Interviewing at Microsoft

I flew out to Seattle on Thursday night for a Friday interview at Microsoft. Of course, the flights both ways had delays because of Chicago, as usual. Anyway, I guess the focus of this topic shouldn't really be air travel, since I already dedicated a post to that. My recruiting contact was nice and put me up in the Westin in Bellevue, right in Bellevue Square. The room was quite nice, but the kickin' LCD TV they had was inoperable without money. Oh well.

Anyway, the interview day was interesting. The typical day seems to be:

1. Arrive at Building 19
2. Talk to a recruiter
3. Take some fancy electronic car to your first/next interviewer
4. Be interviewed
5. Repeat 3-4 as necessary
6. Return to Building 19 to talk to your recruiter
7. Get out

Which was how my day went, with four interviews, sans step 6, since my recruiter was out. The team I interviewed had some fancy title, which I conveniently decided not to remember, but it boiled down to "file systems," where file systems could mean distributed file systems or just native disk file systems, or whatever. It was a relatively new team working on a v1 project, which would be cool. The people I interviewed with were more interested in distributed stuff, which resulted in lots of technical questions about threading. Good thing I'm taking OS this semester, because I didn't know anything about threading beforehand. Now I know just a little bit.

I don't have much to say about the questions I got, but most of them didn't seem too difficult (we'll find out when I get rejected). I talked to a M.S. student who was interviewing in the same building who said Amazon's interviews were harder, which I thought was interesting. They certainly don't have a reputation of being harder to land a job with. Then again, I don't really hear much about Amazon hirings.

As far as this team goes, is it something I'm interested in? Sure. I guess. The prospect on working on a v1 project sounds cool; on the other hand, the project itself doesn't sound as cool, but maybe I'm just not fully informed about the current state of the project. As far as what I'd gain, experience-wise, I think this would be my biggest motivation in going. Multi-threaded applications are allegedly the wave of the future, with multi-core processors coming into full bloom, and this team seems to do a lot with threaded applications, which, if I got to deal with, would boost my experience significantly.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, I have to get an offer, first.