Microsot Interview Part III

The final part of the post will be exactly what happened during the interviews , what kind of questions I was asked, and my overall tips for the interviews. I ended up getting offered a job in two groups that I interviewed with both in Microsoft Office, and have decided to take one. So I guess I did something right during the interview, and was able to answer the questions properly.

The next part of this post, describes what happened to me during my interviews at Microsoft. Each persons interview are going to be different however the general concept behind the questions will be the same across the different product groups within Microsoft. I started my day out at building 19 which is the general starting place for all the interviewees. The building was awesome, it looked great and there were plenty of things to do. They had Rock Band set up in the main room which was a lot of fun to play with the other interviewees. At this point I had been stressing out for the last month and a half about this on-site interview that I had kinda just out-stressed myself, meaning that I really wasn't stressed out anymore and just couldn't wait to meet everyone. I really just wanted to learn from the experience regardless of the outcome. I couldn't wait to talk to all the brilliant people I would meet throughout the day and try to take as much in as possible to help me prepare and get better as a programmer myself. Everyone meets up with their recruiter in the morning, my recruiters name was Jared, and their job is to kinda let you know what to expect for the rest of the day. He/She will tell you what groups you were interviewing for as well as your general schedule for the day. I was interviewing for two groups both with in Microsoft Office, and I was told what building I would be going to for my first interview.

When you go to each building for your interview you will be required to check in at the front desk, where the receptionist will call down the person you are interviewing with, to come get you from the lobby. The first person I interviewed with was a really nice lady with the first group I interviewed with in Microsoft office. The beginning of the interview just went over my personal experiences at school and at work. Then we started the white board exercise, which is by far the one part I was really dreading. The programming question was to reverse the letters of every word in a string, so "This is a cat." would become "sihT si a tac." I programmed it in C++, I didn't find it to hard to get done relatively fast. We then went over a few ways to test the function I wrote. After this interview I was instructed to go wait in the kitchen area on the same floor as my interview and wait for the test lead of the group to come get me for the interview.

In this interview we started pretty much in the same fashion, with just general "HR" questions, like why do you want to be a SDET and past experiences. There were no programming questions in this interview, instead it was straight testing questions. The interviewer drew a fruit peeler on the board and asked me how I would test it as well as how I would go about trying to break it. This is where I really was able to demonstrate the things I learned from my research in testing techniques. It is really important to organize your testing, so that you can really cover as many different cases as possible, while still remembering what you have and have not tested. I was then asked to test the border formating tool in excel on the computer, this was another way to test the same basic principles as the peeler question.

After this I went and waited in the main lobby of the building again until my next interviewer came and got me, this time the interview would be my lunch interview. The Microsoft Office building has its own cafeteria which is where the beginning of the interview took place. The interviewer's name was Greg, and he was a very nice guy and really enjoyed our conversation during the interview. We went over the normal "HR" questions, (notice the pattern yet?), the white board question in this interview was much harder for me then the previous. I was asked to find a string pattern in a given string, which isn't really that difficult, but he threw in the '*' character which meant any number of any character that can be used in the string pattern to be located, the function returns the integer where the pattern was found. This function took me awhile to get into but once I was making progress it didn't take to long to finish.

My final interview was with a guy named Joe, who will actually be the guy in charge of my group this summer. He actually wasn't even supposed to interview me today, but the actual person I was supposed to interview with wasn't there that day. We had a great time talking about our past experiences, and it was really interesting to hear everything he has gone through while at Microsoft. He has been there for over 10 years, and with Office the whole time so it was very interesting to hear the different products and problems he has ran into. There were no programming questions in this interview, but were a couple testing questions. The first testing question I had was what I would do if I walked into my office and the lights weren't working. How would I test what was wrong with them. The next testing question was dealing with the search box in a website and how I would test it out to make sure it works properly.

After I was done with the interviews I was taken back to Building 19, to meet up with my recruiter again and go over how the day went. I thought that I had done pretty good all day, and really like all the people I met throughout the day in each group. I was really excited to hear back from Microsoft in the next week or so with their response. When I returned to building 19, I checked in with the front desk again where I received the vouchers for the rest of the taxi cab rides I would need while in Seattle. I then waited for my recruiter to come down again and discuss how the day went as a whole. I was really excited to just go over everything that I learned through the day as well as express how much fun I had during the day. One thing about the Microsoft on-site interview, is that the the interviewers talk the whole time during your interviews and really go over everything they had gone over with you and had asked you. One thing reason this is done is to test if you have learned throughout the day and can express this new knowledge. This is a great test of potential of your learning capabilities. I really stressed throughout my interviews to learn something new from each interviewer. I think this is a really good strategy because it not only shows that you want to learn and can learn, but you really do learn a lot from these brilliant people, and you might as well take in as much as you can. After you learn something new really try to show this new knowledge in the next interview so it shows your potential, as well as kind of impress the interviewer.

When my recruiter and I sat down in building 19 we went over the different interviews I had and asked how everything went. I really had a great day so expressed this and really talked about all the different things I learned from each person. He then said that it doesn't happen very often where they can pretty much guarantee an offer on the same days of the interviews, but he pretty much said that everyone really enjoyed the day with me and multiple groups wanted me as an intern for the summer. I was so excited and couldn't really believe that I had pretty much gotten the job on the same day as the interviews.

I ended up having to decide between two groups this last week, and finally decided to go with Joe's team, I just really like the products a lot more, and seemed to click with him and the atmosphere more. It was a fantastic day and a great experience, if anyone who is going for an interview with Microsoft ends up reading this I hope my suggestions help, I know that all the sources and tips I have said here are the same ones I used and it apparently worked for me.