These days technical interviews are mainly coding (LeetCode) and system design. Makes me wonder how the technical interviews were like a decade ago even before LeetCode was born. Were they also algorithm coding questions? Any senior engineers care to chime in?
Microsoft did leetcode since the 80s. Most other companies copied Microsoft style interviews, adapting things according to their culture
Interesting. But Microsoft interviews nowadays seem to be easier than most of the others.
Microsoft used to be the clear and definitive tech leader. So they got the best candidates in the world. Now, the pool of candidates is worse, pay is not leading and interviews have scaled back in comparison.
Most of the current leetcode style interviews are just copying what Microsoft started decades ago. It was a drill with tons of technical questions although we’ve since done away with the brain teasers that involve light bulbs behind doors and crap like that.
They still ask brain teasers for intern/new grad phone screens unfortunately
My brother interviewed at Microsoft in the early 90s. He had to implement A* algorithm on the whiteboard. My interviews up until about 2010 were pretty reasonable. Eg fairly simple coding problems and discussing past projects.
+1 on MS methods others have reported. You also had to know how computers worked, differences between different programming approaches, and such, but most of all, whether you knew what you were doing in your previous jobs and everything that you claimed in your resume. There's no reason why that wouldn't weed out the weaker candidates.
Ask some questions on the phone. Send code sample to find bugs via email. Then brought on site. It's a fucking mesh of online quizzes, then phone onscreen then onsite ... Well you know the drill. I liked how they would pick a project from your experience and then drill you on your work.
About the same but they used to love those how to move Mt Fuji questions
Same as now, but less hard. Also fewer resources like leetcode back then. I remember googling for hours to find interview questions in 2000. Woukd have found maybe 50 in all
Same
Careercup was the go to place about 5 years ago (which is how I landed a job at msft). Interviews have always been technical with a heavy focus on efficient algorithms.
Technical