That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
ochagavia.nl146 points by wofo 9 days ago
146 points by wofo 9 days ago
A friend told me about his AWS interview experience. It was a case study describing a potential client, their needs, limitations, etc - trying to be “realistic”.
In the end it came down to either pressuring the client to embark on a complex cloud transition in time for a major sports event (that was a make or break event for the customer) or, as my friend recommended, start with a PoC but do the risky transition after the sporting event to minimize the potential for a catastrophic failure if things didn’t go to plan.
He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
My takeaway was that interviews are a game with their own rules, and you have to play by those rules - demonstrating some sense of judgement outside the parameters of the game will not be tolerated.
> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture.
IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer, the process is working as intended and I'd assume he found a job that better matched him somewhere else, where his mindset will be better valued.
I've too many wacky interview stories to list here, but the first time I came to this same conclusion was when I had an interviewer interrupt me mid-answer to correct my pronunciation of "idempotent" (because I said it in what is apparently a more British fashion). I asked him to repeat himself to see if he'd apologize or brush it off as a tic and he repeated himself with an elevated level of contempt. I declined the offer, that company got bought by McKinsey a year later, and everybody lived happily ever after.
A long time ago, maybe 2016, I interviewed at Paperless Post. The interviewer asked me explain the concept of a promise in javascript, then asked me to implement it from scratch, then asked me to extend it with different features like promise.all.
About 45 minutes into doing this I decided that any company that screened candidate like this was not somewhere I wanted to work so I told the interviewer that I didn't think this was the right fit and I appreciated them taking the time to consider me for the role but I wouldn't be continuing on.
I'll never forget he was like, "But you're doing great!" ... like yes, I know. I'm not stopping because I'm failing, I'm stopping because you are.
I had an interviewer once interrupt me and say that there was no way I could remember the techincal details of a 10 year old project I was the architect for, thus any details I did offer would likely be lies. Needless to say, I didn't get an offer nor would I have accepted it.
I had an interviewer once interrupt me and say there was no way I would have studied gray codes in college. I still don't know if that was some bias that I went to a "provincial school" in their mind or that they hadn't noticed my Master's degree or that my degree program also involved a lot of hardware and electronics work or just that they didn't study it in college and were secretly telling me how useless their fancy "West Coast Ivy" degree program was for them.
I made the mistake of letting that company bring me back for a second "less technical" round of interviews, but I shouldn't have.
> IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer
Which is why I never lie in interviews. If I don't make your cut, I might be dodging a bullet.
Yes, strongly agree with this.
The goal when interviewing is not "get the job", it's "am I a good fit for this role".
If the company is some weird dysfunctional hierarchy run by socio-paths, I'll be happier elsewhere.
Or to put things in a much more pretentious manner - If you're too stupid to appreciate my genius, you don't deserve to work with me :)
Unfortunately most people have a problem with starvation and homelessness, you'd almost swear they're allergic to those things.
The only goal of an interview for the interviewee is to get as much money as possible. If they're offering really good money, you need to pass whatever obstacles they have. If they're not, why are you there?
Money is a factor, but not the only one, and for some, not the most important one. Beyond a certain point, there are diminishing returns. Does driving a car that costs twice as much make you twice as happy? Maybe for the first month, then it's just normal again.
For me personally, quality of life is important, so is vibing with my coworkers, and management that respects work-life balance. I have this at my current job. My salary is good, not amazing but comfortable. Would I trade double the salary for an environment where I'm stressed, expected to work 50 hour weeks, and answer calls on my own time? Nah. No way.
I have kind of the same personal experience - a couple of days answering questions about the scalability and resilience of a fictional web app and enterprise integrations.
I’m very much a generalist and kept to standards and terms not specific to AWS infra. They ”passed” me but wanted a follow-up after going through some training packages to make sure I could translate everything to AWS.
At the time I was leaving a bigger software company , largely because I felt we completely locked down customers in solutions perhaps not in their best interest - so this put me off.
