Google Vs. Microsoft: a Tale of Two Interviews 215
jfruh writes "You might be a bit jealous of Andrew Weiss: fresh out of college, he got interviews with both Microsoft and Google. He discusses (to the extent NDAs allow) the differences between the two experiences, ranging from the silly (Google's famous gourmet cafeteria vs. Microsoft's gaming room) to the serious (Google's technical emphasis vs. Microsoft's focus on explanatory and consulting skills.)"
wow ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:wow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just some ivy league brat who didn't nail his first interview, and wanted a way to bitch.
Ah yes, Purdue - the forgotten Ivy.
I agree with the rest though - worthless article.
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you my hero
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What about it was bitching? The article was pretty disappointing and just said obvious things, but he wasn't bitching.
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Thank you! Wholly shit I wish I could get the 5 minutes back I wasted reading that turd someone labeled "article".
Didn't read TFA? Consider yourself lucky. Rambling about nothing important to anyone except the author. Should have been posted as Facebook status, not an article pointed to on /.
/sigh
Re:wow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That actually sounds much better than the usual "puzzle-style" interview questions I hear. I'd personally begin by asking for high-level details. What applications do you have in mind? Alternatively, are you looking for a specific sort of boat? Without knowing the first thing about boats, there are obvious orders-of-magnitude design, process, and resource differences between building a kayak, say, and an oil tanker. Note here that I'd be careful to avoid detailed design or requirement questions: by my own admission, I don't know how to build boats, so the resulting "requirements discussion" would almost surely be "bike-shedding."
Next, given that there's (presumably) a well-established industry selling ____ boats, why are we assuming at the outset that we should build rather than buy? Suppose the answer is "we're not an end-user, our business plan involves breaking into boat manufacturing."
Fair enough. Then doing profitability requires both building and selling boats in a market with established players, and, by our (my) own admission, we (I) don't yet know how to build a boat, let alone do so well enough to make a manufacturable and marketable product (not to mention the highly nontrivial matters of actual marketing and manufacturing "at scale"). So unless we already have a crack boat-design team at our disposal (in which case, why are you asking me?) it might bewiser, at least for a few years, to get our feet wet by OEMing third-party boats, building something related but less ambitious like "boat accessories", etc., before committing to full-on "boat-building."
And so on. Presumably this is the sort of discussion they want to hear?
They aren't really all that different (Score:5, Informative)
Once inside, they do have different cultures, goals, focus, but as far as getting in, I feel there's very few people who would be hired by one, but not the other.
Microsoft campus interview: a summary (Score:2, Funny)
One of the unique aspects of my time in Redmond was the interview environment. In between interviews, I was in a room filled with music, video games, and movies. While it may sound unheard of, it actually worked in my favor helping to keep my mind off things for a bit.
Entry interview: you'll need to dodge alien laser beams.
Exit interview: you'll need to dodge flying chairs.
Hmmm (Score:2)
No job offer then?
My experience: Google vs Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
In summary, Google's interviews don't get a flying rats behind about anything but microbenchmarks on small pieces of code. Amazon cared more about technical design but started asking me questions on the Linux Kernel (I was applying for Java Engineer position)
Some more odds:
One of the Google interviews disagreed with me that a Java HashSet was not Big O(1) for the contains() method when I wrote out my sample code. I pointed out (very kindly) that I believe HashSet is backed by HashMap in Java, which is constant time. He said he didn't think that was true and I conceded and said, "I can assume then for now that it is not constant time then." I was extremely polite, but I'm fairly certain that cost me the job.
The Amazon interview didn't go after they started asking me the internals of the Linux kernel. Then, the gentlemen asked me to implement a C function. I stopped him immediately after he was done speaking and said, "There must be a mistake, while i'm more than willing to attempt this in C, I thought I was applying for a Java position." He said he didn't know Java and asked me to implement atoi() in Java then. Needless to say he wasn't satisfied with any iteration of my Java code and made it a point that C was far superior to Java when we were done.
I really wanted the Google job, and I feel I was definitely qualified. What makes me feel better about it I guess is that it seems some Googlers couldn't pass the Google interview.
Re:My experience: Google vs Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
It's only O(1) in the absence of hash collisions... which is most of the time, so people like to pretend it's constant time, but in a pedantic theoretical sense the interviewer was right.
