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On-campus InterviewI couldn't be in a better position to talk about the Microsoft interviews! I have reached the final rounds three times for Microsoft and phone-interviewed once for an internship. I finally got an offer once. I will document the most recent experience and just list the questions from the other times I interviewed.
I had applied on-campus for Microsoft interviews and I got an invite on 28th Oct, 2008. This was just around the corner of the recession. My interview was for the position of Program Manager. My interviewer was an African American very laid back and I got asked only two major questions
For the first question be sure you make sense about what you talk. This question becomes especially interesting if your major is computer science/engineering and you intend to switch to the PM position which doesn't have any coding requirements. One safe answer that I gave was that in my master's thesis the project I developed was solely managed and designed by me and I consider that my strengths would be better utilized if I am involved in designing. Wrong answers would include statements like
You must expouse your passion for the technology even if you are applying for the PM role. I know many people who just want to do a PM role because they don't like or don't want to be code-monkeys. That is fine but this doesn't mean you have to let the recruiter know that you don't want to/suck at coding. Since the PM role indirectly involves competence at coding when estimating and designing features.  For the second question, think how would you explain something a totally unknown object to a friend of yours. You would probably liken the object to something your friend already knows about and then explain the differences. Say, your friend has never seen a Cheetah and you want to tell him/her about the cute Cheetah you saw at the zoo. Your friend already knows what a cat is so you decide to expand upon from there. You tell him/her that a Cheetah is similar to a cat in looks except that it is almost ten times the size of the cat and can run much faster infact the fastest though it can't climb trees like a cat can. So on and so forth. By the end your friend would have a vague idea of what a Cheetah might look like. So for questions like these the idea is to use an analogy to describe the unknown thing to the other person. The best analogy in this case I could think of was the postal/mail system in the US, where the sender and the receiver are similar to a server and a client in the internet world and the entire postal system i.e. the post office, the postman, the delivery vehicles etc etc are analogous to routers, swtiches, LANs and ISPs etc etc. This is a safe analogy to give and it doesn't matter whether you say the vehicle is like a router or a switch. The interviewer didn't split hairs with me over the analogy but over a very subtle point i.e. the person sending the mail and the person receiving the mail would you consider them part of the network or not. This debate took about thirty minutes and the punch-line of my reasoning with him was that his is a philosophical/subjective point and it depends on how you define the network i.e. there is no right or wrong answer. This debate might seem trivial but was actually the cornerstone of the entire interview conversation as my interviewer later revealed that he asked me this subtle point because in a PM role one is suppose to convince others' of one's point of view in a smooth, rational and efficient manner and the purpose of this discussion was just to gauge that. When I was about to leave he asked me to stop and wrote the name of a book to read called "Design of Everyday Things". I definitely recommend this book to anyone thinking on the lines of a product design career. |
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