I realized AWS would be just the same, just on a different level.
And of course this makes sense - they want to sell their stuff!
I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.
> I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.
While this resonates with me and probably the majority of the HN readership, I also want to be paid (handsomely) to build things. But in every case where someone pays me to build things, they want to sell it to someone (if they haven’t already sold it before I built it).
I think the important difference is whether you believe the thing you’re building is good for the people that are buying it. Never have I ever seen vendor lock-in become a net benefit for those who have found themselves in its grasp.
Well, if you work in an enterprise setting, and if this setting is just right, you can get paid well to build a lot of interesting things, and have all the choices in how to build.
Certainly not every enterprise setting is like this, but they do exist, or the setting can even be created if just enough people of the right stuff end up together.
> My takeaway was that interviews are a game with their own rules, and you have to play by those rules
But you don't get to know the rules.
And when you break the rules, you get absolutely no feedback. You don't even know if you break the rules, or you were just beat by a candidate the interviewers preferred. I had to go through the process last year and hated almost every microsecond of it, except my interview with the place that actually hired me.
Back in the 90s, looking for a job wasn't so bad. Now it's a nightmare.
If you consider getting hired despite value mismatch winning the interview game, then good judgement would be recognizing that you're expected to push the products aggressively even when it's bad for the client.
I can see both sides but it depends on the position. Was he interviewing for something like a Sales Engineer role or strictly a technical role? If you're doing Sales Engineering or going for a Solution Architect on a PS team then sales is part of the role. If it's strictly a technical role that is not a part of the selling process then it doesn't make much sense to me.
/edit: now that i think about it, they may prefer a sales mindset in all roles which i can also understand
> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
This is hearsay, and smells like bullshit to me. I've given dozens of interviews during my tenure at AWS (in which I had a sales-adjacent role) and we never made a decision based on that. Plus, we'd never give that kind of feedback to a candidate.
Interviews at Amazon are highly structured and there's a Bar Raiser assigned to oversee every one of them to make sure they follow the rules during the debrief. The BR, who is usually not even on the same team or organization that's hiring, would not have allowed this to be the cause for rejection. It's far more likely the candidate was reported weak on one or more of the Leadership Principles evaluation sessions.
> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
1) Is this word for word what they told him?
2) If so, why did he believe them?
These are good questions to ask.
1) I rarely get any feedback, particularly not feedback as detailed as this, with a single reason for failure 2) Employers habitually bend the truth around interviews: interviewing for jobs that don't exist, that are already filled, reneging offers 3) Not being hired after an interview doesn't mean you failed it. They're more like dates than exams.
I actually don't think it's good to ask for feedback. Mainly for the reason you said here:
> They're more like dates than exams
It's much better to look at your own performance critically than to trust the feedback you get. Because the feedback you get (if you get any at all) is unlikely to be that useful or that trustworthy.
Plot twist: the interviewer despises the internal culture and did this as a way to send a signal that the interviewee shouldn't work there regardless of how well the interview went.
One thing I've taken away in my career, interviewing every 3-5 years is that difficulty of interview & difficulty of job are uncorrelated. Often they are inversely correlated.
Possible reasons.. Sometimes a team is growing so fast / or turnover is so high / everyone is so busy / etc that they cannot really stand up a proper interview process .. and/or they just need to get people into seats, and are happy to fire fast later.
Sometimes a job is so boring and team leads have so much time on their hands that they can construct immaculate interview processes and spend hours grilling candidates.
> difficulty of interview & difficulty of job
Define "difficulty of job"
I'm going to assume you mean "people problems;" because the best way a team avoids people problems is by interviewing very, very carefully.
You avoid people problems by interviewing soft skills as soft skills, not building elaborate mazes of "technical interviews" that are really soft skill interviews testing how pedantic you want to be or how much you want candidates to sweat in soft skill-dominant conditions that don't resemble your job that you are hiring for.