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And of course the very definition of O(1) is that it be constant time in the worst case scenario, no matter how unlikely the worst case is.
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That's not even true formally. You can do big-O analysis for worst case, average case, or even best case if you want. Anyway, HashSet contains() is O(1) for any but pathological cases built to defeat the hash function.
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Well, pathological cases [arstechnica.com] should be a real concern if the user has some control over the input and the server or other clients are doing the hashing. As for big-O analysis for various cases, that is technically true in the mathematical sense, but it's almost always understood (unless explicitly stated) in computer science terms (and I really have to presume, that's the sense the Google interviewer meant) to be a worse case scenario, precisely because there's a general interest in using a stated algorithm in
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Average case would be Big Theta(1) if I remember correctly, not O(1). (Slashdot still can't handle Unicode...)
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Big O is an upper bound, big Theta is both lower and upper bound. So, big Theta(x) always implies big O(x).
Most people don't bother writing big Theta, because you usually don't care that much about the lower bound. If you want to use those terms, you should know what they actually mean. Saying that something is big Theta(1) or big O(1) is useless if you don't know what that means.
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Ah well, there's a reason I didn't go in to theoretical computer science. ;)
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"I really wanted the Google job, and I feel I was definitely qualified. What makes me feel better about it I guess is that it seems some Googlers couldn't pass the Google interview."
Should have Googled all of the answers. I bet that's what they did.
Another experience - Google vs Amazon (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's my experience with each. Amazon was four 45-minute interviews, with a 15 minute break between each. Clearly they had decided on the problems for each candidate beforehand, as each interviewer asked a different question or two about my previous experiences and then a technical question that took the remainder of the interview time. I was also given the opportunity to ask about their experiences, which was actually quite illuminating as it was clear their past projects heavily influenced each technical question they asked.
Google was five hour-long interviews with only a minute break or so between them. Additionally, there was an hour-long guided lunch after the third interview. My first interviewer gave me a rundown of how the process worked (in particular, they had a sheet keeping track of what problems I had been asked that was passed on to each subsequent interviewer) and then each interview pretty much was 100% dedicated to solving a technical problem. The only person who asked anything about my previous experience and gave me any information about the workplace culture was my lunchtime interviewer. From what I gathered, it sounds like after a training session most developers are put into an interview rotation, which I suppose makes sense when one considers the number of applicants they must have. As a result, my last interview also had an observer present, presumably in training.
I won't talk about the questions asked except to indicate that both companies asked interesting and engaging technical questions - only one of which (Google's "warm up question") I'd seen on glassdoor or other interview question lists. But Amazon seemed much more interested in my experience in addition to my technical abilities, whereas talking to Google was more like taking a standardized exam.
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One of the Google interviews disagreed with me that a Java HashSet was not Big O(1) for the contains() method when I wrote out my sample code. I pointed out (very kindly) that I believe HashSet is backed by HashMap in Java, which is constant time. He said he didn't think that was true
HashSet/HashMap (and hash tables in general) is O(1) in the average case, but O(n) worst case. Sometimes these things matter, especially when you're dealing with data that crosses the security boundary - if your program stuffs user input into a hash table, an attacker can DoS it [arstechnica.com] by feeding it carefully crafted input such that all keys end up in the same bucket.
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Seems to me like it would be possible to solve by simply assigning a random salt to each hash table and using that in the hash algorithm.
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Yes, sure - though you should be careful about where you get your "random" numbers from, since some sources are very predictable - enough so for the attack to remain viable.
Anyway, the point wasn't so much so that hash table is unusable in that situation, but rather that you need to be aware of how it actually works, and what guarantees it actually makes (specifically O(1) being average, not constant), in order to use it properly. In Google of all places, I suspect such situations may arise more often than
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One of the Google interviews disagreed with me that a Java HashSet was not Big O(1) for the contains() method when I wrote out my sample code. I pointed out (very kindly) that I believe HashSet is backed by HashMap in Java, which is constant time. He said he didn't think that was true and I conceded and said, "I can assume then for now that it is not constant time then." I was extremely polite, but I'm fairly certain that cost me the job.
