7 ms·

Microsoft Azure CTO Headhunted for SDE II Position at Amazon

44 points by johntiger1 3y ago

sp332 3y ago
(2021)
gedy 3y ago
I'm sure many companies would still make him leet code, because "what has he done lately?"
- johntiger1 3y ago
  Yeah he better be able to invert a binary tree, else how do we know he can code? /s
  - eastbound 3y ago
    You can’t imagine what we see on a job. People with 20 years experience in programming, perfectly able to talk about it, and then they fail at writing a String.indexOf() manually (requires 2 for and an if).
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      I'm that guy. After getting laid off, I did legitimately fail some basic programming tests. Some combo of nerves and rustiness, I expect. I've found that practicing leetcode-like problems was necessary and sufficient for fixing that.
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        Same! I remember failing a coding interview because I forgot how to write a for-loop despite using them almost every day. It’s crazy how nerves affect you.
        johntiger1 3y ago
        Yeah I've failed 'reverse a string' before, despite graduating with close to a 4.00 GPA and getting a 99 in my DS/A course from a Canadian school (Waterloo/UofT). Especially early on in your career, the transition from solving algorithms questions on an exam to leetcode-style is quite a jump, especially under time pressure
    - guitarbill 3y ago
      It's tough. I've also seen what you describe, and it's kind of mind-boggling. The only red-ish flag seems to be overly long tenure at a single place. But at some point in the career progression, it doesn't matter. I think the difference is this. Some people I've worked with were excellent coders but have now moved on to e.g. director roles. If you asked them to write code, they'll flat out say that they haven't coded in years. They know it isn't important for their role, and it isn't the value they provide. The bullshitters will never admit they can't do something.
      - johntiger1 3y ago
        Would long tenure at e.g. Meta or Google also be seen as a red flag? I've heard other people say that the opposite (job hopping every 1-2 years) is a red flag.
        59nadir 3y ago
        The average tenure at Google is apparently 1.1[0] years, so it's at the very least not typical to stay for very long. 0 - https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/04/19/whats-the-average-tenure-of-an-engineer-at-a-big-tech-company-ep-434/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/04/19/whats-the-average-tenu...
        aitchnyu 3y ago
        Umm, do these companies factor average tenure to tweak vesting schedule and finetune how much stock they fork over to employees?
        jsnell 3y ago
        Tenure isn't a good way to measure how long people stay. Median tenure (which this is reported to be) is even worse. All a median tenure of 1.1 years days is that about half the workforce was hired in the last 13 months, but it could be either due to the number of employees growing rapidly, due to people leaving the company, or some mix. We can't tell which just from these numbers. As a thought experiment, consider a company that nobody ever leaves, growing by 20% per year. They'd double in size in about 4 years, so the median tenure in steady state is also 4 years. But that doesn't mean that people only stay for 4 years; the turnover in the thought experiment is literally 0%. Also, the numbers the article (podcast?) is claiming are not supported even by their own immediate source. The reference they have for average tenure for software developers being 4.2 years doesn't actually say that. The article actually says that it's 4.2 years for all employees and that sofware developers are about 2 years. It also has such a different number for Google (2.3 years) than the number they chose to originally quote that the methodology just can't be the same. I would guess that the second source is using mean, not median.
    - guappa 3y ago
      Having experience isn't an indicator of knowing how to do basic things, because companies hire just about anyone.
    - johntiger1 3y ago
      Were you asking them in a language they were familiar with? They also might have gotten nerves and thought about using some fancy DP algorithm and gotten stuck in that rabbithole. I've personally definitely had my fair share of unbelievable brain farts
- dehrmann 3y ago
  CTO of a division like that is a completely different job than an SDE II, so you bet he's going to get a leet code interview.
- taftster 3y ago
  OK, but there's some evil truth here... I'm not a "CTO of Anything" type. But I consider myself adept in what programming I do for a living. Leet code is truthfully somewhat beneath me, but yet I'm still scared applying for jobs that would have me need to solve leet code puzzles. Why is that? I think it's because, yes admittedly, I'm probably rusty on all the low-level concepts that leet code exemplifies. And so I hesitate applying for that cool looking job at some edgy tech corp or flashy startup, both likely to the detriment of myself and their talent pool. I could study and hone my leet code skilz, but to what end? There's basically zero times when I'd need to invent a novel new sorting algorithm or data structure. If I'm not borrowing or using concepts, libraries or algorithms from others, I'm likely going at it the wrong way, falling prey to NIH. I'm concerned as a mid-career person the effect of leet code on job recruitment opportunities for us "older" folks. I can out program most any entry-to-mid level software engineer, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't beat me competing on some leet code algorithm.
ajkjk 3y ago
Odd that the Azure CTO also writes thrillers about cybersecurity: http://www.markrussinovich.com/ http://www.markrussinovich.com/
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Oh he keeps a diary then :-)
  - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
    He was a household name among Windows programmers in the 2000-x. Building on that fame, I guess.
- vmurthy 3y ago
  So I went down the rabbit hole of going to the website. Guess what happens when you click the book link? "Your server is running PHP version 5.6.40 but WordPress 6.3.2 requires at least 7.0.0" [0]. Not sure how this fell through. [0]http://www.markrussinovich.com/books/rogue-code/ http://www.markrussinovich.com/books/rogue-code/ [1]https://imgur.com/a/YYJJ9xD https://imgur.com/a/YYJJ9xD
