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Microsoft drops brain teasers from employee interview process
The interview process for Silicon Valley developer jobs has always had a reputation of being an arcane trial by fire exercise designed to weed down thousands of applicants to just the selected few antisocial geniuses.
Microsoft has however been making an effort to improve their hiring process to make it more useful and inclusive, and in a blog post John Montgomery, partner director of program management at Microsoft, explained the changes Microsoft has made to the process, which has meant cutting out such as questions as how many golf balls will fit into a 747.
Rethinking how we interview in Microsoft's Developer Division.
Also at Business Insider.
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Microsoft Drops Brain Teasers From Employee Interview Process
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Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Monday December 31 2018, @04:27PM (2 children)
Just curios but what exactly was new and significant about the Xbox? There was already Nintendo consoles, Sony Playstation etc that had been out for decades already when the Xbox was released. Not to mention the multitude of gaming consoles (not "home" computers etc) that had fallen by the roadside up until that point. There wasn't anything technically impressive with it as far as I can recall. At least nothing revolutionary that had not been seen before. It seemed more like just another MS move trying to squeeze into another market with all their Windows-cash that they didn't know what to do with such as mp3 players, computer peripherals, mobile phones, computer games ... There just doesn't seem to be a market they don't like to choke their way into by tossing large amounts of dollars onto the burning pile of shit that it eventually turns into. Has there been a successful venture so far? Browsers failed, their search engines have been shit. I guess the Xbox is some kind of shining beacon in that regard.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lentilla on Tuesday January 01 2019, @01:26AM (1 child)
DirectX? (I don't actually know the answer - but that's my best guess.) If game developers can write for PC and painlessly port to Xbox (or vice-versa) then XBox immediately becomes far more attractive than other consoles.
So you are probably correct in saying there was nothing particularly special about the Xbox - except that Microsoft was able to take advantage of its monopoly position. Business as usual.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 01 2019, @01:59PM
Could be, I didn't consider that. But it's probably true. It was probably a double win for the developers. That said it was fairly bad for PC gaming since the conversions from Xbox->PC was normally horribly crappy. You could really tell which was the, bad, conversion titles -- frame locks and the game was so obviously used to be played with a controller instead of the normal mouse+keyboard combo (some didn't even bother to change the graphics telling you to hit the X-button etc).