100% agree. I interviewed at Microsoft nearly a decade ago now. I was told I'd be interviewing for the company, and then if I was hired, based on preference and ability and need I'd be placed with a team
When I got there I was told I'd be interviewing for the SQL Server team, interesting work, but not something I'm interested in. I had never taken operating systems in university because it was always available at a time that another class I HAD to take occurred.
So by some random chance, I'd never heard of a semaphore. Perhaps inexcusable at this point in my career, but I was ignorant of the topic at that time.
My first interview question was to write a way to let many readers on a resource, and only 1 writer, with no readers reading at the time of the writer writing. I decided to use lists of something or another, ProcessId, or something similar.
Every time I would go to write the code, i'd get a few characters in, and the interviewer would interrupt me and ask me questions to help me along. Since I had no idea what a semaphore was, much less that I was supposed to use it, we spent like 30 minutes of this back and forth, me trying to write, him interrupting me. By the end of the session I had a single line initializing a list written.
Some of my other interviews during that battery of interviews went better than that one for sure but, needless to say, I didn't get the job.
When I got there I was told I'd be interviewing for the SQL Server team, interesting work, but not something I'm interested in. I had never taken operating systems in university because it was always available at a time that another class I HAD to take occurred.
So by some random chance, I'd never heard of a semaphore. Perhaps inexcusable at this point in my career, but I was ignorant of the topic at that time.
My first interview question was to write a way to let many readers on a resource, and only 1 writer, with no readers reading at the time of the writer writing. I decided to use lists of something or another, ProcessId, or something similar.
Every time I would go to write the code, i'd get a few characters in, and the interviewer would interrupt me and ask me questions to help me along. Since I had no idea what a semaphore was, much less that I was supposed to use it, we spent like 30 minutes of this back and forth, me trying to write, him interrupting me. By the end of the session I had a single line initializing a list written.
Some of my other interviews during that battery of interviews went better than that one for sure but, needless to say, I didn't get the job.