- doix 3y ago
  No HTTPS either! It's been a while since I encountered one of those in the wild.
uxp8u61q 3y ago
Why would you post a link to reddit which is itself a link to Twitter?
- johntiger1 3y ago
  idk i just came across it and thought it was funny
  - politelemon 3y ago
    I think they meant, why not link straight to the Twitter URL.
    - midasz 3y ago
      Or even better, a nitter url. This is like combining my two least favorite platforms.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I was hoping the Twitter link would go somewhere else etc. for a few hops
simonebrunozzi 3y ago
In 2016 I was VP and CTO for the hybrid cloud team at VMware, and previously Senior Technology Evangelist at AWS. I interviewed with Digital Ocean in NY. One of the founders set my first interview with a young woman. She had perhaps 2-3 years of experience as a writer, before joining DO. Halfway through the interview, I started to understand that she was going to be my... boss, if I got the job. And I also understood that they were interviewing me for a position well below my then-current pay grade. I was angry. Such a waste of time, and such idiocy. After politely completing the interview, I (also politely) wrote an email to such founder, expressing my concerns and my doubts. Never heard back. At that point I thought: F*ck DO. They don't deserve me or my time. No one would care about this, but I'm still happy to share this here. This is the type of damage you do when you as a company are careless about how you treat prospective hires.
- GoodJokes 3y ago
  [dead]
- doix 3y ago
  I've been on the other side of that interview, 2-3 years out of univeristy and asked to interview someone with 10-15 years experience, it was pretty awful. Before that I just interviewed either students (interns) or graduates and asked them basic coding questions. There's a pretty high chance that the young women was just as unhappy about the situation as you were.
- perceptronas 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I don't have such good credentials, but I've had my time wasted as well. Now without a written position description and salary I don't agree to the meetings. Seems like a great filter as at least half of the recruiters don't answer
- xgbi 3y ago
  Reading your comment, my first thought was "how entitled??", but I see that this meeting was set up by the DO founders? Aoutch.
afinlayson 3y ago
I still get headhunted for backend engineering jobs, and I haven't done that in 13 years. It's not even on my resume ... but I guess you can see it on Linkedin, so why not.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  From 2005 until 2010 I worked as a .Net developer. I still get headhunters wanting me to apply for senior .Net/C# positions, it makes no sense.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
Suggested headline: "Azure CTO gets automated junk mail, just like everyone else." The justification for that headline is that he wasn't really "headhunted." He was scraped by a LinkedIn crawler and emailed by a mass mailer. It's unlikely a "headhunter" (or recruiter) so much as viewed his profile.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  That context is obvious from the post, and it's interesting (and amusing) regardless.
  - trimethylpurine 3y ago
    Posts can be interesting and amusing without being dishonest. These are not mutually exclusive.
foobazzy 3y ago
I worked for Tapchief about 4 years ago and we had an army of recruiters just scouring through LinkedIn and Upwork who look for interesting profiles and try to convert them to this platform. What I learnt there was that there exists a market for chrome extensions that will help you send template messages and even blanket responses to all and every person in a certain search criteria. You can scrape the pages from search results and even extract contact details like email etc, if present in your profile. Before chatGPT, the quality of these messages were abysmal. But they've gotten better recently. I think Amazon hires smart enough engineers to build bots that can authenticate on your behalf and do this for you. Your job as a recruiter then becomes to only filter through the responses. I would also like to take this opportunity and blame LinkedIn search for giving absurd results. Because this whole process is dependent on finding profiles on their platform.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > Because this whole process is dependent on finding profiles on their platform. The other issue is stale resumes, at least in my experience. I've been in the industry for over a decade, and been in big-name tech companies for nine years. My profile makes it clear that I'm a senior engineer. But I got an e-mail from a recruiter recently about a desktop support position. Turns out, they have a resume from about a year after I made the move from small business sysadmin to AWS support engineer (these days, my resume includes things like "senior SRE" and "devops engineer at a quantitative hedge fund"). They didn't really bother to verify whether their copy of my resume was at all recent.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Yes. We all get spam. Even the best of us.
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
Not in the same league as this CTO, but as a (somewhat) senior hire interviewing for a well known business messaging company, the team I was supposed to be interviewing for never showed up in the interview itself. A completely different Snr. Director showed up from another team, basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "I've no idea why they set up this interview since my team has already filled any open roles". Got stonewalled then by the recruiters after that, which seemed like either a setup or a massive mix up.
rtpg 3y ago
It’s kinda funny how, as an IC anyways, recruiters are supposedly only supposed to be a sign of good things (or at worst neutral) yet everyone around me has such an aversion to interacting with them in practice. Real “defeat from the jaws of victory” vibes with most interactions
D13Fd 3y ago
I was in IT for about a decade, up until 20 years ago. Then I switched to an entirely different field and I'm now in a senior role. I still get spammed with occasionally with e-mails for low-level IT and software development jobs.