Presumably, he was testing you to see if you could explain why he was technically right, even though it is commonly assumed to be constant because in the average case it is. The Java HashMap and HashSet (as far as I know) handle hash collisions with a linked list, and the worst possible case for a Hash structure is if all your elements have the same Hash key, this is of course so unlikely that it would never actually happen in real life, but since O is the worst case, it would be O(n). Of course it's entire
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Now, on to the fun stuff. HashMap is O(1) when used with separate chaining and a max limit on the chain (linked list) size. So I could have any number of buckets, with a max of 100 entries in each bucket. That means putting any entries when (buckets * chainMax) > N is provably O(1): The max cap on the chainSize means that the search for a particular entry
Microsoft interviews have changed (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that was a fairly lame article...
Anyway, I interviewed with Microsoft back in 1989 or 1990, and it appears that things have changed since then. Back then, they definitely were more focused on technical questions. I don't remember anyone asking anything about customers or business or communications. It was all technology, with a bit of design thrown in. The position wasn't even a hard-core programming job. Since I was a few years out of college, the customer/business/communications questions would have been nice, since I would probably would have been better positioned to answer those than the college seniors, as my then current job had me working with customers a lot. Their recruiting group was horribly disorganized back then also -- they switched recruiters and the job at the last minute, so no one (myself, the recruiter, the interviewers) was properly prepared. I suppose they've probably fixed that since then... One of the weirdest things was the "cult of Bill" -- whenever you asked a question, the answer seemed to always be prefaced with something like, "Well, Bill thinks that..." Even questions that had nothing to do with technology or Microsoft, like "what do people in Redmond do for fun?" "Well, Bill thinks that being fit and active helps the brain, so a lot of us like to mountain bike..."
Re:Microsoft interviews have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible microsoft, having been in business a while, isn't as starved for technical people as it is for people who can explain what all the technical people just did. Making a product doesn't do you any good if you can't communicate what that product does, and how it would be useful.
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Let me quote the bit from TFA which explains the difference:
That same day, I was offered the position as an Associate Consultant.
When I interviewed for a software development position 4 years ago, pretty much all questions were technical, and most of it was writing code. No-one asked me any questions about customer or business communications, either.
The MS job was about business skills and google (Score:2)
The MS job was about business skills and Google was about tech skills.
Now to be fair we need to have tech job at MS vs tech job at goolge.
But this maybe telling that college CS is not good for some tech job at least at MS but the same CS is what google may want for tech jobs.
I think that MS is better as they see that CS is NOT IT.
It all depends on the team... (Score:3)
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MS interviews also involve bids sometimes. I interviewed 4 years ago, and there were 4 teams in the loop (though all from the same org, and three from the same division). Each candidate was interviewed by every team, in a round robin fashion - 45 minutes of interview, then 15 minutes break and you're off to the next one. Then, as I understand, they somehow split the accepted candidate pool between each other, and settled cases where two or more teams bid on the same person.
Interviews aren't really different (Score:2)
No work life balance at Google (Score:5, Insightful)
When I interviewed at Google, I was struck by how my main interviewer had no work life balance after he moved to Google. He talked about all of the things he used to do - hiking, mountain biking, etc. When I talked to him in more detail about some of his favorite hikes and rides, it became apparent that they were all done before he went to Google and that he no longer has time. Then as I talked to the rest of the team members I found the same thing - their lives revolve around Google. And as I looked around I saw all of the great amenities that are geared toward keeping you on-campus - great food, free laundry, haircuts, oil changes, gym, swimming pool, etc. You could literally live at the office and have everything you need.
That's when I realized that I didn't want to work there. They wanted to bring me back for another interview for a team member that wasn't there for the first one, but I declined and took another job.
Re:No work life balance at Google (Score:4, Insightful)
That, and everything at Google seems to be geared around making you feel like you're still in college... forever. There's the big campus, where everybody eats together in the cafeterias or in the quad, the free T-shirts and sweatshirts (around San Francisco, you constantly see Googlers out at bars wearing their Google shirts, just like how you see people wearing college shirts around campus), the little coding tips posted all over the place ("Hey kids! Remember to use the right data structures")... hell, when you go to a Google event, the sessions when you can talk to Google engineers and ask them your questions are actually called "office hours." If you really, really, really enjoy being treated like a college student, it might seem like heaven to you, but I can imagine that a seasoned, professional developer could feel pretty insulted by that level of paternalism. That said, Google also seems to favor hiring people right out of college.
