My Microsoft Interview Questions
Posted on | July 18, 2005 |
A couple of the folks I had the pleasure of interviewing down at Stanford wanted me to update this post to include the questions I asked them. I’m not going to give them all away, and a couple of the more entertaining questions were:
- Which of Microsoft’s seven businesses would you sell? Why?
- You’re now the product manager for Fortran.NET. What are the top three features you want to add? (This one was a LOT of fun!).
—– original post —
I had the wonderful opportunity earlier this week to travel to Philadelphia, PA, and visit some first-year MBA candidates at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business. What a brain vault! I was asked to help interview candidates for our MBA Intern program here at Microsoft. I was surprised how much Wharton has internalized blogging – there’s even some “officially-sanctioned” blogging going on over there. I’ve already asked them to add an RSS feed – we’ll see what happens.
I found out from a couple other folks recruiting that these little weasels send around the interview questions, so we had to change a lot of the fun questions between days. Since these are probably making the rounds anyway, and for those of you working on the “Complete Reference of Microsoft’s Interview Questions”, here’s a few highlights:
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Explain a database to a young child.
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Explain the Internet to your grandparents
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What is your favorite web site? Why? Now improve it.
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REST or SOAP? Why? Why not the other?
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Steve Jobs calls and asks you to improve the iPod. Go. (No bonus points for saying, “Add WMA support!)
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You’re in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake – goes up, goes down, stays the same? Here’s a couple answers.
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I've moved this post about the interview questions I ask during Microsoft interviews, as well as the...
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There are several test cases, the boat is mired in muck before/after release(after), boat is mired in muck before(before) not after release, or the boat is floating(float) and the rock floats(floats), the rock sinks(sinks) or the rock gets mired in muck(muck).
So you have:
after/floats water level rises because more water is displaced.
after/sinks water level rises because more water is displaced.
after/muck water level rises because more water is displaced.
before/floats water level rises because more water is displaced.
before/sinks water level lowers because less water is displaced.
before/muck Indeterminate conclusion, need more information about the state of water displacement.
float/floats water level stays the same because the same amount of water is displaced.
float/sinks water level lowers because less water is displaced.
float/muck Indeterminate conclusion, need more information about the state of water displacement.
Based on an equal probability of all test cases, most likely the water will rise. (I need a $2.3 million grant from the government to finish studying this problem.:)