44 points by johntiger1 3y ago

sp332 3y ago

(2021)

gedy 3y ago

I'm sure many companies would still make him leet code, because "what has he done lately?"

johntiger1 3y ago
Yeah he better be able to invert a binary tree, else how do we know he can code? /s
- eastbound 3y ago
  You can’t imagine what we see on a job. People with 20 years experience in programming, perfectly able to talk about it, and then they fail at writing a String.indexOf() manually (requires 2 for and an if).
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I'm that guy. After getting laid off, I did legitimately fail some basic programming tests. Some combo of nerves and rustiness, I expect. I've found that practicing leetcode-like problems was necessary and sufficient for fixing that.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      Same! I remember failing a coding interview because I forgot how to write a for-loop despite using them almost every day. It’s crazy how nerves affect you.
      - johntiger1 3y ago
        Yeah I've failed 'reverse a string' before, despite graduating with close to a 4.00 GPA and getting a 99 in my DS/A course from a Canadian school (Waterloo/UofT). Especially early on in your career, the transition from solving algorithms questions on an exam to leetcode-style is quite a jump, especially under time pressure
  - guitarbill 3y ago
    It's tough. I've also seen what you describe, and it's kind of mind-boggling. The only red-ish flag seems to be overly long tenure at a single place. But at some point in the career progression, it doesn't matter. I think the difference is this. Some people I've worked with were excellent coders but have now moved on to e.g. director roles. If you asked them to write code, they'll flat out say that they haven't coded in years. They know it isn't important for their role, and it isn't the value they provide. The bullshitters will never admit they can't do something.
    - johntiger1 3y ago
      Would long tenure at e.g. Meta or Google also be seen as a red flag? I've heard other people say that the opposite (job hopping every 1-2 years) is a red flag.
      - 59nadir 3y ago
        The average tenure at Google is apparently 1.1[0] years, so it's at the very least not typical to stay for very long. 0 - https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/04/19/whats-the-average-tenure-of-an-engineer-at-a-big-tech-company-ep-434/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/04/19/whats-the-average-tenu...
        aitchnyu 3y ago
        Umm, do these companies factor average tenure to tweak vesting schedule and finetune how much stock they fork over to employees?
        jsnell 3y ago
        Tenure isn't a good way to measure how long people stay. Median tenure (which this is reported to be) is even worse. All a median tenure of 1.1 years days is that about half the workforce was hired in the last 13 months, but it could be either due to the number of employees growing rapidly, due to people leaving the company, or some mix. We can't tell which just from these numbers. As a thought experiment, consider a company that nobody ever leaves, growing by 20% per year. They'd double in size in about 4 years, so the median tenure in steady state is also 4 years. But that doesn't mean that people only stay for 4 years; the turnover in the thought experiment is literally 0%. Also, the numbers the article (podcast?) is claiming are not supported even by their own immediate source. The reference they have for average tenure for software developers being 4.2 years doesn't actually say that. The article actually says that it's 4.2 years for all employees and that sofware developers are about 2 years. It also has such a different number for Google (2.3 years) than the number they chose to originally quote that the methodology just can't be the same. I would guess that the second source is using mean, not median.
  - guappa 3y ago
