1. Welcome (Raquel Garcia) - 9:15am
2. Oli Messenger - 10:00am
3. Sarnath Pai - 12:00pm
4. Tara Brown - 2:00pm
5. Brian - 3:15pm
6. Wrap-up and thoughts (tips!)
Welcome - HR
After arriving at building 19 (the HR center) at 9am, I waited around in a candidate holding room for about 45 minutes. The place was swarming with people, both interns and full-timers. A lot of people were dressed up in suits, in stark contrast to the HR people, who were usually women, who looked like some of my little sister's friends. Or sorority girls. Seriously, there was one blonde, straight-haired woman in a jean skirt and Uggs. They really seemed to want to show what a fun place Microsoft is... there was a Microsoft Surface (which I got to play with for a moment, when it wasn't surrounded by older, awkward-looking guys) and an XBox with Rockband playing, as well as an espresso bar.Office Live - Workspace - Oli Messenger
Anyway, at 9:45, Raquel Welch finally came out to get me and a full-time applicant and let us know where we were going to go. She let me know that I would be interviewing with the Office Live group. Most people seem to interview with 2 groups, but I guess maybe I am only a good fit for this one. So I hopped on a shuttle (the shuttle drivers are really nice if you talk to them!) to building 31 to meet Oli Messenger (which sounds like some kind of Microsoft product, but oh well.
Oli is short for Oliver, as I learned, and he was British, young, also a program manager, and very friendly. He asked me first about what kind of stuff I like in school (what "modules"). I told him about NLP and why I find it exciting. He then proceeded to the design question, which was pretty open-ended. It was making a system of 2 Roombas. The motivation was that the customer had a big house. The assumptions were that the Roombas could communicate wirelessly, and they could walk up stairs (somehow).Office Live - Small Business - Sarnath Pai
I went through some features that would be cool and hit upon interfacing the Roombas with a PC. He seemed to like that idea, so I drew out the UI and we went over what makes a good UI. I told him it was really dependent on the user; I also decided to add some advanced features to the UI for little home hackers. (I prepped this kind of answer ahead of time, whew!)
Towards the end, he pulled up Office Live Workspace on his computer and showed me some of the features. I asked him about differences between this and Zoho or Google Docs, among other things. He seemed to like answering those questions.
After this, I had an hour-long break (not typical at all). Since my next interview was in the same building, I just stayed in the lobby and connected to the local wireless.
Sarnath was a lead PM (PM of PMs) in the Small Business side of Office Live. This was my lunch interview. I expected to be doing coding questions in the cafeteria, but instead, it was an exercise in small talk. Fortunately, Sarnath was still relatively young and managed to make me pretty comfortable. We talked about hiking and burgers before moving on to general PM job description stuff. I still didn't really get any questions, so just to keep the conversation going, I talked about my experiences managing an SATPrep program in college.Office Live - Workspace - Tara Brown
After getting back from lunch, we had about 30 minutes in the office to do some interviewing. He asked me to sort 50 test scores using "pen and paper." I did counting sort, which was apparently impressive and a surprise to him. The follow-up was that I had to explain why counting sort can be linear when the proven bound on sort is O(n log n). He wasn't that clear, but the point was that the bucket collisions would make counting sort useless. The last question was very open-ended. I had to brainstorm features and uses of an online Office. I listed things that it and other document-sharing services already do, but needed prodding to think of small business applications. Sarnath also mentioned that it could be used to help businesses draw customers using advertising and phone services (Live Search and TellMe).
After this, I had to go, though I had another long break (40 minutes).
This was probably my worst interview, but it still wasn't bad. Tara had two questions; she showed me the Office Live workspace and asked me what I would change about it, and she asked me about how I would sync contacts between Facebook, Gmail, other sources, and Outlook. I don't know much about this, particularly network or server stuff, so I suggested a central server that would hold everything, and Outlook would sync with this. She prodded me to add features like a UI for seeing all the contacts online, and having automatic updates of changes in contact details. I argued that a way to see recent changes in details should be included, but she seemed to disagree. We ended on a good note, though, and she went to get my last interviewer.Office Live - ?? - Brian
I'm not sure exactly who Brian was; I did notice that he seemed to be more "established" that the others, and he mentioned that he is usually everyone's last interview. He also said that if you don't end up having that last interview (#4 for interns, #5 for full-timers), you know you didn't do well. So maybe he was someone with more say as to whether people get hired. Brian asked me about my past work, then asked me to describe something in school that I think could be improved using technology. Since MIT's class registration system sucks more than anything else, I went off about that. I drew a storyboard of the UI for pre-reg on the whiteboard, which Brian seemed to like, since I didn't have to really explain how to improve it. He then asked me about some technology that people aren't using now but might be big later, sort of how Google and iPods became really popular despite the technology being around for a while before they got so huge. I talked about NLP again, and we went on to talk about the future of software and UI's. After this, it was time for me to go, so I took the shuttle back to building 19 to check out.Wrap-up
Back at building 19, I hung out for a few minutes until the fill-in for Raquel gave me a packet with things to do in the Seattle area and sent me on my way. I'll be hearing back from them within a week or so, I hear, though I may be able to hurry that up if I send Raquel an email.
Overall, I thought the whole interview series was really easy. I felt on top of my game (get plenty of sleep and lots of caffeine!), but most of my energies went to talking about myself and easy UI-type ideas. I felt over-prepared in terms of technical and interview knowledge, but that might have been helpful in terms of feeling comfortable with what to say in front of the interviewers, and when to stop talking. Definitely read up on the interview tips Microsoft sends you. In general, being friendly and casual, with plenty of anecdotes and interest in the details of the position seem to have really helped me. I also always hopped up to the whiteboard whenever I had a design question of any sort, which seemed to go over well. I also told everyone how I like to follow through on plans, and had plenty of anecdotes (like planning Spring Break for a group) on hand.
That's all I have to add; for more tips definitely see this guy's post, which I used to prepare.
1 comment:
What stages must be passed for a Program Manager Internship position?
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