Anonymous – on interviewing at Microsoft.

September 19, 2000

Dear Collin,

I’m sure I’ve told you about my cousin, the one who worked at Microsoft? The one who retired with large land and stock holdings in his thirties? Because he worked there, I’ve always felt like I would work there too someday, at least I did until I interviewed with them last week.

My full day of interviews started off with an investigation of my work ethic. The beautiful HR representative asked me how many hours I’d worked per week at my last internship. Forty? Is that all? She asked me what my former boss would say about me if she called him up and asked him about me right now. I think she wanted me to say that he would say I was brilliant, a saving grace to the company, that I had to be dragged away from my computer. All I could get out was, “He would, uh, say, uh, I was a hard worker, and that I learned a lot.”

She also wanted to know if I had checked with my boss to see if the program I wrote five months ago is still working. I honestly hadn’t checked, although I knew that it worked perfectly when I left. (I checked after the interview and found that they hardly ever use my program, but that when they do, it works superbly). She was scandalized by my lack of concern, and a sense of corporate guilt welled up inside of me. This interview was not going well.

My next interview was with a woman who seemed very dedicated to her job. I was taken to her windowless room, which was of course filled with workstations and servers. First she asked me a Zen-like computer-science question: Given a circular list of data items, what was the quickest way to get from the beginning to the end? I floundered. She followed up with a question concerning two jars full of marbles, filled with a hundred red and a hundred green marbles, respectively. If ten red marbles were put in the green jar, and then ten marbles were drawn from the green jar to be put in the red jar, how many marbles of each color would be in each jar? She asked me to come up with an equation. With her hints, I answered the question. Her final question was: What were my computer-related hobbies? She didn’t want to know what kind of plain old hobbies I had, just my computer hobbies. I play the violin, I study multiple foreign languages – but she wasn’t interested in that.

I was taken next to a room with an actual window, where I was introduced to a smiling man. By then I had learned to mistrust smiles. He asked me another marble question, followed by a light-bulb question, then did something I will never forget. He picked a highlighter out of his drawer, set it on end in front of me, and asked me to describe how I would test it. I must have listed twenty tests, including toxicity, endurance, buoyancy – yet still he asked for more. Finally, I reached out and grabbed the highlighter. It turns out that this was what he had been looking for all along.

My final test was administered by a nearly unintelligible (though obviously quite intelligent) Indian man. He, too, asked me a riddle. It concerned an Indian village which was in the midst of an epidemic. Infected villagers were identified by a red dot on their forehead. Each day the villagers gathered in a circle, so that each villager could see every other villager. If someone in the village was infected, a visitor to the village would say that “one or more of you has the disease.” Those that determined they had the disease would leave the village immediately, while the others would stay. This process was to be repeated once a day until all the sick people had left. Given a certain number of sick people and well people, how many days would it take for all of the sick people to leave? I still haven’t figured that one out.

I had one more meeting with the HR girl. When she asked me how the day went, I laughed. She didn’t find anything the slightest bit amusing.

Sincerely,

Anonymous