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Comment by subharmonicon | Hacker News Reader

In the 90’s when I was at Microsoft it was common for people to ask brain teasers and algorithm questions and expect people to be able to reason through the problems even if they walked in not knowing the particular algorithm or data structures involved. The interview was graded more on your thought process and ability to make forward progress with hints and less on getting to a correct answer in 25 minutes.

People were super harsh about attention to detail, e.g. you had to write code that would compile on the whiteboard and you would get penalized to some degree for making mistakes, especially if there were enough to make it clear that you hadn’t really been using the language you claimed to be proficient in.

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https://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-Mount-Fuji/dp/03167784... was the classic book on MSFT interview questions before the software world switched to copying Google's leetcode interview style. Google found that the leetcode questions were the best metric for long term performance because they were a practical proxy for IQ and built their software empire on that style of interview. You can find references to pre-leetcode questions from Google's very early interview prep material from the time before they had data showing that brainteasers weren't as effective as leetcode questions. Then everyone switched to copying Google's interview questions because they hoped to copy Google's success.

The book isn't useful anymore for interviews, but it is a fun read if you like brainteasers.

Here’s an idea. What about using a computer, causes that’s what you are going to be doing.

I’m just bitching about having to code a binary search using a white board at Google when I had previously written a search engine and indexed two country’s by a man who wears a cowboy hat to work. (To be fair it was a nice hat)

I didn’t get the job, they claimed not good enough at coding, wtf! Well f*k them then.

Now sure but this was Microsoft software in the 90s, no one wanted to restart their interview for a third time because the f*king thing bluescreened again.

I’m totally on board with what you’re saying.

Unfortunately a lot of tech is far too biased towards a small set of learnable skills that are sometimes hard to demonstrate in an interview setting, and the result is that a lot of good people don’t get offers for jobs that they could totally crush in.

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