Microsoft interview

The Microsoft interview is a job interview technique used by Microsoft to assess possible future Microsoft employees. It is significant because Microsoft's model was pioneering, and later picked up and developed by other companies including Amazon, Facebook, and Google^{[citation needed][1]}.

Innovation

The Microsoft Interview was a pioneer in that it was about technical knowledge, problem solving and creativity as opposed to the goal and weaknesses interviews most companies used at the time. Initially based on Bill Gates' obsession with puzzles, many of the puzzles presented during interviews started off being Fermi problems, or sometimes logic problems, and have eventually transitioned over the years into questions relevant to programming^[2]: [P]uzzles test competitive edge as well as intelligence. Like business or football, a logic puzzle divides the world into winners and losers. You either get the answer, or you don't... Winning has to matter. ^[3] Joel Spolsky phrased the problem as identifying people who are smart and get things done while separating them from people who are smart but don't get things done and people who get things done but are not smart^[4][5]

This model is now used widely in the IT Industry.

The positions

Microsoft hires both undergraduate college students (“college hires”) and the more experienced (“industry hires”). For college hires, there's a focus on those with degrees in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering or systems engineering for the three main technical positions of software development engineer (SDE), Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) and Program Manager (PM).

Microsoft also hires for non-technical positions and those who have an MBA. The interview would not be a technical one.

College recruitment phases

Microsoft College Recruitment practices can be divided into phases.

Résumé/College Fair

Microsoft recruits heavily from college campuses in the United States.

The interviewing process typically begins with college students attending a career fair on campus and submitting a résumé to recruiters. The campus fair and accompanying on-campus information session about the company gives students the opportunity to find out more about what Microsoft does, and to ask questions to current employees.

First interview

After the résumés have been collected, a select number of students are contacted for a first-round interview usually held on the candidate's college campus or over the telephone with a single recruiter. The first-round interview can last for about thirty to forty five minutes.

The candidate is initially asked to fill out an application form prior to the interview detailing work-location (Redmond, Silicon Valley, North Carolina, Nebraska) and work-type preferences (Business initiatives, media center/gaming, operating system, etc.).

During this interview the recruiter attempts to determine if the candidate will be able to flourish at Microsoft. After the interview, the recruiter will consider whether Microsoft's current business needs and the candidate's qualifications and interests are compatible.

Questions

Some examples of questions that the recruiter will keep in mind or ask a candidate include^[6]:

• What types of projects (academic or otherwise) have inspired you in the past?
• What are some self-directed missions that may have influenced your career direction?
• Did you have a moment of epiphany when you KNEW what you wanted to be when you grew up?
• How does Microsoft fit into your vision?
• What are some things that excite and motivate you?
• What are some examples of poorly/well-designed software? What makes the software this way and how would you change it?

Microsoft expects that the candidate know its various businesses and product groups, and come prepared to speak in-depth about their résumé in addition to asking thoughtful questions.

Post first interview

The candidate can generally expect to receive the results of the first-round interview from the recruiter within about 2 to 3 weeks of the interview date. If the first-round interview was successful, the candidate is contacted by a Microsoft recruiting co-ordinator to arrange a mutually acceptable date for the second-round interview.

Travel and lodging arrangements are then processed and finalized.

Second interview

If candidates successfully complete the first-round interview, the third phase is the second-round interview, which is held in Microsoft's headquarters located in Redmond, Washington or at one of its other sites in the world.

The maximum length of the candidate's interview trip can be up to three days and two nights, which includes one day to interview and one day to sight-see^[7].

Candidates interviewing for the program manager position can be expected to answer detailed design questions that test the candidate's creative ability and focus on customers. The candidate is expected to provide reasons for features added to products designed and include explanations as to why a customer might want or need a particular feature.

Candidates interviewing for the SDE and SDET positions can be expected to answer detailed coding and algorithm questions.

Many questions asked are purposely ambiguous and/or abstract. It is expected that the candidate ask thought-provoking questions of the interviewer in order to better answer the question. The candidate is normally given a marker, eraser, and a whiteboard to record his/her solutions and ideas to questions. The interviewer observes how the candidate attempts to solve a problem and follows the candidate's thought processes.

The interview day usually comprises meeting with about three to five different employees within Microsoft. A typical schedule might include two interviews in the morning, one lunch interview, and two interviews in the afternoon. The lunch interview can take place in one of Microsoft's various in-house cafeterias or in a restaurant off-campus. In most cases the candidate will interview with two different product teams within a single product group or two entirely different product groups (Microsoft site FAQ 2006). It depends on the current business needs of Microsoft at the time of the interview and which needs best fit the candidate's skill set and interests. The candidate is generally notified on the day of the interview as to which position he/she will be interviewing for if the candidate is interviewing for software development engineer, software development engineer in Test, or Program Manager Positions.

Following each interview with the candidate, the interviewer will email the complete set of interviewers with their feedback on the candidate. This email generally begins with a summary “Hire” or “No hire” assessment. The last interviewer to see the candidate is special, and referred to as the “As Appropriate” or “As Ap”. This person, generally the most senior person among the set of interviewers, will only see the candidate if the email feedback on that candidate thus far has been generally positive, or at least split between “Hire” and “No Hire” assessments. The “As Appropriate” interviewer often makes the final call as to whether the candidate will receive an offer.