    Having experience isn't an indicator of knowing how to do basic things, because companies hire just about anyone.
  - johntiger1 3y ago
    Were you asking them in a language they were familiar with? They also might have gotten nerves and thought about using some fancy DP algorithm and gotten stuck in that rabbithole. I've personally definitely had my fair share of unbelievable brain farts
dehrmann 3y ago
CTO of a division like that is a completely different job than an SDE II, so you bet he's going to get a leet code interview.
taftster 3y ago
OK, but there's some evil truth here... I'm not a "CTO of Anything" type. But I consider myself adept in what programming I do for a living. Leet code is truthfully somewhat beneath me, but yet I'm still scared applying for jobs that would have me need to solve leet code puzzles. Why is that? I think it's because, yes admittedly, I'm probably rusty on all the low-level concepts that leet code exemplifies. And so I hesitate applying for that cool looking job at some edgy tech corp or flashy startup, both likely to the detriment of myself and their talent pool. I could study and hone my leet code skilz, but to what end? There's basically zero times when I'd need to invent a novel new sorting algorithm or data structure. If I'm not borrowing or using concepts, libraries or algorithms from others, I'm likely going at it the wrong way, falling prey to NIH. I'm concerned as a mid-career person the effect of leet code on job recruitment opportunities for us "older" folks. I can out program most any entry-to-mid level software engineer, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't beat me competing on some leet code algorithm.

ajkjk 3y ago

Odd that the Azure CTO also writes thrillers about cybersecurity: http://www.markrussinovich.com/ http://www.markrussinovich.com/

quickthrower2 3y ago
Oh he keeps a diary then :-)
- sam_lowry_ 3y ago
  He was a household name among Windows programmers in the 2000-x. Building on that fame, I guess.
vmurthy 3y ago
So I went down the rabbit hole of going to the website. Guess what happens when you click the book link? "Your server is running PHP version 5.6.40 but WordPress 6.3.2 requires at least 7.0.0" [0]. Not sure how this fell through. [0]http://www.markrussinovich.com/books/rogue-code/ http://www.markrussinovich.com/books/rogue-code/ [1]https://imgur.com/a/YYJJ9xD https://imgur.com/a/YYJJ9xD
doix 3y ago
No HTTPS either! It's been a while since I encountered one of those in the wild.

uxp8u61q 3y ago

Why would you post a link to reddit which is itself a link to Twitter?

johntiger1 3y ago
idk i just came across it and thought it was funny
- politelemon 3y ago
  I think they meant, why not link straight to the Twitter URL.
  - midasz 3y ago
    Or even better, a nitter url. This is like combining my two least favorite platforms.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I was hoping the Twitter link would go somewhere else etc. for a few hops

simonebrunozzi 3y ago

In 2016 I was VP and CTO for the hybrid cloud team at VMware, and previously Senior Technology Evangelist at AWS. I interviewed with Digital Ocean in NY. One of the founders set my first interview with a young woman. She had perhaps 2-3 years of experience as a writer, before joining DO. Halfway through the interview, I started to understand that she was going to be my... boss, if I got the job. And I also understood that they were interviewing me for a position well below my then-current pay grade. I was angry. Such a waste of time, and such idiocy. After politely completing the interview, I (also politely) wrote an email to such founder, expressing my concerns and my doubts. Never heard back. At that point I thought: F*ck DO. They don't deserve me or my time. No one would care about this, but I'm still happy to share this here. This is the type of damage you do when you as a company are careless about how you treat prospective hires.

