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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.
"How Would You Move Mount Fuji?"
/mnt/fuji /dev/null
mv
Free XBox, PS2
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.
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.
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
mv /mnt/fuji /dev/null
If you wanted to get the job with MS, you would have to change that to:
move "C:\Mount Fuji" C:\RECYCLEDSometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
``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."
My ph.d. isn't in CS (I don't do any programming) but I think the answer is ``shoot the hostage."
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
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.
I was at MS for a job interview and I was asked to design an in-car coffee maker. I concentrated on things like getting water & coffee to the device as well as figuring how how to make the coffee cup stay in place while brewing, device size, styling and pricing. Being an embedded guy, I was also concerned about powering the device, working with a minimal UI (probably room for just a view buttons), keeping the water from freezing in the lines, making sure it worked on inclines and getting rid of the heat generated by the brewing process.
I was *supposed* to be thinking about how I could link the coffee machine to the a wireless network so I could sync it with my WiFi alarm clock and e-mail program, said the interviewer.
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
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
I interviewed with MS once, and the interview was much more like a CS exam that I thought it would be. I completely blew the interview (I hadn't slept at all the night before because the hotel room was freezing, there was only one blanket and the bed was rock hard - so I was not at my best) It went like this:
The interview was a full day affair, with very few breaks. They said in the AM that I may or may not be finished at lunch, basically - they said that if I was a total idiot then they wouldn't waste anyone's time after lunch.
All of the interviews involved writing code on a whiteboard in various languages. The code was reviewed for syntactical correctness as well as logical.
The first interviewer was really cool - she asked me to mock-up a battleship simulation in C# and laughed at me as I did a very bleary-eyed OOP model in C# of the Game object, the Player object etc... when really what she was after was the validation logic for putting the ships on the board - ensure they are in bounds and don't hit other ships etc... to me that seemed completely worthless - I mean that just an algorithm you would work out and tweak, the important stuff is your class structure.... but I digress.
I walked out of that interview feeling pretty good until I got in the next one. It was horrible - the interviewer was very arrogant and rude and had a thick accent which made him difficult to understand. He would ask me a question, and sit and roll his eyes as I was answering and check his email - basically communicating clearly to me that he didn't like me, want me there or want to be talking to me. For a code sample, he asked me to write code in C# (on a whiteboard) that would traverse a tree of nodes and print out the values in order of all nodes at an arbitrary level. So I wrote a recursive function that would do what he wanted, and that would work just fine. He didn't like that way I had written it, and demanded that I rewrite it "more efficiently". I stood there for like 20 mins feeling like a total idiot because I couldn't figure out what he was talking about, until he got mad and said I should be using "queues" and that it would be more efficient. I had no idea what he was talking about and told him, and he came up and tried to explain that I could have used a FIFO queue - but looking at his example, I didn't understand how his approach would have been any more efficient than mine - when I asked him this, he just got angrier and said it was. Suffice to say, that interview didn't go so well. I realized as soon as I was done with him that I wasn't going to get the job, so I resolved to just have some fun and enjoy the rest of the day. As an interesting footnote, I kept thinking about the question, and a couple days later I did find a much more efficient way of doing it, but it had nothing to do with queues, and it would have been much faster than either of the methodologies we had discussed. I damn near emailed him the better solution, but figured "Whats the point?" Ah well, like I say I was not at my best.
My next interview was with a guy who asked me a different technical question involving organizational hierarchies. I was lucky in that interview because I had written a budget system for a bank that used a similar structure, so I had found a very clever solution to the exact problem he asked me. When I explained my whiteboard code, he got a "damn this guy is good" look in his eye, so I felt pretty good coming out of that one.
Next was a lunch interview, a guy who that said would be my "peer" took me to lunch and asked me a bunch of questions while I was eating. The questions he asked were ridiculous, I mean stuff straight out of the MCSD Analyzing Solutions test. Seriously, I'm pretty sure he pulled a couple test questions before our lunch interview. He would ask me something, and I would answer him with a couple ways that I had solved the problem in the real world, and then he would say "no, that's no the answer, the answer is Scalability, Maintainability, Performance and....
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
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
I would hire 20,000 temporary staff for a period of 5-15 years, without ever offering to hire them on permanently. Then, I would issue each of them a teaspoon and canoe. These would be deducted from their first paycheck of course, at full retail price. The teaspoon serves 2 functions, as a paddle for the canoe, and when they arrive at Mt Fuji, as their shovel. It is true that Mt. Fuji is made more of rock than anything resembling soil, but I expect my employees to not need a babysitter, I hired them to figure these things out. Once they have their teaspoon filled with 0.0000000000001% of Mt. Fuji, then they have to canoe back to where ever, and deliver the teaspoonful. There would then be paperwork to fill out.
On second thought, Mt. Fuji is still somewhat active, might be best to have them sign a disclaimer, in case they are lavanated.