LiveBlog: my interview with Microsoft

I just got out of my first interview here, and while my interviewer is writing up his review of what he thought of me I figured I would post a brief update.

Today I am interviewing with the Office Graphics group, and the Sharepoint group. The first person that I met with was the lead program manager over the graphics group. He was nice, and asked me some good design questions.

He asked me to design a TiVo for car radio. I feel that in this particular case having used TiVo for so long that I may be heavily biased towards the actual tivo device because I use it so much. Some of my better ideas included putting in a base station at home to update the content guide over the wireless network and having it display still images for advertisements.

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Update 2: after meeting with Mark, head guy in the Visio group.

I just got done my lunch/interview with Mark, one of the head guys with visio. So far I have been impressed with how down-to-earth everyone has been. In the intervierw with Mark, he told me a lot about what Visio does, and asked me to show how a program would deal with merging two graphs of data. (the problem was not trivial, and at the end he told me it has yet to be solved in software)

I am now in the lobby of a differnent building waiting for another interviewer. He didn’t tell me the name of my next person, so I am casually waiting. My signal isn’t that strong here, so I hope this update goes through.

Update 3: after interviewing with the sharepoint group program manager

I just got done with my third interview. In this interview I talked with the lead program manager from the sharepoint group. The interview was slightly more intense than my previous ones. The interviewer put up the code for the fibonacci sequence on the board and had me toy around with different ways of improving it. I had to keep saying what order it was at every step of the way (if only CS 235 wasn’t 5 years ago, I might have faster responses to those questions.)

I have some time before my next interview, and I hope to have more interviews after that. I have no idea how things are going, but seem to get along well with all the interviewers (which may just mean that they are nice, not that they like me.)

From what I’ve heard so far, I think I would make a really good program manager – but we’ll are what Microsoft thinks. (I wonder if any of the decision makers are reading this right now… One of my earlier interviewers talked to me about my blog over lunch…)

Update 4:

I just got done interviewing with another lead program manager from the sharepoint group. He asked me a few design questions, and had me design an alarm clock for the blind. I am now waiting to hear where I go from here.

(as in, do I get more interviews, or do they have enough information to make a decision already.)

Update 5: That was my last interview, I went back to building 19 to talk to Valerie, my recruiter.