Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakex | Hacker News Reader

Name and shame

Microsoft did this. I went through a DEI loop at Microsoft (found out later) and was ghosted by one manager, another manager asked a leetcode hard with 20 minutes to implement it, another asked a leetcode hard and DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER until I walked them through it step by step (they had never seen the answer before).

Less you think I'm complaining about algorithmic interviews, I passed Google and Netflix technical rounds just fine.

Microsoft managers were the most disinterested group I've ever interviewed with, and it was only later that I found out I was picked to interview for multiple teams because of a DEI recruiter, and then found out that MS had initiatives forcing managers to interview people from underrepresented backgrounds.

Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock. The IQ difference between the people at Netflix and Google compared to MSFT was astounding.

I used to work at Microsoft and was on the other side, unfortunately I had the exact opposite experience. I interviewed and rejected a candidate (due to poor technical performance) then had the hiring manager contact me asking if I would reconsider as he needed to "increase DEI" footprint of his team. He wanted me to lower the bar for DEI reasons.

>Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock.

Well, if they were only interviewing you for performative box-checking reasons so they could hire the person they really wanted to hire then they would have a strong incentive to come across as somewhere you didn't want to work at. A disinterested interviewer is going to come across as not so bright. So this is hardly a fair assessment of the talent at Microsoft.

OTOH my professional interactions with Microsoft employees has always been positive. They've always been extremely capable and have gone the extra mile for me.

No, they were not smart engineers. one literally interrupted me to say “you can’t solve this using recursion, you need a for loop”. I clarified if they meant for stack space reasons and they said “no, it just doesn’t work recursively”.

The system design round, they got confused with some basic queueing concepts. It was a shit show.

>Seriously, sell your microsoft stock

Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.

What part of the org were you interviewing in?

Azure.

I have no trouble believing that the engineering competence of Azure is especially low.

Okay but you can’t rely blame this on DEI or racism for sure. Plenty of people have had the same experience (myself included) with tons of companies and their hiring processes, it’s not like being given unfair conditions in interviews definitively amounts to racism or Microsoft being performatively woke. It happens to everyone. Even your anecdotal experience with the other companies being “better” is just that, random chance. I’ve had great interviews and bad ones, and 99% of the time all it comes down to is the mood of the interviewer and how much they like me personally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com