2 partitions. However, I once saw a monkey with 4 partitions.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
After the interview I heard back from Microsoft and was told that they wouldn't give me the job as my answer showed I wasn't prepared to back up their sales techniques. I was amazed. Basically they wanted me, as a pre-sales consultant, to lie to prospective customers about the capabilities of MS software. I've been in situations before where I've had to dig my company out of sour deals where salesmen have lied to customers about products they're buying, and it ain't nice. Too hear that MS do this shouldn't have been a suprise, but to hear it officially certainly changed my mind about working for them.
Microsoft asked a guy interview questions.
I expect he objected to the unprofessionalism. I mean it is one thing to ask an expert in a given field in, then ask him questions about how well he would fit into a given role. It is quite another to give him a generic quiz, likely written by people with much less competence than he. Asking questions is fine, but the implication of incompetence in giving a generic quiz is quite another. If a large company is that impersonal and indiscriminate when hiring, what other stupid bureaucratic procedures would an employee have to deal with? I would not walk out of a job because I am given a quiz, but I might if it was a quiz that did not really apply to the type of job I would expect to be working on.
Think of it this way. You're a nationally renowned chemist and DOW asks you to interview for a position. When you arrive they give you a test asking the atomic number of something and how you would centrifuge a sample of something. It entirely discounts your accomplishments to date. Obviously you know the basics or you would never have been able to do all you have done. It could be very insulting and good warning sign of a bureaucracy run amok.
A few weeks after telling IBM that they did not want the job, they got letters telling them that their offers had been withdrawn as they had failed to achieve 2:1's (type of British honours degree).
However, both of them had managed to get this grade of degree, just decided IBM wasn't for them. If it had happened once I would have figured it was a mistake, but twice seems to me that their personnel system can't cope with the fact that people may actually turn down a job with them, and a form letter is sent out by their bureaucracy.
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
Since your command won't work as you think it will... Try something like
/mnt/fuji /home/microsoft/building8/
mv
Wonder what happens when you move Mnt Fuji into Bill's Office....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's easy when Microsoft offers them exorbitant wages of 40 Rupees an hour!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I have a strange reaction to that question "How would you move Mt. Fuji?"
I love technical challenges - the harder the better, but the idea of moving Mt. Fuji offends me so much that I have trouble even thinking about it.
No doubt I'd fail the interview because my answer would have to be, "You shouldn't even joke about moving Mt. Fuji!"
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.
Or not so anonymously. What an Idiot I am.
I broke my pipe down to pieces (the chanter, believe it or not, is the longest segment) and put the four-reeded monster in a tote. /., so I got that goin' for me.
Ascended Fuji. I was #2 in the group to reach summit.
Assembled the instrument. Splitting headache from the ascent.
I played "Amazing Grace" and "Morag of Dunvegan" looking down into the crater.
The mountain was moved.
For 500 yen, a fellow lit off a blowtorch and stamped the foot of the chanter (a hard-plastic Dunbar-Eller) with some Kanji that say "Top of the Hill, 3220m" IIRC.
Trying to play the instrument at that elevation qualifies as full-on stupid, but WTF, it's braggin' rights on
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Memo to Bill Gates: Even you sir, cannot have your cake and eat it too.
If you insist on importing massive numbers of H1B visa applicants and paying them slave-labor wages to write code, you'll eventually reap the fruits of this policy. If you insist on outsourcing software development to third world countries just to save a few bucks on developer's salaries, you'll eventually get what's coming to you.
The IT industry as a whole has been guilty of this. All of the big players: Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, and IBM have taken part in the outsourcing craze and now they act surprised when college students don't want to study IT for fear of being outsourced.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Want cheap labor? Fine, you can have it, but after you've laid off all the highly paid US developers and decimated the IT industry, don't expect to be able to find talented individuals to manage your cutrate 3rd world development teams.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
People are easy to accuse Microsoft for their arrogance. But Google recruiters (and other companies big & small) does the same thing too. Multiple unsolicited invitations. IQ tests in the interview. I wish the recruiters would have done more work to really know the candidate rather than just resume fishing with google (like search for 'Java web services resume'!) But hack, you can politely decline or not even respond to unsolicited message if you are not interested.
Yes, the job market is heating up this year. Simply putting a resume in your home page might get you a few unsolicited recruiter spam.
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.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Who gives a crap about Microsoft.
Whats wrong with these people! Can't a man walk down the street without being offered a job?
Well, maybe it was the fact that I was in PSS... But the fact is, my interview process was atypical. They needed to hire someone fast and so it was about two weeks between when I applied and when I was hired. I only had three interviews.
And they stopped asking me weird puzzles when they asked me what sort of software development work I had done and I started talking about some of my AI experiments....
But two things: Most of the managers who interviewed me were clueless about technical fields. Again this may not be representative of Microsoft or even PSS, but perhaps just my department.
The one interview I had that was really good was an informational interview for a possible Services for UNIX support position that never materialized.
