Day after: Thoughts on Microsoft

Yesterday as I left Building 19, I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen. I knew that I answered all of my interview questions pretty well – but you really receive no feedback along the way so you can’t be sure what’s going on.

After the fact, I thought more about it and I think I did pretty well. My last interviewer asked me what my hardest question was – but I didn’t have a really good answer. I told him that the question from the Visio group about merging two graphs was probably the hardest question. In general, I do not think that a design question can be hard – and I certainly enjoy them.

Ever since my interviews, I have been thinking in the back of my head about how to solve that graph problem that the visio group posed. It bugs me that the problem isn’t solved – but I think that it is solveable, and I think that an elegant solution exists to do it. (It’s just not known yet).

Microsoft is a big corporation, but the groups that you interview with (and eventually work with) are pretty small. The people are nice (and smart, of course). One thing that I thought was interesting was that whenever a microsoft employee files a patent application – Microsoft gives them a small cube (maybe 3 or 4 inches cubed in size). Everybody I interviewed with had at least one of those cubes – and I can’t help but think to myself “If I worked here – I would want enough of them to build an addition onto my office ala Pee-Wee Herman’s Christmas Special (where he builds an addition to the playhouse using only fruitcake).”

Another interesting thing is that the window offices are based only on time you have been with the company – not seniority. If a new VP came in, he would have an interior office. The one person that I interviewed with that did not have a window office had only been with MS 4 years – but was already a lead program manager. Someone I interviewed with that had been at MS for 5 years did have a window office – so I suppose that somewhere in the 4 – 5 year range may influence your window-office ability. (Although that’s not really relevant for a hiring decision, I thought that was an interesting tidbit)

When talking to Valerie, she asked me what I thought of the day. She asked me if it was harder than I thought it would be – but I told her that it wasn’t. (It really wasn’t – I had read a lot about the interview process, and was expecting to get pounded.) She told me that she would let me know how I did on Friday. I have plenty to worry about between now and then, so waiting wont be that big of a deal.