I was interviewed for a position at Microsoft and I was asked a puzzle question. Did not answer it, but passed the interview!
Donāt forget, if you are going to ask a candidate to write some code, give them a keyboard and at least Notepad. NOT a pencil and paper. I hate it when I literally have to write out code. Thatās not how I do it on the job, and I can type a lot faster than I can write. I canāt tell you how many times Iāve had this happen.
For extra realism the test should replicate the conditions the candidate would be working in. Full development environment. If youāre hiring me for a MS shop, give me Visual Studio with all the trappings (intellisense, etc).
To continue with the juggler analogy, thatās like giving the juggler candidate paper representations of balls to demonstrate with, not the real thing. Yeah, you could juggle them, but it wouldnāt be the same.
congratulations on surviving hospital, having babies is natural, going to hospital can be fatal!
Following your recent bad apple post, I would have thought a way of assessing how the person makes people feel, letās hope your āWould your team enjoy working with this person?ā question answers this.
Microsoft used to have interviews like thatā¦ not anymore. get a life.1!!
The problem with presenting with past projects at other employers is those damn company secrecy policies
Really? Iām sorry you feel that way. I think presentation is a terrible way to interview programmers. Communication and Lexical skill while both desirable traits are sometimes mutually exclusive. In fact, I get terribly nervous around presentations, but that doesnāt mean I donāt have passion for my work. I always document my code well, and always have an eye out to be sure my programs are efficient and readable. My management reviews are always terrific. I just dislike presentation. shrug
Itās not in the employeers interest what you can do, (by the way is all crap)(because if you get interviewed by the executive, he doesnāt understand it anyway), but how cheaply you are willing to do it.
The programming skills arenāt important at all, itās your social ability and how you communicateā¦
If you even canāt concatenate two strings together thatās not so important (beacause I promise you there are a couple of people calling themselves programmers that hardly can do that).
I am non-native English speaker, tooā¦
communicating! communicating! communicating! communicating! ā¦
such like developers! developers! developers! ā¦
I always feel anxiety before using Englishā¦ Using foreign language is so difficult.
You are recycling these posts. Why do you keep talking about this Mt Fuji stuff? All the comments are the same except for the inane stuff about Minesweeper.
5 days? That sounds like something wasnāt quite right at first. Hope everyone is healthy and well now.
That must be a cultural thing.
In France, I had a boatload of job interviews (most of them unsuccessful, of course, my jobless periods happened, unsurprisingly, in crisis periods like now) and as far I as recall, I havenāt had such questions.
From time to time, I was asked some technical questions, or to find as much errors as possible in a small C program (did a good job there) or to write a small C code.
But most of the time, the job interviewers relied on resume scrutinizing, asking what I did at various periods, etc.
Now, we have a 3 months (can be extended to 6 months) period where we can be fired immediately (after this period, it takes 3 months to fire somebody), so if you are blatantly incompetent, if you had bluffed about your experience, etc., it will become obvious and out you are. A loss of time for the employer, but not so much, and I suppose most candidates are honest anyway.
how much of your favorite brand of soda is sold in this state?
I hate soda and donāt drink it. Next!
@Schmoo, thanks for letting me know about this Tim Minchen person. That was great! A lot more informative than this repetitive prattle about Mount Fuji (To put it in the modern dialect of the American teenager OMG WTF who cares?)
@WordofmouthMike: congratulations on surviving hospital, having babies is natural, going to hospital can be fatal!
The ānaturalā mortality rate of childbirth (ie, nothing is done to prevent death of the mother) is estimated to be 15,000 in every million births. In Europe and the US, the current mortality rate is 90 in every million births. A few hundred years ago, less than 50% of women survived the birth of all of their (then standard) 5 or 6 children. But hey, who needs facts when you can just add the word natural to everything? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s
One of my favorite questions to ask is Did you notice anything in particular about our facility when you came in? (not applicable for phone interviews of course). Its not a pass/fail question, but it gives a little insight into how they think. Out of the 20 or so interviewees for the last opening here, the ones that didnāt notice anything also didnāt have any programming skills; the ones that said something vague (that parking was a problem) had basic skills; but the ones that pointed out specific things (like the ashtray 50 feet after the no smoking sign) had some l33t skilz.
This is so fucking full of bullshit iām very happy i donāt work in your companyā¦ Can you make a difference between attention to useless details and ability to grasp detail when you actually NEED it. Actually, forget it, this is worse than that. I could basically say the total opposite, a lot of programmers i know donāt notice shit about this kind of things unless they actually need to, because theyāre using their mind on more important matters.
I so hate those tricky shits about how to be the best hirer anyway ā¦
@Raph, I agree. That is just pretentious drivel. The kinds of comments I see about hiring programmers are always so strange, moronic, stereotypical, and nonsensical.
The first square you click on a Windows minesweeper board is certain to be empty.
Doh! I guess I donāt get the job.
The Soda question is easy ā¦
I live and work in the UK ā¦
Soda is called either a fizzy drink or cola not Soda
There are no States in the UK
So the answer is : None
Do I get extra points for lateral thinking ā¦
@WordofmouthMike: congratulations on surviving hospital, having babies is natural, going to hospital can be fatal!
@Schmoo: The ānaturalā mortality rate of childbirth (ie, nothing is done to prevent death of the mother) is estimated to be 15,000 in every million births. In Europe and the US, the current mortality rate is 90 in every million births. A few hundred years ago, less than 50% of women survived the birth of all of their (then standard) 5 or 6 children. But hey, who needs facts when you can just add the word natural to everything?
Facts: Women are screened for possible complications for the 8-9 months leading up to the birth, have a fully trained midwife on hand with a complete portable medical kit, and you only an emergency call and a short journey away from a modern hospital (or they would recommend a hospital birth), so a home birth is once again an optionā¦
A few hundred years ago women had no screening, no medically trained midwife, no medical kit, no phone, and no access to hospitalā¦ and were often malnourished, a large number died after the birth not during it ā¦
Whoosh!