Interviewing at Microsoft Part I

This story of mine is really to help other Microsoft prospectives as a resource of a past experience and my suggestions and tips on how to do the best you can. I am a junior at the University of Miami and was interviewed by Microsoft for a SDET position for the Microsoft Office team. I was able to get the job so obviously I must have done something right in the interviews. Again the story below and intertwined suggestions and tips are simply what I did, and which happened to work for me. They by no means guarantees no one a job, but hopefully it will give you something else to think about and study.

So I was able to get an interview with Microsoft for earlier this month. And I hope you realize how nervous I was in the weeks prior to the trip out to Redmond. Looking back at it, it is truly amazing how fast yet seemingly slow the events transpired.

Our school has a large career fair every spring semester on campus. There is a very large technical section, and then a very large business section. I knew that IBM and Microsoft were both going to be here this year, and I felt like I had enough experience to convince them that I would be an asset this summer. Luckily I was able to have a friend of mine who already landed an internship with Microsoft introduce me to one of the guys at the booth, and we were able to talk for about 10 minutes and he explained to me that he would set me up with an on campus interview with a couple weeks. So I said great, and was very excited about the whole situation, but realizing now that I was really not prepared for the whole situation.

So the school recruiter showed up to campus, I think it was the first week of March, and I had my interview set for a Wednesday afternoon. By now I had begun to realize that I was actually going in for my first real technical interview, and to make things worse I found out that I was actually going to be required in front of the interviewer on a PIECE OF PAPER!!! no less, not even my trusted laptop.

Anyway the day of the interview came around, I had been studying a lot for this interview, but I knew that it was going to be difficult. I was so nervous because if I did well, I knew that I would be flown out for the next stage of the interview process, the dreaded trip to Redmond. Well during the interview I got asked the normal personality questions. Like how are you doing today, I was asked about the programming I do for the Biology Department down here, and about my life as a Student. But then the not so nice programming question came; write a function that returns the index of a given string where it is located as a substring in another string.

This really isn't that hard of a program to write even on a piece of paper, the stress really just freaked me out. I got through about 75% of it by myself but it took me a very long time, and I ended up needing help from the interviewer in order to complete the function. I was able to program pretty much this exact same function in my interview at Redmond completely by myself witch is pretty amusing right now... but that is for another post. So the programming didn't go nearly as well as I wanted it to, in fact I was convinced that I had just ended my Microsoft aspirations right then and there, however his next question caught me a little of guard...

How would you test a Soda Machine? Yep that is the question I was asked, not any insane program to write, or even if I knew it was going to be about testing, it wasn't how to test a certain function. It was how the hell would I test a damn Soda Machine... So I answered with the normal functionality tests first, does it except money->when it takes the money can you push a button-> when a button is pushed does a can of soda come out->after the soda comes out does your change get released as well. I gave several functionality tests in this type of manner, but then decided to throw in some outliers. Like what happens when you put a hundred dollar bill in, what happens if it is outside and it has to deal with 120 degree weather, or the opposite. What happens when you random cut power supply to the machine does it shut down gracefully as it is liked to be put. This is as I later found out a very standard interview question asked to Software Developers in Test, or SDETs. It is supposed to test your testing method, as well as gain a little better understanding of how your thought process works. I thought it was absolutely nuts, but you know it did make me think and reason a bit, as well as explore testing methods that can be easily moved to a program.

I was extremely nervous afterwards, I felt really bad about the programming and didn't really know what to think about the testing question. I was overall not very optimistic and thought that it was a good experience but wasn't going to lead anywhere. And then the unexpected happened I found out about a week and a half later that they would like to have me out to Redmond for an on-site interview, which is what I really knew was going to be the biggest obstacle...

Overall I will say this one school interview really opened my eyes to what an interview for my career would be like. It really got me in the mood for my later longer and more intense Microsoft interviews. And I think the best thing that it did for me is show me how much more I needed to study coding rules. Simply knowing how to code isn't enough for some interviewers you have to be prepared to tell and more importantly actually show the different coding procedures. Another tip that I have for this initial interview is be friendly and be yourself, you will have a lot more fun and make a much better impression, as yourself not a bumbling idiot.