First-round Interview with Microsoft
Yesterday morning, I had my first-round interview with Microsoft. My interviewer was a woman named Shauna. Shauna has been with Microsoft for two years and works doing testing for a Windows Communication group. My overall impression of the interview was favorable, but with an interview system set up to err on the side of false negatives (meaning: they don’t care if they miss out on good people so long as they don’t hire bad ones) you never know.
After an introduction, and a pitch of Microsoft - she asked me the standard “Why work for Microsoft question.” After that question, she went on to ask me an interesting open-ended question.
Design a media center
The gist of the question was that I was to design a media center. She mentioned it could be living-room based, portable, or however I wanted to make it. That was the original specification. I asked her clarifying questions such as: Is there a target audience? (No) Is there a budget? (No, the sky is the limit) Is there any specific other requirements I should be aware of? (Nope.) So at that point, I had to come up with something- anything - that would play video, music, pictures… etc. I decided to go for something rather interesting (to me) and designed a $2.5 million media center.
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