Once long ago when I interviewed at Apple I was asked the classic "fork in the road, two guys, one always tells the truth and one always lies" riddle, with complete earnestness as far as I could tell. Possibly the single worst interview question I've ever been asked.
Of course I told the interviewer I'd heard it before and then gave the correct answer. In my case we just ended up chatting about previous experience instead of doing another brainteaser and I ultimately passed the interview, I think. But afterward the recruiter strung me along for weeks telling me they wanted to make an offer but not giving me one, and I ended up going to Microsoft instead.
Not the worst interview experience I've had, though. That would be the time I interviewed for a full time position after an internship and a group of guys who knew me and had worked with me all summer asked me a pointless brainteaser as the only interview question. I crashed and burned for a full 40 minutes in front of them. Humiliating, and pretty much a pointless hazing ritual as they offered me the job anyway. Luckily I got a better offer and was able to turn them down.
Here are some other brainteasers I've been asked in interviews. I actually think these physics based ones are fun (probably because I had no trouble solving them), but they're still terrible interview questions:
You're in a boat on a lake with a bowling ball. After you drop the ball overboard and it sinks to the bottom, is the lake water level higher or lower or the same?
Three balls are on three downward sloping tracks. One track is a straight line down to the end, the second is the same except for a small hill in the middle, and the third is the same except instead of a hill it has a small dip. All tracks start at the same height and end at the same height and cover the same horizontal distance. The balls are released at the same time and roll to the end without leaving their tracks. Which one gets there first?
This reminds me of the weirdest interview I ever had (boutique software agency, maybe 30 devs).
I walk in, and the CEO's secretary hands me an IQ test and says I have one hour. I do the test, then I meet the CEO and we chat about general topics while she grades the test nearby. Then she announces my IQ, and the CEO says "hmm, yes, that's above the minimum I'd consider for a developer." Then for the last few minutes he goes through the 2-3 questions I got wrong and asks me to explain why I gave the answer I did.
That was the first and only interview, and about six weeks later they call me back in and the CEO made an offer. I reply that I'll need a few days to consider. CEO: "What? Why??"
I interviewed at IBM back in the mid-90s right out of college for "Internet consultant". I was given an aptitude test and the hiring manager said that I scored one of the highest he had ever seen. He then proceeded to not give me the job because I didn't have enough experience, which is something they already knew before making me jump through hoops. It was so dumb, but it pretty much exemplifies IBM-thinking.
At least he didnt came out with a measuring tape and tried to measure your skull.
That's silly! Everybody knows it's the shape that shows the intelligence, not the circumference!
Thats a particular type of insane that might have been fun to take the offer
This can't have been recent. Or perhaps it was and they violated the law. A standard IQ test is probably quite good at assessing if you'll be good at a programming job but it is also quite illegal unless it has passed through a battery of compliance paperwork - which it actually cannot pass because it would require the output of IQ tests to be race-equal and they cannot be both an IQ test and race-equal. This is literally a Title VII violation.
I'm a broken record about this, but no, it's not illegal to administer IQ tests in white-collar employment, and it doesn't take a battery of compliance paperwork to do so. This is an Internet myth.
Not only Internet. It's held view among risk-management-heavy enterprises, some of which might even insist, beyond the claim in this thread, that "any anbility assessment is illegal". To be fair, maybe someone in HR read it on Facebook or LinkedIn, showed risk management a (doesn't have to be real) legal risk they could head off. So they ban people evals, even for skilled trades.
Not even brain teasers or IQ. Just: can applicant FizzBuzz? Verboten!
This is how, in a mass job application world, enterprises end up with >80% of coders, all making 6 figures, that can't FizzBuzz.
A hack to get the enterprise to assess is find the third party SWE test providers to big brand logos the board recognize, brands under the same risk governance / regulatory regimes, and ask "what do we know they don't?" First, the board know and respect those brands. Second, the question makes the board consider what they think about those in charge of the failing capabilities internally. This is something now both easy for the board to discuss, and obviously done by good references. Ok, let's try empirical evals.
