The Microsoft Interview -Part 1

Well, I meant to write about this long ago. But the process was so long and I had too much to say that it was painful to even think about writing it all down.
So at last I decide to divide and conquer. Write down as much as I could in one sitting, save it as draft or publish as is if complete enough and call it a part, repeat till the story is over. Sounds good enough.

The specific interviewing process that I am going to describe should be specially helpful to international applicants. I don't know about the process for local (US) applicants, but I would imagine it's pretty much the same.

Also before you read on, I will try to describe the process, and the questions you can expect in an MS interview, but not the answers. Giving out the answers will not help you, me, or Microsoft so there is no good reason I should do it. In what follows everything but factual statements is my own commentary and views on the topic (and thus should be taken with a grain of salt :))

I applied to Microsoft for SDE/SDET positions last july after receiving an email saying they will be coming to Egypt soon looking for candidates. Sent my CV via email and a few days later I received a reply from an MS recruiter arranging for a long distance phone interview to get things started. We arranged a mutually convenient time for the interview and I started my preparations.

The phone interview is the very first step in the process and in my opinion is like a quick "litmus test" for the candidates. Microsoft ideally wants people with passion for whatever they do, and the phone interview is probably aimed at a couple of things:

• Making sure things you stated in your resume are true.
• Detecting the passion for what you do.

I was asked to basically describe my career so far, why I chose computer science as a major, and what I like about the field. We also talked about projects I've made/worked on that I'm proud of, and about what in my opinion will be the next big thing in the field.
That particular question is highly subjective and you should not feel obliged to talk about anything Microsoft related. I think the question is just to see if you're up to date with the emerging technologies, which serves to show you have passion for the field and that you're always eager to catch up on new stuff in the incredibly fast-changing IT world. Practical proof of that is that I had a bunch of my friends who had their phone interviews, we all gave very different answers to that same questions, some chose a hardware technology, some chose software, some even chose concepts like mobile computing and we all passed the phone interview. As long as you are not totally clueless, you'll be fine.

The phone interview also included a question about how to test a keyboard/chair/pen/notepad.... etc. You just need to devise creative test cases (in addition to rather normal ones) and scenarios and have an eye for how the thing you're testing will be used in various scenarios and in extreme conditions.

My specific interviews should have included a puzzle question. The thing is that I was always fascinated with puzzles, and hence knew a lot of them. When my interviewer was about to ask me to solve a puzzle she asked me to honestly state if I'd already knew it before so that she changes the question.
She did ask me one that I knew. I stated that I knew it beforehand, so she chose another one, I knew that one too, she chose yet another one and I tell her again that I already knew the answer. She says "Ok then, I'll ask you a question for which there is no specific answer". She then asks me about what I'd do if I had a term paper discussing a chapter from a book to deliver tomorrow, and I went home at 5pm only to find out I didn't even have the book.

This was basically the phone interview, it lasted for around 30 minutes all in all and I was told that I should hear from them again in 2 weeks or something.
I did receive an email later saying that I'd passed the phone interview and that MS is encouraged to go further in the hiring process. A "real" interview was to be set up in Egypt and details about the time and place would be sent to me later when it's closer to the interview date and arrangements had been finalized.
I was later informed that my interview should be at MS Egypt premises on the 30th of August. I patiently wait (all the while preparing) for the interview date.

Things are about to get exciting.

To Be Continued...