The Evolution of Tech Interviews: Lessons from my Microsoft experience

Ever wondered what it's like to interview at one of the world's most prestigious tech companies?

Let me tell you.

April 2003. I’m sitting in a 7x7 office on the Microsoft campus, facing my first interviewer of the day. I’m 23 years old, with some industry experience already under my belt, though nothing as prestigious as the company I now find myself interviewing for.

My palms sweat. My heart beats too quickly. I try not to show how nervous I am. In 2003, Microsoft was still a developer’s Mecca. If you are working for Microsoft, you’ve made it. And I desperately want to make it, because my current work situation is quickly becoming unbearable, with a punitive manager, a clueless skip, and zero psychological safety.

“On a small island in the South Pacific,” my interviewer starts, “lives an aboriginal tribe with a crazy rule: if they find out they have blue eyes, they must sacrifice themselves to their god that very same day.”

My heart thunders in my chest. This is one of Microsoft’s famous brainteasers. And because I studied for this interview, I think I know where it’s going! I know it’s not exactly ethical, but I’m going to pretend to be super-smart and “solve” the puzzle.

“They can’t look in a mirror to tell the color of their own eyes, nor would they tell each other their eye color,” continues the interviewer. “One day a Spanish ship anchors off the coast. The explorers come onshore, and, ignorant of the tribe’s custom, mention that some of them have blue eyes. Five days later, some of them kill themselves.”

“What, all five?” I blurt out.

The interviewer’s eyes widen. “I didn’t tell you there were five of them!”

I blush in embarrassment and admit the truth. Can’t exactly pretend after I answered the brainteaser’s question before the interviewer asked it. I’d outsmarted myself, or, perhaps, my nervousness had outsmarted me.

The current interviewing approach stinks

A few years later, Microsoft stopped using brainteasers, deprioritizing questions requiring a “lightbulb moment” for those designed to showcase an interviewee’s ability to deal with ambiguity, clearly explain their thoughts, and showcase their methods for dealing with complexity.

But at its core, the practice of tech interviews hasn’t changed much. While companies espouse a preference for competencies over skills, they’re let down by weak interviewers who frequently succumb to the need to demonstrate their own intelligence to the interviewee, or who are simply too nervous to conduct an effective interview.

Additionally, the format of breaking the interview down into a set of rapid-fire problems and a dynamic not all that different from an interrogation, leads to the necessity by the interviewee to show skills they will never need to use on the job. When was the last time you had to write an algorithm to recreate a binary tree from an in-order and pre-order traversal lists? When was the last time you had to do any of the coding problems typically asked at interviews?

For me, literally never in my 28-year career. Not once. And if I do ever have to write anything like that, I have access to vast resources both online and on my team. I have time. What I *don’t* have is a judge looking over my shoulder to see how I’m doing.

I will cover some better ways to interview later in this series, but for now, if we can't control how the interview is conducted, how do we prepare for it?

In the next article, I'll go into specifics of preparing for each part of the technical interview. Here, I'd like to focus on something else: the mindset I've found helpful to adopt.

The emperor has no clothes!

There's a presumed imbalance of power in an interview setting. The interviewer is the emperor, presiding over your employment future. By their grace alone will you get that job you desperately want. Upon their goodwill is your career hinged.

This view of the interview setting is ultimately self-defeating. Yes, you do want to make a good impression. But it's critical to realize that the person on the other side of the interview table is human too, with all the typical human mores. They suffer from lack of confidence, from lack of time, from lack of patience. They struggle with effective communication. They may even struggle with their own performance on the team. Or, if they're the hiring manager, their career is largely in your hands. What if they hire you and you turn out to be an underperformer, making them look bad in front of their own boss, or, worse yet, destroy the team with your negativity?

They're hoping that you're their next rockstar, and fearing you're their next problem. Have some empathy for that. Interviewing is much like dating: there's risk all around.

What's more, let me clue you in on a little secret. There’s a really good chance that the first two-three interviewers in your loop are going to be relatively new, and just as nervous as you are. Seems weird, right? I still remember how nervous I was that first time I sat down on the opposite side of that table. What if the interviewee said something I didn’t understand? What if she coded an algorithm I couldn’t immediately evaluate? What if they’re legitimately smarter than I am, and this becomes painfully obvious during the interview?

The best interviewers figure out that the interview dynamic works much better when it’s pitched not as a competition, but as a collaboration. I’ll discuss this more in detail when we talk about how to best conduct interviews, but just remember that as an interviewer you hold the power to change the dynamic too. Even in a competitively-pitched interview session, try to push the interviewer toward a more collaborative approach. “I’m thinking that we should try …, what do you think?” “I am struggling with this part of the question, what do you think might be the best way to approach it?”

It feels like you’re giving up the farm, admitting weakness, but think back to your work experience. When was the last time you were forced to solve something entirely on your own, with nobody to bounce ideas with? (Oh, this happened to you? I hope you left that job quickly!) The point of a successful interview is to show the interviewer your critical thinking, your communication, your work ethic, your ability to work as part of a team. You might show the first of these by just ramming through the problem by sheer intellect, but you show very little of the others.

Good interviewers know this. Bad interviewers… well…

The Dreaded Anti-Loop

I forget who came up with this concept. Might’ve been Scott Hanselman. But the idea is that for any given interviewee, there exists an interview loop they couldn’t possibly pass, no matter how smart or prepared they are. This might be because of personality clashes, the mood of the interviewers, or a myriad other factors.

Don’t assume, when you get that rejection, that the problem is entirely on your end. You might’ve fallen victim to an anti-loop.

But do spend some time after every interview loop analyzing what went well and what might’ve gone better. If you weren’t able to solve a problem, take the time to solve it afterwards, then analyze what led you astray during the interview. Was it the pressure? Lack of a specific skill? A failure to engage the interviewer in a collaborative dynamic?

Draw your conclusions, and then practice for your next loop. I’ve had some spectacular interview fails in my life. I’ve left some interviews thinking I’m a total moron, and this happened both when I was an interviewee and an interviewer. But you know what? I made the effort to learn from those experiences, and to do better next time.

Oh, and that 2003 Microsoft interview?

I passed it.

Call to Action

I'd love to hear more stories from the Interview Trenches. Share your own interviewing experiences below. What has been your worst interviewing experience? What's been your best?