Re:No work life balance at Google (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really, really, really enjoy being treated like a college student, it might seem like heaven to you, but I can imagine that a seasoned, professional developer could feel pretty insulted by that level of paternalism. That said, Google also seems to favor hiring people right out of college.
You know, if you're hiring strategy is to go after people with Asperger's who hyper-focus on interesting technical problems and hate the concept of change...that's probably an excellent way to build a work environment where such individuals will thrive.
I mean, think about it - they just spent 4 years getting used to college and are about to face yet another major life change and here comes Google to say that hey, things don't have to change much at all - work can be just like college for you. I probably would have jumped on an opportunity like that if I'd realized what the potential upside was. On the other hand I probably wouldn't be married right now and I would most likely be working 80+ hour weeks, but hey.
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A Microsoft interview question (Score:2)
This question was asked to me years ago in a Microsoft interview, and has been bugging me since. I am curious as to what other people here on /. would have responded, and more importanly, the 'why' behind the response.
Here is the question:
Say I were to hire you today, and gave you the choice between two compensation packages, which one would you choose (and why)?
1: A standard salary of $100k
2: An hourly wage of 10 cents an hour - but every month that you worked here, we would double your hourly wage
Which
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I'll take number 1.
No sensible employer will keep a number 2 employee beyond year 1 and I don't like to switch jobs that often. In fact if number 2 was a serious option I would expect you were going to axe me after 12 months for a total spend of ~$66k rather than keep me for 24 months at a total spend of $268 million. Meanwhile I'd need to keep myself in ramen noodles for the first 10 months while living in my parent's house.
Re:A Microsoft interview question (Score:4, Insightful)
Ten cents and hour doubling every month will make you more in a year and a half than the $100k/year would in those same time, and impossibly more after that. I'd see it as a question judging how long you wanted to work at Microsoft. If you were in for a career, you'd end up making more than Bill. If you wanted to jump ship in a year with MS on your resume to make more some place else, then 1 would be the answer. Different people want different things. Some just want to jump jobs every year or two for better raises and to keep things interesting. Some are looking to stick around for the long haul. Projects also look for both sorts of people. Since we probably don't know what he wants, I'd be honest and discuss how long I wanted to stay with MS and what my future plans were.
What I would have answered would have depended on when I interviewed. Earlier, I'd take the money and run. Later, when asked what I saw myself doing two years from now in an interview, my response was "still sitting here doing the same thing. I've played the .com job jumping game for years now and am ready to settle down." That was the answer they were looking for as they had to refill that position every year. They paid me more than I asked and here I still am ten years later.
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Is there any guarantee to how long the job lasts?
Hopefully having done my math right, in the 12th month, you're making $204.8/hour. So, depending upon how long the job lasts, #2 is better.
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Hourly it builds even faster - $16 for the first month (160 hours at 0.10 / hour) and by the twelfth month you're getting
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Operating under the assumption of 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year [vacation time, right?], that's 2000 hours a year, or 50$/hr.
That's 10 months at 10 cents an hour to equal that rate, plus you'll need to make back the amount you "lost" over the next month or so, so say it's 11 months to break even, at which point your earnings surpass the salary and really start taking off.
The main problem I see with the latter is that it pretty much guarantees you won't be working there for much more than a year, and cert
Interviews vary a lot. (Score:3)
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Why so many?
Sounds like huge pain in the ass. I get irritated if interviews run more than 1 hour. If you want my time, pay me for it.
Re:3 on-site interviews means a FAIL (Score:4, Insightful)
You want a job? Pay for it with you time.
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I have a job I like, pays well and lets me set my own hours. You have to convince me to come work for you.
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Congratulations, I assume you're not applying then. If you're the best candidate you'll likely have been actively recruited and bypass half the interviews. If you're not the very best candidate then the onus is on you to prove yourself to the employer, not the other way around.
Re:3 on-site interviews means a FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us wouldn't work for a company that had such a one sided view of things. I want a better job. The company wants the best employee. I'm happy to prove I'm the best employee, but they have to prove they're the best employer. If they want me to jump through hoops, then clearly they want a trained poodle and not an experienced software developer.
In that sense I agree with you. We're clearly not going to get on.
Re:3 on-site interviews means a FAIL (Score:4, Funny)
Who is this insanely awesome employer of yours?
