A student of mine needed to miss one of our meetings to prepare for an interview. When we did meet, I asked how the interview went — they hadn’t heard anything at the time (update: they got the job!), but felt it went well.
We chatted a bit about the interview process, and the conversation reminded me of a few interviews I did while at Microsoft. Most went well, but one went horribly wrong.
Out of the Wilderness
I started at Microsoft as a Support Engineer (SE), back when the Rolling Stones were singing the praises of the Start button on the newly released Windows 95. I was hired at teh Charlotte, North Carolina office to support Office products, and later moved to OS support for Windows NT, handling more difficult cases and new products.
There was no real future in Charlotte for technical growth — all you could ever do there was customer support. To advance, I needed to be in Washington where the product teams are located. And so it was that I applied for and got my first internal interview on the team which supports OEM’s like Dell and HP.
I flew to Seattle at the end of the week, as my interview loop was on a Friday at the downtown Bellevue office.
Now, before I get too into this story, there’s one thing you should know. This occurred in 1997, when Jeff Foxworthy, the southern born comic, starred in a popular comedy TV show. You may remember some of his "You Might Be a Redneck" jokes. This will become important later (don’t get ahead of me).
We return you to your regularly scheduled story.
The team of about 15 enjoyed a morale event the week previous, brewing their own beer at a local brewery. When I arrived on Friday, they were having a mini-morale event, enjoying their malty creations with some snacks. My loop started before lunch, and ended during the morale event.
As I was waiting for my last interviewer (I’ll call him Doug), others on the team invited me to have some beer and some snacks, which I did. I chatted with a few of them as we drank and snacked, then Doug came to get me, and a beer for himself. We headed outside for our talk, as it was a nice warm sunny day in the PNW.
Which is how I found myself on a job interview, slowly becoming keenly aware that I had a beer.
One of Jeff Foxworthy’s jokes goes "If you’ve ever brought a beer on a job interview… you might be a redneck." That line started echoing in my head. It was so loud, I thought Doug could hear it too.
For the record, I was born and raised in New England — Doug didn’t know that, however. Remember, I flew there from Charlotte, NC — for all he knew, I just might be a redneck.
And so, without ever breaking eye contact with Doug, I grabbed my beer and sloooooowly bent over sideways to put it on the ground next to me, then sloooooowly sat back upright again.
The rest of the discussion went smoothly.
And when the interview was over, I quickly picked up the beer and disposed of it before thanking everyone and leaving.
I thought I had absolutely trashed my chances with that team — the beer was the icing on a crap cake, and it amplified every other bad answer I thought I had given. I flew home dejected.
Of course, my assessment was wrong. I got the job and moved to the PNW where I spent the next 20 years of my life.
Coda
Several years later, I was at a reunion lunch for this team. Doug and I were talking when he brought up the beer incident. He wondered what I was doing — was the beer not good? Was I not feeling well?
He had no clue about the Foxworthy bit or my concerns about coming there from Charlotte. When I told him my thoughts that day, he had a laugh, and now we both have (read in Paul Harvey’s voice) … the rest of the story.
Out Of The Frying Pan
After being an SE for several years, I wanted to move to a product group. These are the teams that actually build the software and products you all know and love. By now, I had been supporting Windows NT Embedded, and the team was ramping up to build Windows XP Embedded. There were openings for test engineers, and I got onto a loop for one of those positions.
I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much about that interview loop. What I recall is one notable hour. The interviewer was a very experienced tester, and he started our conversation with the following question:
You are driving your car, when it stops running at the top of a hill. You need to get to the service station at the top of the next hill. What do you do?
OK, typical testing question: something weird has happened, and you need to figure out what to do. I tried everything I could think of:
- put the car in neutral and roll down and up the other side (not enough energy)
- push the car downhill to give it more energy (I fell trying to do that)
- call for assistance (no phones)
- walk to the service station for a tow (not safe to do so)
- push it off-road to go around the hill (not possible — the road was cut into the landscape)
- fix the car (no tools, no way to know what was wrong)
And so on. After every "That didn’t work," I asked more questions, refined my understanding, and tried again.
For almost the entire hour.
I tried everything I could to get that car up the next hill to the service station, to no avail. Everything I did was met with a reason why it wouldn’t work.
As a metaphor for software testing, it was brilliant — you try everything you can to get something to work (or something to break), often with no success. The interviewer was trying to get me to give up, to be discouraged, to stop trying. In short, he wanted to see if I had what it took to be a tester. I didn’t, which is one of the reasons why I got the job.
The one thing I didn’t try, the interviewer told me at the end, was try to start the car again. Sometimes, tests fail for no apparent reason — maybe it’s a timing issue, or a resource wasn’t freed up yet, or maybe it was an odd numbered Tuesday. Running them again can results in the tests passing.
Again, my assessment of my performance was moot — I did get that job as well. And I learned that being damned stubborn is a great trait for a software tester.
Out of Options
My last internal interview loop turned out quite differently from the others.
It was somewhere around 2008 or so, and I was tired of what my job in the Embedded space. A friend was a software architect, deisgning high level systems that inform and drive the design of our products. I was a project manager for servicing Embedded product at the time, and desperately wanted something more technical. There was an opening on his team that seemed like a good fit for me, so off I went on another loop.
Again, I don’t recall much of the day, but one specific question comes to me in my nightmares when I’m feeling down and can’t get out of my own head:
What is your favorite technology?
Simple enough question, right? It’s a technical role, so it makes sense they want to know about my favorite technology.
Here’s where I made a horrible mistake. Let me explain…
I was quite nervous that day — I hadn’t interviewed for several years, and I really wanted to do well on this loop.
My friend and I met for lunch just before this nterview. We were discussing the Toyota Prius, a popular car in the area, although I wasn’t a fan at the time. This was the first hybrid I had ever seen, and I joked that it was a car powered by four cordless drills and a lawn mower engine.
Quite simply, I knew nothing about the car — how the regenerative braking system worked, how the charging system worked, the composition of the batteries, the size of the gas engine, nothing. It was just what we had been talking about at lunch.
I wasn’t thinking straight when I was asked about my favorite technology. I unthinkingly replied, "The Toyota Prius".
The interviewer asked some follow-ups, but I had nothing meaningful. I must have seemed I was trying to ingratiate myself with him. Of course I was, but it wasn’t a conscious decision. It was a combination of nerves, immediacy, and personal aggrandizement.
I was inauthentic and obviously so, and nothing is more unattractive, in any context.
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. And I never got a chance to interview for another internal position before I left to company.
Summary
While my career didn’t end right then, it never again looked as bright or felt so limitless as it had prior to that. I tried one other lateral move several years later, but didn’t get past an informal talk with the hiring manager. My final Microsoft interview was my exit interview in 2017.
On the whole, I don’t think there is any real secret to interviews. Sure, you need to know the stuff they want you to do — there’s no sense interviewing to be a welder when you don’t know how to weld — but you can dance and prevaricate a bit about that if you’re close. That’s just knowledge, which is attainable by anyone.
However, when asked about the real things — what you like, who you are, what makes you tick — no amount of shucking and jiving will fool people, at least not people who matter. You need to be authentic with them. Nothing else will do.
While my lack of authenticity kept me from a job I thought I wanted, oddly enough, it was me finally being authentic that led to me leaving the company to become a teacher.
Oh, and what should I have said when asked "What is your favorite technology?" It really hasn’t changed much in the 15+ years since I was first asked that question, and I’ll address it in a future post.