2 ms·

When I interviewed at Redmond 15 years ago, it was the recruiter who asked me a bunch of techie questions then decided to bring me out for a whole day of onsite

When I interviewed at Redmond 15 years ago, it was the recruiter who asked me a bunch of techie questions then decided to bring me out for a whole day of onsite interviews. During that I recall it was only a director of SW who asked me some mentally crushing questions about subtleties in how the Windows kernel fiddles with files. As I said, I was a UNIX developer who didn't know those bottlenecks in the Windows kernel. Still he persisted. He did take me for a spin in his awesome BMW sports car after though! My thoughts on Redmond were that it rains all the time and the inside of the Microsoft buildings is pretty depressing.

im_cynical 8y ago
I've had something similar happen to me once. I'm DevOps, very systems focused. I was leaving Cisco and got on an interview panel with 4 network engineers at some place. I caveated I know networking better than most but I'm by no stretch a network engineer. They agreed and explicitly stated the position was on the systems side and it was fine. The interview was only an hour and half. About 30 minutes into they ran out of questions and started to get bored. They tell they're all studying for their CCIE's and decided to start borrowing questions from the final exam. They decided to play "lets stump the Cisco guy". And did they? YES! Did they stop? NO! This was 7+ years ago and I'll never forget how uncomfortable and bad that interview was. They managed to dredge up all these arcane, stupid questions, some of which bore no practical function.. and listened to me "I dont know" for a solid hour I'm sure it left them with a bad impression of me, and it certainly left me not wanting to work there.