a shrine of insignificance

I am home sick today, and just looking to relieve my bordem by stumbling. I come across this site. I totally agree about programming interviews. I have had a few in my time and most have been reasonable, asking about designing an efficient algorithm for a task. But then there was my second round of MicroSoft interviews. I decided that I didn’t want to kiss up and b.s. the entire thing, so I was very honest. When they asked me if I used Visual Studio, I told them the truth. No. I told them that I didn’t like the fact that when I wrote ANSI C++ in Visual C++ it returned errors. That seemed to displease them, oh well, and they went on to the programming part of the interview. My task: Write the function for the TRS-80 that translates a charecter as a byte of binary into the pattern of pixels that would represent the charecter on the screen. Insane! Even more insane the interviewer got angry when I asked him for more details on how the TRS-80 did screen output. He refused to tell me if there was a function that accepted relative (or even absoulte) pixel locations and wrote them to the screen. He only begrugedly told me what the pixel size of a charecter was. And of course I had to write the thing in real code on a whiteboard. Not only do I hate writing on whiteboards, it is uncomfortable and my being left-handed makes it hard not to erase what I am writing as I write, but I am also very much a code directly on the computer. I do not write my code first, and I test as I write. I don’t just write out a whole program on paper once, type it into the computer and compile with the expectation it will work. The whole absurdity of the interview is heightened by the fact that I was applying for a Project Management Internship with the Visual Studio group, no TRS-80s there and Project Management is not a developer of low-level functions, nor would their be a need to write systems code while working on a GUI application. Needless to say I wasn’t too suprised or upset when they turned me down. Especially, since Intel offered my an internship the next week.

Filed under: General on June 12th, 2006