GoodJokes 3y ago
[dead]
doix 3y ago
I've been on the other side of that interview, 2-3 years out of univeristy and asked to interview someone with 10-15 years experience, it was pretty awful. Before that I just interviewed either students (interns) or graduates and asked them basic coding questions. There's a pretty high chance that the young women was just as unhappy about the situation as you were.
perceptronas 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. I don't have such good credentials, but I've had my time wasted as well. Now without a written position description and salary I don't agree to the meetings. Seems like a great filter as at least half of the recruiters don't answer
xgbi 3y ago
Reading your comment, my first thought was "how entitled??", but I see that this meeting was set up by the DO founders? Aoutch.

afinlayson 3y ago

I still get headhunted for backend engineering jobs, and I haven't done that in 13 years. It's not even on my resume ... but I guess you can see it on Linkedin, so why not.

mrweasel 3y ago
From 2005 until 2010 I worked as a .Net developer. I still get headhunters wanting me to apply for senior .Net/C# positions, it makes no sense.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

Suggested headline: "Azure CTO gets automated junk mail, just like everyone else." The justification for that headline is that he wasn't really "headhunted." He was scraped by a LinkedIn crawler and emailed by a mass mailer. It's unlikely a "headhunter" (or recruiter) so much as viewed his profile.

D13Fd 3y ago
That context is obvious from the post, and it's interesting (and amusing) regardless.
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  Posts can be interesting and amusing without being dishonest. These are not mutually exclusive.

foobazzy 3y ago

I worked for Tapchief about 4 years ago and we had an army of recruiters just scouring through LinkedIn and Upwork who look for interesting profiles and try to convert them to this platform. What I learnt there was that there exists a market for chrome extensions that will help you send template messages and even blanket responses to all and every person in a certain search criteria. You can scrape the pages from search results and even extract contact details like email etc, if present in your profile. Before chatGPT, the quality of these messages were abysmal. But they've gotten better recently. I think Amazon hires smart enough engineers to build bots that can authenticate on your behalf and do this for you. Your job as a recruiter then becomes to only filter through the responses. I would also like to take this opportunity and blame LinkedIn search for giving absurd results. Because this whole process is dependent on finding profiles on their platform.

jwestbury 3y ago
> Because this whole process is dependent on finding profiles on their platform. The other issue is stale resumes, at least in my experience. I've been in the industry for over a decade, and been in big-name tech companies for nine years. My profile makes it clear that I'm a senior engineer. But I got an e-mail from a recruiter recently about a desktop support position. Turns out, they have a resume from about a year after I made the move from small business sysadmin to AWS support engineer (these days, my resume includes things like "senior SRE" and "devops engineer at a quantitative hedge fund"). They didn't really bother to verify whether their copy of my resume was at all recent.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Yes. We all get spam. Even the best of us.

Simon_ORourke 3y ago

Not in the same league as this CTO, but as a (somewhat) senior hire interviewing for a well known business messaging company, the team I was supposed to be interviewing for never showed up in the interview itself. A completely different Snr. Director showed up from another team, basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "I've no idea why they set up this interview since my team has already filled any open roles". Got stonewalled then by the recruiters after that, which seemed like either a setup or a massive mix up.

rtpg 3y ago

It’s kinda funny how, as an IC anyways, recruiters are supposedly only supposed to be a sign of good things (or at worst neutral) yet everyone around me has such an aversion to interacting with them in practice. Real “defeat from the jaws of victory” vibes with most interactions

D13Fd 3y ago

I was in IT for about a decade, up until 20 years ago. Then I switched to an entirely different field and I'm now in a senior role. I still get spammed with occasionally with e-mails for low-level IT and software development jobs.