Because the last interviewer is more influential and also additional people may be involved into final decision, this decision may be negative also when more than a half of the engineers vote "Hire".

Post second interview

After the second-round interview the candidate is asked to submit a reimbursement form for any expenses incurred during the trip to Redmond (i.e. taxi travel and meals). The candidate then generally receives an e-mail or phone call detailing the outcome of the second-round interview. If selected, an offer is made and the candidate is given a list of starting dates to decide on whether to accept based on any other pending offers.

Further information

Interview questions

The questions asked during the Microsoft Interview are crafted to determine a candidate's problem solving, coding and design abilities. Eccentric questions (such as Which of the fifty states would you remove?) test a candidate's ability to come to a decision and articulate it^[8]. Candidates answering questions should consider the use of technology in the present and future, and User scenarios. Some questions involve projects that the candidate has worked on in the past.

The Microsoft Interview is intended to seek out creative thinkers and those who can adapt their solutions to rapidly changing and dynamic scenarios.

Below is a small sample of questions that a candidate might be asked to answer during the second-round interview:

• Design a cellphone for a blind person.
• Design a music system for a car. What are the features? Draw a picture.
• Design a GPS navigation unit for a hiker
• Design a communication device for Canadian park rangers.
• Design a remote control for an automatic window-blind system.
• Design a TV Remote Control with Two Buttons.
• Design a coffee maker that will be used by astronauts.
• Design an alarm clock.
• Design an alarm clock for a blind person.
• Design a search function
• Design a website for a library
• Design an ATM for children
• What method would you use to look up a word in a dictionary?
• What are examples of poorly designed software?
• Design an instant messaging system.
• I am your grandmother. Describe what MATLAB is to me.
• How would you explain what a database is to a 5-year-old?
• How would you explain computer networking to a kindergarten kid?
• What is your favourite software, and how would you improve it?
• Write code for an electronic messaging board. What happens when a user logs on?
• Develop an algorithm for selecting objects in Visio.
• Tell me about a time when you made a decision and later found out that it was incorrect. What did you do to resolve the issue?
• Suppose you are one week away from the product shipping date and discover a bug in your software. What do you do?
• You have a linked list and don't know how long it is; how do you find the middle of it?
• How would you test a keyboard?
• How would you test a pen?
• Write code for finding a duplicate in an array.
• Write code that returns the length of a string without using any built-in functions.
• Reverse a Singly Linked List with and without using Recursion.
• Determine if a Binary Search Tree is well formed.
• Reverse every word in a String (abc def becomes cba fed).
• Write a function that returns the angle between the hour and the minute hands of a clock, given input of the time.
• Write a function that takes a string consisting of numeral characters and returns all possible alpha character strings of same length as input that correspond to the keypad of a typical telephone.
• Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
• How would you test an elevator?
• How would you test a vending machine?
• How would you test a program that takes in two points and outputs the distance between the two points?
• Test the Windows scroll bar.
• Switch every pair of words in a string ("ab cd ef gh" becomes "cd ab gh ef")
• Write the function for strstr function (finding a substring inside a string)
• Reverse the order of words in a string ("ab cd ef gh" becomes "gh ef cd ab")
• Write the function for string comparison. How would you test it?
• Write a function to zero all duplicate values in an integer array. How would you test it?
• Write a function that compares two strings and returns a third string containing only the letters that appear in both.
• Find cycles in a singly linked list, using minimal storage.
• Shift all elements of a circular array by k bytes, using no extra memory.
• For an array of size n, print all pairs that add to k. (then, do the same thing with a sorted array)

Interview resources

Microsoft provides a list of suggested reading to prepare for the interview. A sample is given below:

• Writing Solid Code, Steve Maguire
• Code Complete, Steve McConnell
• Testing Computer Software, Cem Kaner
• All I Really Need to Know in Business I Learned at Microsoft, Julie Bick
• Business @ the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates
• The Road Ahead, Bill Gates
• Algorithms in C, Robert Sedgewick, eds. . Addison-Wesley, 1990.
• Essential .NET Vol 1 The Common Language Runtime, Don Box Addison-Wesley, 2003.
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord Wiley Computer Publishing 2002
• Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. Addison-Wesley, 1995
• Introduction to Algorithms Second Edition, Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Cliff Stein MIT Press, 2001
• The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth Addison-Wesley

References

1. ^ Applicants blog after Google interview
2. ^ Poundstone, William (2003). How Would You Move Mount Fuji. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. pp. 50–90. ISBN 0316919160. 
3. ^ Poundstone, page 62
4. ^ Poundstone, page 68-69
5. ^ Spolsky, Joel (October 25, 2006). "The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html. Retrieved 2009-09-20. 
6. ^ "Microsoft Students China: The Interview – Overview". https://www.microsoft.com/zhcareers/student/cn_zh/int_overview.mspx. Retrieved 2007-11-21. 
7. ^ "Microsoft MBA – Interview FAQ". http://www.microsoft.com/mba/int_faq.mspx. Retrieved 2007-11-21. 
8. ^ Poundstone, page 67

• Microsoft College Careers. The Interview — First Round. Retrieved from the World Wide Web on January 16, 2006.
• Job Interviews Get Creative, NPR 2003. Retrieved from the World Wide Web on January 16, 2006.

External links

• Microsoft Interview Questions
• Microsoft Technologies Interview Questions