matthewthornton.info

Hey.  I’m back.  Did I miss anything?

Now that I am solidly in place at my new job, I feel I can take the opportunity to burn some bridges and take some loving (or not-so-loving) swipes at our good friends at Microsoft.  For those of you who don’t know, I had an interview with M$ last fall.  I’m guessing it didn’t go well, since I never heard back from anyone–just an automated message to recoup my expenses.  They really do have an odd culture at that company.  The median age of the people working there seemed to be right about my age, which leads me to worry.  I don’t know about the rest of you but I want someone in the software shop with a long grey beard that talks endlessly about when he programmed his first FORTRAN compiler.  (That’s not sarcasm, that’s a fact–you need guys like that on the floor to tell you what to do sometimes.)  Everybody is walking around like they’re still on a college campus, with a Zune plugged into their ears, drinkin Starbucks.

The interviews I went through were dreadful.  I had one guy ask me to write some code, which I hate doing on the fly.  However, I managed to come up with what Knuth would call a “literate programming”-based solution to the problem that was easily readible and did the job.  The guy then started criticizing me saying it was too slow and wouldn’t be good in a production environment.  Oh!  And I didn’t mention this-you’ll love this one-I had to use C strings.  That’s right, they think the pinnacle of programming is to guess how big of a string they’ll need and let the hackers blow right through the stack.

My second interviewer was a nice woman but she asked me the question of what would I do if I had to arrange a meeting and prepare a presentation to give to a VP about what position a company should take about a particular sales acquisition.  This is obviously a test to see how well I think on my feet and handle a difficult problem but she kept interjecting humorously that “things like this have happened.”…….you know?  As a potential stockholder in the future (or not) of Microsoft, I’d suggest you’d keep that little nugget of information to yourself.

My final interview was over lunch.  No. No.  I know what you’re thinking.  A nice pleasant conversation with someone asking me what I thought of the company and whether or not I had any questions.  No.  An actual third interview with a guy asking me non-stop questions.  When he was done with his meal, he asked, “Are you ready?”  “Sure.  Yeah.  I haven’t eaten since last night but boy the bread sure was good.”  The guy kept asking me question after question about Vista and if there was anything I’d like fixed on the user interface and how I’d do it.  Seeing as how I haven’t used Vista, along with the other 5 habitable continents on the planet and parts of this one, I had a hard time coming up with answers to his questions/root cause analysis.

So, ultimately, it sounds like I probably didn’t get the job, which is ok since I got a better one anyway.  You know what the oddest part about the whole experience was?  They never asked me if I had any questions about the company.  They never asked if I wanted to know more about what I’d be doing.  Sure, I’d make smalltalk with the person on my way to the next interview but not anything that would get me hopping up and down about the company.  Normally, you get done with the interviewer’s part of the interview and then you get to ask them some questions.  The arrogance!  Let me make this abundantly clear to you, Microsoft–YOU.  ARE.  NO.  LONGER. THE. ONLY. SHOW. IN. TOWN.  You need to finnese me a little bit to convince me to travel across a continent to work for you.  A microsoft internship can actually carry a stigma with it now, depending on who you talk to so you need to convince me why I would want to work for you.  Not necessarily the other way around.  I’ll admit, I’m not the best programmer on the Earth and there were probably people better qualified for the internship but, hey.  As long as you’re there, why not make me feel all warm and fuzzy about Microsoft?  Dispel the myths?  Oh, well.  Guess they’ll never learn and that is a good segue into my next blog entry.