Countless such broken record warranting beliefs clanging around 100k employee enterprises. McKinsey, BCG, PWC, KPMG -- all they need to do to justify 8 figure bill for the year is undo any one of them.
I can believe that. When we (devs) implemented an interactive design/coding screening questionnaire, we had an uphill battle to get HR to approve us giving it to candidates. Apparently, the company had an internal rule of "No tests." We got past it by convincing them that it didn't have pass/fail criteria: it was an evaluation of their thought process and programming ability.
Well, you and rahimnathwani up there have convinced me. Now I have to go around and deprogram everyone I said this to...
It's a really widespread myth, hard to fault anybody for believing it. There's even a kernel of truth to it (Griggs).
Would you mind helping me understand what degree the truth is? More here about my confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171999
"illegal unless it has passed through a battery of compliance paperwork"
"This is literally a Title VII violation."
Griggs v. Duke Power Co. held that "The [Civil Rights] Act [of 1964] does not preclude the use of testing or measuring procedures, but it does proscribe giving them controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance."
Why do you believe that prior documentation is required, and that the absence of such documentation would make the testing illegal?
> Why do you believe that ...
Check his blog and find out. I particularly enjoyed the part where the best way to improve public transport is to keep poor people out, not to increase frequency.
Is there a specific page on his blog that answers my question?
His suggestions for improving public transport are not relevant to this discussion.
You might alternatively prefer the ones about how health insurance never denies care, Luigi Mangione was a bad guy, or Democrats have made it profitable to be a victim.
Wow, I am entirely wrong here, huh? I thought that "demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance" was held to the standard that it had to be proven fair (and consequently documented to have proven job impact).
EDIT: Hang on, I decided to just test the idea with the usual suspects and I don't see how you could design this in a way that works. You'd need some kind of non-contaminated testable outcome - lines of code etc. don't work - that is considered job performance which is scientifically validated in order to be able to survive the litigation that would follow the test.
I suppose the part that was wrong was that I claimed you can't run an IQ test. That's not true. You can. It just legally exposes you to a paperwork burden involving proof that it is required for job functionality - proof which you'll almost certainly fail because software engineer productivity isn't mechanically solved yet.
Is that the distinction? Listen, I've read your stuff and generally trust you and in any case I'm open to having my mind changed on this subject, but it seems like the actual thing is "Possible, but if you do it, you're going to find yourself in a massive paperwork and legal headache".
Several (not many relative to the total industry, but several) large household-name companies publicly do general cognitive testing for white collar roles, and the companies that administer these tests have logo crawls just like any SAAS company of their clients. These companies have enormously deep pockets and would be juicy targets for employment law practices. But nothing happens, because this is mostly not a real thing.
The reason more companies don't do this is that the tests don't work well for this purpose.
It seems to be quite accurate that many of these tests are publicly referenced. e.g. (PDF warning) https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/careers/documents/assessment-proce...
and the provider is https://www.shl.com/
I took the practice test to completion that PWC recommends and just to give people an idea of these cognitive tests. It was a series of questions that went:
> Which statement describes you best?
> 1. I usually make decisions only after I have collected all relevant information.
> 2. I usually think of all factors when I am trying to understand a business issue.
> 3. I change my interaction style based on the personality of whom I am speaking to.
With a warning when you "go too fast". The test is supposed to take 16 minutes but finishes quite fast. I must imagine that these cannot be the only category. It also wasn't even clear how someone takes one of these to practice since it's impossible to get 'better' on them. There is no evaluation provided at the end. So one must conclude that 'practice' involves 'gaining familiarity with the testing system'.
Presumably the psychometric tests are wordsum, shape rotation, something numeric, but I couldn't find one for free to look at without applying so I'm content to just accept that it exists and move on with my life.
