Tuesday, February 22, 2005

need interview questions?

ran across this awesome list of in depth .net questions on scoble's link blog. having worked on indigo for over a year, i thought i had pretty deep knowledge of .net, but i must admit, i started having a little trouble on the "senior developers/architects" section - nothing a little msdn couldn't fix though :)

checking out these questions took me back to my interviewing days. after going through round after round of interviews during my senior year in college, i started at microsoft and flipped to the other side - i started running the interviews. personally, i really enjoy interviews; i have a passion for finding good people and building great teams.

anyways, if i'm ever running interviews again and a candidate's resume claims they have .net experience: watch out, i might just fire off a few questions from scott's list. although i suppose if they've read my blog, they'll conveniently have all the answers...

for anyone out there who is nervous about an upcoming microsoft interview: relax, it's not that bad. check out one candidate's recent experience.

2 Comments:

Blogger jwfbean said...

Now that google and other searchalikes (like MSDN search) have brought even the most arcane facts to our fingertips, most interview questions are even more irrelevant.

I've been through a few job interviews over the past year, at a slew of companies, such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo and others. It always strikes me as odd that the skills and tools that you utilize when you do your job are completely different than those required to perform well in a job interview.

Many job interview questions, especially the "logic puzzles" (like: four people are in the room, one is behind a wall, they're all wearing a hat, either red or blue, and they can only see the color of the hat of the person in front of them. Who can correctly determine their own hat color?) might intend to probe the candidates thought processes and reasoning skills, but in reality they simply probe whether or not the candidate has heard the solution to that question before.

The best job interview I ever had was for a small startup company. They sat me alone in a room with a laptop and told me to do a bunch of stuff, and let them know when I was ready to share my solutions.

The ideal job interview would be to give the candidate an assignment to complete prior to the interview, and then to spend the day of the interview defending their work.

I think when the companies ask candidates to write code on a whiteboard, they're just being lazy. But maybe that's just because I have had too many instances where I've floundered on the whiteboard even though I knew full well that I had solved the problem before, knew exactly where in my toolbox that solution was, and knew that I could do it again quickly if I just had a compiler.

2/22/2005 10:37:00 PM  
Blogger Dilip Murthy said...

It seems most of the gruelling interviews are for the techie guys.

I am not from an Engineering background but I've had my share of a challenging experience with a "certain" company. Ofcourse it wasn't for a tech job but for an advertising related job. I know I fit into their teams well enough, but I feel I shouldnt have mentioned my MBA aspirations.
Does that have a bearing on how the companies judge you? An insecurity perhaps of not staying "in" for a long term?

ciao,
-Dilip.

2/23/2005 12:27:00 PM  

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