From what I've gathered so far: they hire clueless idiots who spend all day posting banalities on the 'net, pay them excessively, and don't force a standard workday.
For the love of god please clue us in.
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From what I've gathered so far: they hire clueless idiots who spend all day posting banalities on the 'net, pay them excessively, and don't force a standard workday.
For the love of god please clue us in.
I bet he edits /. summaries.
Re:3 on-site interviews means a FAIL (Score:4, Interesting)
Why so many? Sounds like huge pain in the ass. I get irritated if interviews run more than 1 hour. If you want my time, pay me for it.
Agreed. They may be the top of the prestige ladder, but google and microsoft are both places where you'll be expected to put in long hours for average pay. Maybe the hours and hours of interviews is really just to determine who values their time the least?
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I know people who work for these companies. What you say here is absolutely not true.
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Average pay for a new Software Engineering BS grad is 80,000 USD? Microsoft was paying that in 2010. What are the above average companies paying and who are they?
I started at $60k for 30-35 hours a week at no-name company in PDX in 2006.. Cost of living is way less there than Redmond. I did a few phone interviews with MS back then, but they only wanted to start me at 68k or something like that. Though I'll admit having MS on my resume might have been better for my career in the long run, but I had a damn good time in Portland and I'm glad I got to live out most of my 20s with short working hours and a decent wad of cash in my pocket in a fun town.
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Why so many?
Sounds like huge pain in the ass. I get irritated if interviews run more than 1 hour. If you want my time, pay me for it.
Going AC since frankly my work history is my own, and I'd rather not have any negative commentary that follows be pinned to current/past employers.
Frankly a bit surprised seeing people make comments of this sort... I strongly suspect most of the folk making claims like this frankly either are naive and doing entry level (think university assistant admin where you're just starting out- which was usually hour to two, single interview in my experience), or blatantly arrogant (and perhaps a few who actually hav
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I've rarely interviewed more than once for a job, never 3 times. And got every job I ever wanted (there were some I didn't want I got and some I didn't want I didn't get). Either
1) I am a super mega-uber-super-fantastic-interviewee and you are a loser or
2) different companies hire in different ways.
The number of interviews is meaningless.
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OP didn't qualify the statement. It sounded like OP saying all interviews were 3 or more in a day which is false.
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You mean in one day, or 3 separate visits? If you don't get an offer after the first visit with Google, you got rated poorly by someone.
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Or they changed job requirements part way through and are still interested in you for a related position but not the specific job they were looking for before.
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Which is not to say you are unfit for the position. It's an indicator, but people get bad interview loops. Google knows this.
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Yeah, Google and Microsoft are massive failures at the moment.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, what is the difference in the amount of money paid to Google for the software you want help with versus what has been paid to Microsoft?
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I'd wager it's a fairly bottom heavy ratio.
Google would be well served to have an internal department which handles only the resolution of software problems for paying customers - and I'm not talking about just "tech support", but something more akin to Launchpad (complete with user-ranked bugs). Things like the bugs in Google Calendar which make client-side association with the calendars in eg. Outlook or Thunderbird cause events to be unmodifiable by the owners when the account data is imported.
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I've never been able to talk to anyone at Google about a problem or have them acknowledge it, much less work with me to fix it.
Depends on the product. I know that Google Earth, at least, takes bug reports and feature requests via a public issue tracker on code.google.com. I've filed two feature requests. They acknowledged one of them.
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Which only goes to show that Google cares about the tech stuff, and MS just cares to make money.
or MS cares about its partners, which is presumably the job of an Associate Consultant.
Google doesn't care about it's customers. it doesn't have any, it just has users. it doesn't have Associate Consultants, just forum moderators, who probably don't work for Google anyway.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is wanting to you to be technical and MS only cares about how well you can talk.
Which only goes to show that Google cares about the tech stuff, and MS just cares to make money.
Not saying that Google doesn't want money, but it doesn't seem to be all that matters to them.
MS on the other hand, that is all that matters to them.
One of the best advice I ever got was:
Remember, no matter how great of a thing you create, unless someone sells it it will be forgotten.
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Best advice?
Sounds like one of the most depressing things I have ever heard.
