Microsoft Interviews

One week today I had interviews at Microsoft at their main office in Redmond, WA. Yesterday I received a job offer from them for the position I interviewed for, and I'm very excited about working there this summer. The interview day was very fun for me for a lot of reasons. Microsoft paid for my flight to Seattle, paid for my hotel and taxi service, and also provided me with a generous food stipend for the day. I stayed for three days and really got pampered, I had dinner the night before my interviews at the hotel and had a big steak and baked potato, and had breakfast in my room the morning of the interviews. The breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs with ham, hashbrown, and toast. This was probably the most memorable breakfast of my entire life.

I had talked to a few people who had done the intern interviews in preparation for mine, and they told me that it was the hardest day of their lives. As for me, I had a lot of fun. I had great conversations with all of the interviewers, asked them some really good questions, and I did very well answering all of their questions too. I think they were very impressed with me, at least that's what they said when they offered me the job.

I think the question I'm most proud of was a Tester question involving HTTP. The thing is, I didn't know much about HTTP and told the interviewer that, but he wanted to see how I answered the question anyways. He wanted me to test the protocol he wrote on the board, but only testing one keyword in the code (the GET keyword). Even though I don't know much about HTTP, I came up with some advanced test cases that he said he would expect from senior testers, so I was very proud of my answers. In particular, I pointed out potential problems with character encodings and version numbers. He seemed very impressed with that, and I think I impressed the other interviewers as well. Well, I suppose I must have since I got the job!