I have an interview with them coming up. Any tips?

quote:

Originally posted by matai:
I have an interview with them coming up. Any tips?

"Do not walk into the interview with an iPhone on you."

Seriously, this was given to my FIL who applied and interviewed 4-5 years ago when they were pushing their own phones.

I'm sure it's changed as they have abandoned that market pretty much.

Please tell that guy from Abu Dabbi to quit calling and telling me that he is from Microsoft and that my computer has a virus.

On your job application, state your email address as: matal@iclould.com

Don't show your portfolio on an iPad.

If you scored an interview with Microsoft, I think you know better than the average person on how to present yourself.

Be prepared to have an encapsulated story for every line in your resume. Enough to explain should anyone ask you anything but brief enough. Either they'll be interested to know more and ask you to expand or be satisfied enough to move on to their next question.

The method du jour is situational questions:
"Tell me about the time such and such (like you had a problem)?"

"What did you do to solve it?"

"What did you learn from it?"

"When was the next time a similar problem arose and how did you apply what you learned from the last time?"

"Did you learn anything new from the last incident?"

And it's true about the iPad and such. I have a friend who's a top dog at a company. At a prior position, one of the accounts he had was with Apple. He had a separate laptop just for Apple with Apple programs.

A good friend did. They stack rank and lots of H1B visas. Good luck.

Stack ranking does blow but I think a lot of companies do it (I've been 'stack ranked' for the last 20 years). Still, that wouldn't keep me from interviewing at MS.

I interviewed with them 20 something years ago. My advice is what you already know - go in sharp, prepared, and well rested. Don't forget to review your responses for possible "canned" questions, but especially for any MS specific technical questions, if any. Also prepare mentally for any sideways questions that they may throw at you to just see how you handle it, which is usually more important than the answer itself. Also be ready to ask them some questions that would be good for THEM to think about, and not necessarily hard-wired to the job itself, but your questions should be interesting and complementary to Microsoft and the people interviewing you. If you can shape that discussion to suggest (not directly) things that they may be interested in looking at in the future that are in your areas of interest, those discussions can be extremely productive. If you're involved in security (which I saw you are), that area is very ripe for many avenues of very interesting discussions if you could engage them. Those kinds of discussions in interviews can go a long way toward picking you out of others that may be as technical as you, but in that vein you would be a more interesting colleague to work with. Some people don't mind working with robots, but the best technical people have imaginations and like to discuss interesting topics, both in breadth and depth, related to their own technical areas of interest. I think if you could find some common ground along these lines, when they invite you to interview them, that could go a long way in your favor, because they would realize that if they hire you, they will be able to engage you productively going forward, instead of "just doing the job". That angle has helped me in the past, and I enjoy it.