Also when I say "play politics" I mean in the sense of managers saying "Great to see you contributing to Microsoft as a whole" right up until the review and then using your contributions to other departments against you at that point (despite the fact that you met or exceeded all of your goals). My experience there was not unique, as I have heard from many other employees who have had similar things happen to them.
My contributions to Microsoft were often highly visible and well above my level (53). Yet, they actually kept me from being promoted. A few of my contributions (in supporting roles) were:
1) Introducing and championing the idea that Exchange would never compete with Sendmail because the email and groupware markets were substantially separate. This eventually lead to the addition of a POP3 server in Server 2003. Steve Wasko pushed this project through.
2) Introducing the idea that Services for UNIX should be displated at Linuxworld. Paul Cayley (sp?) agreed to provide the additional funding for more display space for this.
The above seem quite obvious, but you would be surprised...
Additionally I provided consulting time to competitive managers regarding how Linux, Samba, and other open source products would actually be used in a real environment.
There are several other ideas I pushed in the competitive circles which have not yet been implimented so I won't comment on them here except to say that the I pushed very heavily the idea of introducing telnet servers and clients into SFU which could use Kerberos to encrypt the session (OpenSSH is omitted from this product due to patent liability concerns).
The problem is that MS's interviewing problems are part of a larger unresolved issue... And I used to work at Microsoft, so it is not that I was too snobish to go through the interview process, but simply that I found it largely a waste of time.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"How would you design an in car coffee maker?"
Well.
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.
The real reason manhole covers are round reflects late 19th century manufacturing technology. In the late 19th century, casting worked fine, but the only power tools were lathes, planers, and steam hammers. Milling machines and welders were in the future.
Given that toolset, a round manhole cover is an easy thing to make - cast, chuck in lathe, finish machine in one setup. A manhole cover ring, which needs a little finish machining to clean up the inside of the ring, is also straightforward. Simple, cheap, and suitable for volume production.
Making a rectangular plate with 1890s technology is harder than making a round one. It would probably require four passes through a power planer, which is a more expensive machine than a lathe. Making a rectangular manhole frame with that toolset is really tough. You can't use a lathe to do the finish machining. It's tough to get a planer into the inside of a rectangle. You'd need a specialized planer with a long reach, and it would take at least four setups to do the job, probably eight to get into each corner from both directions. Today, you'd cut four straight sections and weld the parts together, which is how rectangular frames are made today. But that option didn't exist in 1890.
Take a look at a steam locomotive from that era. All big metal parts consist of cast surfaces, flat machined surfaces, circular machined surface. Anything else was really difficult to make.
Of course he was upset. The overhead for recursive functions is many times more than that for implimenting queues. From this page covering what you should have remembered from basic computer science, we find that "Every time a method is called, all of the local variables, registers, and method parameters must be pushed on the call stack. This can make recursion very time consuming since recursion usually adds a lot of method calls."
However, had you recalled Breadth-First-Search, you'd realize that with a queue you could traverse the the tree one level at a time, starting with the root and adding all children found on each level. This explicitly stores in queue the information you implicitly programmed in the recursion. It requires more thinking, but it saves the costly recursive calls, which can pile up very quickly if you're searching an unbalanced tree. You were lazy and neglected algorithmic analysis for the easy recursive solution and got rightly burned for it. This may have happened because you were tired, and that's certainly understandable, but this is early CS/basic algorithms material, and if I was your interviewer I'd also be concerned (but less of a dick about it).
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.
Thanks. I am getting sick of this simplistic urban legend. But I think there's more to it.
When you design a cast metal part, you have to make sure the molten metal will reach all the corners. The easiest thing to cast is a sphere; the hardest is something with thin parts sticking off. It's probably easier to cast round manhole covers with a lower reject rate.
Also, sewer and storm drain manholes are generally shaped like big bottles. A skinny neck to enter through, and a large body to work inside. Given a round neck, wouldn't it be awkward to attach a square frame? (Power and phone manholes are usually rectangular, with short round necks supporting the mh cover frame.)
And also, a precast manhole may be installed at an angle to the center line of a street. The round cover disguises this, but a square cover would look odd if rotated from the CL.
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
nt
You are not the only one getting a bit sick of this,
Here in the UK manhole covers are no longer round.
They are square and split diagonally. Yes they can fall down the manhole, although the two halfs are loosely bolted together and Yes they are a real bugger to get back out again.
I know I have built enough sewer lines. The round neck is usually covered in a flat slab with a square hole in it. On that, between 2 and 4 courses of bricks are laid and then the frame is cemented on, into which goes the cover.
The cover slab can generally be twisted enough to line everything up with the kerb so as not to look too odd. Generyll speaking the most important thing about cover placement in a road is to avoid placing the cover directly under the tyres of most cars. So they will normally try to place them in the middle of the lane. This reduces the amount of impact damage the manhole sustains and probably avoids vehicles slipping on the metal covers.
Watch me build my house
If you have a square manhole cover, you can turn it 45 degrees on a vertical axis and drop it in the manhole.
If you have a circular manhole cover, you cannot get it in there. So you never have to send people down to retrieve manhole covers and/or workers with cracked skulls.
Really, people.