I would rather create something wonderful no one ever sees than have what I create be dictated by some salesdrone.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a nice thought... but the problem is it becomes very difficult to fund future creations with that mindset. Unless you're fortunate enough to be in some funded department who is just doing R&D it's not a great way to go through life. Even if you are that fortunate, chances are there's some very political individual properly extracting enough from your group to make sure the company at large is getting value out of their funding.
Same holds for pretty much any productive endeavor.
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Funny, I meant creative. I wonder if that was Freudian.
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I wish it did. But even artists need to eat.
For better or worse (I'd argue better), we're past the days of aristocracy founded artistic endeavours so if you plan to do "interesting work", be it paint, code, write, architect, etc. you better find a way to market it. It doesn't necessarily have to be mass marketed or commercially successful, but doing it as the OP suggested "something wonderful no one ever sees" isn't viable unless it's just your spare time.
And if it is, more power to you, but I'd argue that
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Google is wanting to you to be technical and MS only cares about how well you can talk.
Of course, Google has the advantage of prior knowledge here. They probably had the guy profiled before he even signed up for the interview.
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No, that's actually quite short sighted. Many important discoveries and inventions were never realized in their time, yet the memory of them and their inventors persists.
{List of all important scientissts goes here}
Furthermore, having a work remebered is not the most important thing in the world.
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Just a thought.
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I wonder how much they paid for Stonehenge back then...
A lot, in terms of GDP. It took maybe 1-5% of the population several years to move some big ass stones across the UK.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Not saying that Google doesn't want money, but it doesn't seem to be all that matters to them.
Playing devil's advocate, you could also say "Not saying that Microsoft isn't technical, but it doesn't seem to be all that matters to them".
To be fair, a lot of companies underestimate the ability for tech people to have good communication skills, for both inside the company and without. When you have big companies like Microsoft and Google, to have a good infrastructure, you need good communication. This just shows that, for one reason or another, Microsoft has chosen to focus on this in their current hiring process.
Honestly, they both want / need money and tech to stay in business.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is wanting to you to be technical and MS only cares about how well you can talk.
You do realize that the people the pay the bills are often not interested in the tiny highly technical details. This is also why very often Architects are higher up the food chain than operations personnel.
It's the architect's ability to communicate that separates them.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
No (Score:2)
He was interviewing for different positions in the 2 companies.
Probably a developer post in Google and a consultant post in Microsoft. Microsoft's interviews for the product developer post are fully technical.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is wanting to you to be technical and MS only cares about how well you can talk.
Well, right out of the gate he was not applying for the same job. So its inherently and apples to oranges comparison.
Which only goes to show that Google cares about the tech stuff, and MS just cares to make money.
That's drawing a pretty specific conclusion from virtually no information. Your wouldn't have some sort of bias would you?
One could chalk it up to the different requirements of the job he's applying for.
Or one could spin it that Microsoft values effective communication highly even for its technical positions.
None of the above (Score:2)
I agree, making a profit is immoral! It might be better to just get a doctorate and work at a university, at least then he can expand knowledge without exploiting anyone.
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You have a Microsoft? Me too!
i wonder who has the third one.
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I hear there's pills for that these days.
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"Hmm... why would someone be jealous?"
Not to mention that I'm sure both Google and Microsoft employee plenty of minimum wage workers... those campuses don't clean themselves (yet) as well as hordes of junior level monkeys, clerks, secretaries, etc. Just getting an interview at a company isn't all that impressive unless it's a high-up job that falls into the "dream job" category for thousands or millions of people.
Re:Ugh (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention that I'm sure both Google and Microsoft employ plenty of minimum wage workers...
Actually Google singlehandedly raised the "minimum wage" across the Silicon Valley back in the day with all other tech giants having to catch up to avoid losing talent... don't sound so bitter man...
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There's no need to go to the US -- Google and Microsoft (etc) recruit from other top universities.
While I was at Imperial College Google came about twice a year. Their London office was less than a mile away, but I'd be surprised if they didn't visit Cambridge, Oxford, UCL etc etc almost as often.
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Re:Ugh (Score:4, Funny)
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Funnier still, it sounds like he actually interviewed for two different positions - some technical kind at Google, and then a marketing consultant for MS. What's the point of comparing the two?
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If I was interviewing, this would impress me. I'd be inclined to argue because having people come up with alternative solutions and able to explain why theirs is better will generally lead to a better product.