I am positive that I have answered exactly this set of questions as part of a screening test to be allowed to take a Management Certificate course about 15 years ago.
Haha, they aren’t what I’d call an IQ test. More like a personality quiz perhaps. Did you also do a more IQ-like test that tested cognitive ability rather than evaluated inclination?
Your last statement is closer to the real situation, but you make it sound like it's certain that you will be called upon to defend the legality of your actions.
But I'm not aware of any evidence showing that is true.
And, even if it were true in the past, it seems that the DOJ believes that was based on a misinterpretation of the law. So it is less likely be true since June 2026: https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1444871/dl
Got it, thanks. That's helpful.
I can add that the original anecdote here wasn't in the US. It happened to me in Japan, I think in 2009.
(The CEO doing the testing wasn't Japanese though - maybe Russian at a guess.)
Here a few additional teasers,
- How many golf balls fit into the plane
- How many gas stations exist in country (or alternative version with city)
- How many turns do you have to go on a gum machine until colour comes out?
Naturally they all evaluate properly the skills required for the job, and other professions get asked the same kind of stupid questions.
Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are unemployed and every opportunity counts, that is usually where the interview ends for me.
Oh yeah the estimation problems are terrible. The probability ones are at least notionally trying to test your math skills. But still pretty far from being relevant in almost all cases.
Having had to estimate peak user traffic patterns, bandwidth usage, etc. for continent-scale services, Fermi estimation questions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem) are excellent questions for people working at the largest scales. Even if the guessed inputs or formula for the estimate are imperfect, being able to bang out an approximate formula that can brought out for discussion with peers and refined into something that can be agreed upon as a target is extremely valuable. It's not a useful skill for everyone but for those aspiring to be more than a mere coder, it's worth knowing.
Years ago, I read a book titled How Would You Move Mount Fuji? [0] about the cult of Fermi Questions [1]. These are questions where you're looking for an order of magnitude. The cult of Fermi Questions in Silicon Valley started with William Shockley [2] using them in interviews. Several of his smart dudes quit to start companies you may have heard of like Intel, AMD & Fairchild [3].
Notes:
0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316778494
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem And not the question Where are they? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Same guy. At the same Los Alamos.
2 - You know, the guy who got a Nobel Prize for inventing transistors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
Not everyone dreams to found the next unicorn, real life for most of us isn't the Silicon Valley TV series.
Just like not every cook wants to be a Michelin star with molecular cuisine, a tiny food drop in the middle of a gigantic plate.
I think those questions are good ways to assess open mindedness, estimation, and verbal communication skills.
There are other ways to assess those skills, sure. But questions like that aren’t bad ways.
Things that open-ended are ripe for abuse, which is to say when you have a team of white techbros, guess which candidates get high marks on these ad-hoc questions?
From the comment I was replying to:
> Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are unemployed and every opportunity counts, that is usually where the interview ends for me
This person is close minded and is filtering themselves out of the process. This is ideal.
Are you saying you’re against all open-ended questions in the interview process?
I agree with pjmlp, it's become a substitute for actually interviewing/evaluating the candidate. Especially if they are trying to hire for something they don't already have, it's a form of bikeshedding. For example, if they need a database expert because the team has been faking it until this point, they can either learn how to hire one, or they can focus on brain teasers and "culture fit", and feel good that whether or not the person is expert, they passed the test.
Ideal would be if the questions are actually job related, how many other professions do you think get these kind of stupid questions?
Since we are it, lets make Jeopardy for getting a job.
Companies are groups of people behaving a certain way, and jobs are behaving that way. As an outsider, you don't know what the job is. If the interview is a bunch of questions you think is stupid, then the job is probably doing a bunch of stuff you think is stupid. If you want the money and prestige anyway, then learn to do the stupid stuff.
Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out.
Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.
I bet it is about solving the daily brain teaser of working with unmaintainable code!