I failed the Microsoft interview after asking for a different brain teaser

One thing I've taken away in my career, interviewing every 3-5 years is that difficulty of interview & difficulty of job are uncorrelated. Often they are inversely correlated.

Possible reasons..

Sometimes a team is growing so fast / or turnover is so high / everyone is so busy / etc that they cannot really stand up a proper interview process .. and/or they just need to get people into seats, and are happy to fire fast later.

Sometimes a job is so boring and team leads have so much time on their hands that they can construct immaculate interview processes and spend hours grilling candidates.

Once long ago when I interviewed at Apple I was asked the classic "fork in the road, two guys, one always tells the truth and one always lies" riddle, with complete earnestness as far as I could tell. Possibly the single worst interview question I've ever been asked.

Of course I told the interviewer I'd heard it before and then gave the correct answer. In my case we just ended up chatting about previous experience instead of doing another brainteaser and I ultimately passed the interview, I think. But afterward the recruiter strung me along for weeks telling me they wanted to make an offer but not giving me one, and I ended up going to Microsoft instead.

Not the worst interview experience I've had, though. That would be the time I interviewed for a full time position after an internship and a group of guys who knew me and had worked with me all summer asked me a pointless brainteaser as the only interview question. I crashed and burned for a full 40 minutes in front of them. Humiliating, and pretty much a pointless hazing ritual as they offered me the job anyway. Luckily I got a better offer and was able to turn them down.

Here are some other brainteasers I've been asked in interviews. I actually think these physics based ones are fun (probably because I had no trouble solving them), but they're still terrible interview questions:

You're in a boat on a lake with a bowling ball. After you drop the ball overboard and it sinks to the bottom, is the lake water level higher or low […]

Just don't ask brain teasers when you conduct an interview; I believe they give no valid signal at all, and I also believe Microsoft does not ask them anymore.

The coding questions that require an "aha!" moment are very similar to brain teasers, and should also be avoided.

When I conducted interviews for FAANG, I asked somewhat simpler coding questions, something around DFS and/or topological sorting (without calling it by name, of course), because those are thing which you might actually need to implement at work: people sometimes traverse JSONs, and people sometimes resolve dependencies. No one has ever told me "oh, I know this problem, it's DFS", because surely I know they know it. Just show me that you can write the code.

> You have 12 marbles and a balance scale. One of the 12 marbles is inconsistent with the others, meaning it could be heavier or lighter than its peers of normal weight. You are allowed to use the balance scale exactly 3 times to identify which of the 12 marbles is irregular AND determine whether it is heavier or lighter than normal.

I also got this riddle, in 2015. I couldn't solve it. Tbh, I think it's a terrible question. There isn't really a step-by-step problem solving process, but you just need to have a "leap" to realize you can weight the marbles in groups of 3. I also got rejected. It's crazy to get rejected from a one-question riddle like this

My favourite interview question that I received was when I was asked to write code that would serialize/deserialize a binary tree and was told it was fine to use "any programming language".

They received a crash course in the power of Haskell ADT and `deriving (Show, Read)`.

Halfway through my career, being on both sides of the table (interviewer and interviewee,) I've observed that a common interviewer mistake is to expect candidates to regurgitate facts; or be able to provide a memorized answer.

In this case, the goal is to hire great engineers; and great engineers do not memorize solutions to every problem, nor can they come up intuitively with great solutions in a matter of minutes.

Counterpoint to many responses here - when I have interviewed people, it’s a really positive signal if the candidate says they have already seen a problem- the we can move onto something more interesting! Not solving does not mean failure either. As a candidate myself I always mention if I have seen similar problems, such as finding primes - real example, and I was hired on that loop at Microsoft!

On the other hand, if I heard that a candidate had not mentioned they had the same question twice, or later let it be known they already knew the answer, I would lose a lot of trust in them.

Be honest; it’s more likely you will be hired by honest people.

I really loved to work there. I knew alot of friends, toured the campus, and even worked with prior employees that had good experiences. Every product before 2015 was beautiful (i still miss my Zune).

Then they broke me. I tried to give feedback on the products, interviewed, and really tried to reach out to them. Mostly ignored (except Outlook team, thanks ). The heavy marketing and tech debt within Windows is what did it for me. Rant over.... the interview felt like some trick questions at that time.

> Microsoft, of all places, might sound like a weird company to target in 2026.

Heh, Microsoft might actually have been weird to target in 2015, especially in SV / startup circles, given that pg had declared it dead in 2007 (https://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html) I guess the Netherlands didn't get that particular memo.

In 2026 Microsoft might actually be interesting again, given it's up there in the Mag 7 jockeying for position in the AI race. I know it's gonna be impossible to get an accurate vibe-check on HN, but I wonder what younger folks think of it today...