I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019) (facet.net)

> I've struggled with this a lot over the years, but I finally decided to share my story. I don’t think I would have made it past the first round of interviews at Microsoft if I hadn’t gotten so lucky. So pretty much, my entire career is built on one amazing stroke of luck.

...which explains why they felt like they "cheated".

I don't have a problem with people marketing themselves on LinkedIn - it that not the entire purpose of the site?

I do it to generate sales leads for my startup. We're bootstrapped so being able to generate leads without any ad spend or outbound sales means we don't have to raise money to grow. I used to write blog posts but they take so much longer. Hence no new posts on the blog since 2019.

Now I focus on LinkedIn. A single viral post on LinkedIn can get 2M-5M views on average. It will generate $1M-$2M in potential business for us. This way I can spend 50% of my time writing code, 45% doing CEO stuff, and 5% doing marketing.

I would propose to change coding interviews to the following scheme:

Step 1:

Interviewer ask a coding question. If candidate is able to answer correctly then move to Step 2

Step 2:

Candidate asks a coding question from Interviewer. If Interviewer answers correctly go back to Step 1. If Interviewer is not able to answer correctly in 60 min, and Candidate is able to explain solution and implementation, move to Step 3

Step 3:

Interview is over and Candidate automatically qualifies for next hiring phase.

Fairness becomes a bit of a contrived concept once you start to factor in higher order effects. Then it just turns into fair if it advantages me, and unfair if it doesn’t.

I helped a friend get a job once because I knew who was going to interview him, and I knew he had a blog where he published all his thought-leader technical opinions.

Is that fair or unfair? Probably neither. It’s more of a random coincidence that my friend benefitted from this. But is it fair that I have learned more about my local industry by going to industry events and listening to people present things, and talking to people, etc? That probably is fair, and that’s how I learned the tip I gave to my friend.

Fairness isn’t really relevant to the problem here. If you believe that there is a problem at all, then the problem is that the screening process can be influenced by random coincidence.

Than Microsoft would've been scammed out of $350 worth of plane tickets, $150 worth of hotel commodations and $1000 worth of employee time. Hardly the end of the world for a multi billion dollar company

> and passed just due to the advantage?

Passed a six hour Microsoft on-site grilling due to knowing the question for a 15 minute off-site interview question?

The demonstration was to write the sums 1+2+...N and N+(n-1)+...+1 and add them up position wise. The sum comes n*(n+1)/2 (divide by 2 for the two sums).

So I opened the python interpreter, and I used this very trivial method of calculation (instead of summing the sine and cosine functions independently), and using asin and acos functions, got the result. It turned out to be accurate for n=1e6 with an error of ~1e-5. So it should be usable for much bigger n too.

Xor solution and adding solutions are the same solution it's just a matter of what binary function you use for calculating sum. You can use any commutative, associative binary function which has inverse. You can use addition, xor or even multiplication.

So actually not knowing the formula is kinda advantageous, because computing the sum as 1 + 2 + … + n (with every addition mod N) gives you the right answer (mod N).

This would let the examiner fail a student for subjective reasons instead of academic success. The examiner would then be able to say « I failed them because of their skills, not because of their religions, look how easy the solution is ».

Perhaps this is what we are reproducing as an industry with all our convoluted interview processes, and it may be a decorum to choose the candidates we want instead of using objective criteria.

  /*
    I used to be able to do this without a compiler
  */
  for(;;){
    int i = values[0];
    if(i == values[i])return i;
    values[i] ^= values[0];
    values[0] ^= values[i];
    values[i] ^= values[0]; 
  }

  /*
    full test code, does java really not have Arrays.shuffle?
  */
  public static void main(String...args){
    final int result;

    Integer[] values = new Integer[12];
    for(int i = 1; i < values.length; i++){
      values[i] = i;
    }

    final int dupe = values[0] = 1 + new Random().nextInt(values.length - 1);
    final var list = Arrays.asList(values);
    Collections.shuffle(list);
    System.err.println(list);
    for(;;){
      int i = values[0];
      if(i == values[i]){
        result = i;
        break;
      }
      values[i] ^= values[0];
      values[0] ^= values[i];
      values[i] ^= values[0];
    }
    System.err.println(dupe + " " + result);
  }

That's cheating.

You're supposed to study the whole course, the examination is a statistical test to see if it's likely that you studied, and can apply, the whole course. If you didn't study the course, you're misrepresenting yourself by during the exam.

That's cheating (in a different way to the first one).

Examinations are imperfect, they usually can't cover an entire course without being too onerous.

In this circumstance you cheated, but did not break the rules for taking the exam. You will be less competent on the course material than is intended for those who pass.

Start with what works and then optimize

Sophomoric is exactly the word here, and it’s no surprise that the story is about Microsoft