Sign up with GoogleApprox. 20 years experience interviewing and hiring technical candidates at US companies valued at 10-100’s of billions of dollars.
Not sure why that’s funny...
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Former Microsoft boss' favourite interview question
- Thread starter Bradley Prior
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Not sure why that’s funny...
Willie Trombone
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It's hilarious that you think it qualifies him to be the authority on interviewing and hiring.
Ballmer was at the helm from around 2000 to 2014. He replaced almost every division head while there and somehow they completely missed the mobile boat.
I don't think a nose for talent was what he was famous for.
MS share price during Ballmers tenure:
For comparison:
Apple:
Google:
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You don't think that a person integral to the success of the worlds most successful software company would be an authority on interviewing and hiring? It's not like I am making an appeal to authority here anyway: First, you miss the the entire point of the question - as though, asking "how", is something this "twit" has never thought of, when it reality, "how" and why is asked as a follow up, every single time. Then you propose "he should really have told you he didn't pick it at random", which is really, just dumbing the question down.
The opinion you were dismissive of was mine - the one that I justified by explaining how the answer to such a question would typically unfold. I am the person with thousands of US technical interviews, thousands of post-mortems, hundreds of hiring strategy and methodology meetings, participating in retroactive studies correlating hires to prior interview performance, etc., all in the gigantic big tech environment with super-high hiring bars.
The whole nasdaq followed that curve, and the other arguments show a basic base rate error - you're not going to have the same rate of growth when your company is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
If you really want to make the argument, that the magna cum laude Harvard graduate who is the 6th wealthiest man in the world, who as Executive VP, President before becoming CEO, from inception to ~$500Billion dollar Market Cap (before he became CEO), is some sort of twit, feel free to do that, but I would strongly recommend coming down to earth for a bit.
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Willie Trombone
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We disagree.
Rather compare Apples with Microsofts... Or Googles or other tech stock.
Certainly Ballmer mad a fortune off MS stock... Thanks largely to the direction the company took after he left... And no doubt his generous income from the firm for the many many years he worked there.
MS was on a high until he took the helm.
Arguably, XBox was his biggest success.
Being rich makes you a great or lucky investor in most cases, not a people person.
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You’re making the base rate fallacy again. If Microsoft grew at that rate it would be even more enormous. The fact that you see being the 2nd largest tech company on the world at $1.5T today or $500B then as some sort of failure is utterly absurd.
Willie Trombone
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The discussion is about Ballmer, not Microsoft.
He made his $$ off MS... I'm saying he wasn't as much the driving force for that success as you give him credit for as a CEO.
I'm not saying he hasn't been personally successful. I'm saying he's not the guy I would go to for advice on interviewing or hiring people.
Yes, and Ballmer was upper management of a company that started up in 1980 and was worth hundreds of billions of dollars two decades later. It's reasonable to assume he had some level of professional competence when it came to hiring.
It's certainly not guaranteed that he's some sort of hiring guru because of this, but when people have had this sort of success, it's best to give some credence to their opinion, and if you don't agree with it, then perhaps give a critical response to the person who explained the typical progression of the question, as opposed to "My opinion. Lolz.", or whatever.
Willie Trombone
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Actually I will concede that he was possibly successful as a hiring manager if that was one of his primary roles when Gates was head...
It seems it may have been.
Certainly his money was made under Gates and Nadella thanks to his 8% (under Gates) and 4% (under Nadella) stocks...
His own tenure as CEO was the worst for the company. But then perhaps as a middle to upper manager he was in his element.
That said, I still don't agree with this example of interview question, at least not if you've laid out a bit of your logic. It's too open to interpretation.
Besides, if he thinks answering yes to the gamble is a failure, well it seems he made a few of those poor gambles while at the helm.
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EVP and President are hardly middle management. You also seem to have a fairly simplistic understanding of importance of the role of the CEO relative to exogenous factors.
Answering yes is a failure, given what is laid out. It’s really not very open ended at all. It doesn’t mean you won’t necessarily get the job - there are other questions, and more importantly, if you end up reversing your decision on the follow up “prove it” question by showing otherwise, you’d likely get full credit (certainly more than someone who said “no”, and couldn’t prove it).
Willie Trombone
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No that is upper management, but he was not hired in either capacity.
Not sure what the level he was hired at matters... The stock price went up nearly 15x during his tenure of this position though. Point being that one really has to look at the average performance of the company over a long time, and look at the make up the long term leaders during that time. Poor stock performance over even long spans doesn’t necessarily mean poor leadership. Exogenous factors (like breakthroughs in search, or maturation of free *nix ecosystems) dominate the short to medium term.
backstreetboy
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He was right with that interview though. Apple dropped the price of the iPhone by $200 just two months after it launched and it was a terrible business phone because it didn't work with Exchange ActiveSync.
Willie Trombone
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...and the rest is history?
itareanlnotani
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I was initially sceptical of the iphone until a friend bought one a few days after release, and started sending long messages to me (which was a change from his usual cryptic short messages). He wasn't that computer literate, and if he could use it, then I needed to check it out.
Was a world of difference from the then ubiquitous motorola or nokia's, and literally a game changer.
I bought one almost immediately after checking out my friends. It was that much of a difference.
Heck I still have mine, it works occasionally as an mp3 player at parties.