Microsoft puzzles

Not at all.

It should be expected that the interviewer would like to know if you've seen the question before as it invalidates the reason for asking that question, and gives a false representation of your abilities if you know the answer. By asking the question the interviewer is obviously asking you to reason/think on your feet. In my second interview I actually told the guy that I had already heard a particular puzzle so he asked another. I wouldn't usually condone a site that posted such the specific group of questions if the average person could be trusted not to abuse it, however I don't feel that is the case, so therefor such a site, in my opinion shouldn't exist.

Not sure if this was part of the question, but I don't think interviews should be just puzzle questions either. Most of my MS interviews have been less then 40% puzzles.

The best questions that I have seen is for the questioner too ask about some simple object or concept of in the field, and then to keep asking for more information, based on your responses. This is something like the little kid who asks repeated asks 'Why?', but more intelligently done. If the interrogator is good, it doesn't take long before you move from talking something you thought you knew cold to babbling about things you don't know but really think you should.

(Nightmare question on graduate A oral exam: 'Tell me about angular momentum'. It did not take long from that starting point for me to demonstrate a gross lack of understanding of group theory. 'Tell me about the helium atom' undid a friend of mind. These sorts of questions, properly followed up, are infinitely better at forcing a person to think then your average puzzles.)

If the puzzles truly were developed by Microsoft then they'd display blue screens of death twice a week, they'd destroy all data on the hard drive when operated as directed, Microsoft would have reneged on an asserted 90-day warranty, and Microsoft would have developed partial fixes but require fee-bearing calls to technical support to ask about the availability of the partial fixes.

You can get a fellowship for being able to solve rgp chestnuts? Where? Are any other skills necessary?

I presume (from experience of the software they produce) that they'd have turned you down flat if you'd got any of the answers right.

Hmm, I have a feeling I can't win at this.

All I can say is that if you spent a single day working at MS, you would think much much better about it. It's a wonderful place to work.

<grin>

Shane! Join us! Reach out with your feelings!

Use the Penguin, Shane!

'You will never find a more wretched hive of sc...' Well, I'm glad you like it there.

Oh I do. I own a Mac, a PC laptop running w2k, as well as redhat. I would like to say though when I installed redhat it took a personal hatred of w2k and renumbered it's partition so that I had to manually figure out and change the partition number in my primary windows98 boot.ini to get w2k back. hrmmmm.....

My only dispute is with the word 'quickly'. I wish the process were quicker, so we could all move on to working with our computers instead of fighting with them.

Well, I don't like the company's policies, but then I don't like a lot of corporate dirty tricks - Microsoft aren't unique there.

Here are some of the Microsoft products I have used which are fundamentally broken:

MS-DOS (3, 3.3, 4, 5, 6, 6.2, 6.22, 7), including its 'utilities' Windows (2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 3.11WW, 95, 98, NT4), including its 'utilities' Word Powerpoint Access Microsoft C 5.1 Internet Explorer Outlook Express

Here are some of the Microsoft products I have used which more or less work as expected:

Visual Basic Microsoft C 6.00a Visual C++ (but MFC is unusable). Note, however, that Visual C++ gets /worse/ with each release. Last time I tried, it couldn't correctly compile this program:

#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { unsigned long count = 0; int ch; while((ch = getchar()) != EOF) ++count; printf('%lun', count); return 0;

It compiled the program, but not correctly - when the program was run, it produced no output. That was Visual C++ 6. Visual C++ 5 and prior have no trouble with it. (BTW I am given to understand that a bugfix^WService Pack was issued which fixed this problem. Too late, MS, too late.)

If I didn't have to /use/ Windows, I'd love it! A toy OS for lusers to play with, so they can pretend they're 'using a computer'. Keeps them happy, keeps them out of my way.

For the last year or so I have been fortunate because, most of the time, I can get away with not using Windows. But sometimes I find myself sat in front of a Gates interface, and I find it hard to stifle a scream.

I only wish it were true.

You already are.

I was only answering your points with some reflections of my own. I have no particular desire to plunge rec.puzzles into a flame war either.