What People Are Saying About Microsoft’s Interview
Here are some positive snippets from interview reviews from Glassdoor:
- “I got referred to a specific team at Microsoft as New Grad hiring was halted for 2016. Talked to a manager on the phone for an hour, and was asked about my resume and did a interview question. Was flown to Seattle 2 weeks later and had an onsite interview with the team at Redmond. It consisted of 5 interviews with coding and culture-fit questions. I was at the Microsoft Campus from 9AM to 4:30PM. The process was nice, and the interviews were more conversational than say Google onsite interviews. I got a call 2 days later with an offer to join the team.”
- “Everyone was super friendly and super excited about future of Microsoft under new CEO leadership.”
- “Took part in an interview event which lasted about half of the day. Four rounds of approximately one hour interviews with short breaks in between. The questions were based on algorithms and Big-O notation for run-time and space complexity. Questions were either straight from or similar to questions in Cracking the Coding Interview. Make sure you understand the complexity of the code you are writing or at least be able to walk through the calculation of it. Practice solving problems from Cracking the Coding Interview and you should do fine.”
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Preparing For An Interview
Preparing for an interview primarily means taking time to thoughtfully consider your goals and qualifications relative to the position and employer. To accomplish this, you should perform research on the company and carefully review the job description to understand why you would be a good fit. Lets look at the steps to preparing for an interview.
Learn About Microsoft’s Culture
Most candidates fail to do this. But before investing tens of hours preparing for an interview at Microsoft, you should take some time to make sure it’s actually the right company for you.
Microsoft is prestigious and it’s therefore tempting to ignore this step completely, but the prestige of the company, in itself, won’t make you happy day-to-day. It’s the type of work and the people you work with that will.
If you know engineers who work at Microsoft , talk to them to understand what the culture is like. In addition, we would also recommend reading the following resources:
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How To Pass The Microsoft Interview: A Practical Guide
Microsoft is one of the most prestigious and long-standing tech companies in the world. Their impact on the world of technology and beyond is nearly impossible to quantify, and their technical breadth expands into many different domains.
Its no secret that working at Microsoft also offers a fair number of perks. This includes the standard high salary, catered lunches, Microsoft swag, and much more. Access to top-of-the-line equipment and the ability to work with some of the most capable and intelligent people in the industry is a dream for many software engineers.
Getting hired at a company like Microsoft is not easy. The competition for the prestige and benefits of a job at Microsoft are highly sought after, and as a result, you will be in competition with many other qualified engineers.
If you are intrigued by what Microsoft is offering, then youll need to be able to jump the Microsoft Interview hurdle. Mastering this interview is the barrier that stands before you and working for one of the largest and most prestigious tech companies.
In this post, we are going to be outlining how to prepare for the Microsoft technical interview. We will be highlighting some of the key differentiating factors for Microsoft and how these compare to other, more standard technical interviews.
In this post, I will cover these topics:
We’ve Helped Several Engineers Get The Job At Microsoft
Interview Cake is a systematic approach to solving any programming interview question. We’ve helped engineers get jobs at all the best tech companies, especially including Microsoft. We want to help you with even the toughest software engineer interview at Microsoft.
Microsoft has been one of the tech industry’s giants for decades, and it shows in their coding interview. They expect a high degree of acumen and precision, so much so that it sets them apart from the vast majority of other companies that compete with Microsoft for talent. Microsoft interviews are tough, but they are solvable. Microsoft extends thousands of job offers a year, and you could be one of the engineers receiving one of those offers.
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Important Points To Keep In Mind
Who You Will Interview With
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Microsoft Technical Program Manager Salary
According to Comparably, a Microsoft Program Managerâs average compensation is $145,360 per year. The annual salary can range from $113,000 to $195,000. Your offer, however, will depend on various factors, such as your experience and the value you bring to the organization. How you perform during the interview and how well you negotiate will decide your final package.
How And When To Start Microsoft Interview Preparation
Microsoft interview preparation guide can be started from college days itself, by participating and being active in competitive programming contests and attending coding competitions such as ICPC . You should have a thorough understanding of database concepts and data structure and algorithm concepts.
Understanding these concepts is a very important step in cracking Microsoft interviews especially if you are not from a Computer Science background. Do rigorous practice to improve coding skills and try out various problem-solving questions. Try to do more projects that could improve your resume. Be familiar with the possible questions that would be asked based on the project you have done.
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Getting In: How To Land The Interviews
Big tech companies get hundreds of thousands of applications. Microsoft uses three streams for their recruitment and candidate sourcing, which Domina outlines as online applicants, referrals, and LinkedIn scouring.
Online applications might be the easiest thing you can do right now to reach out to a company and showcase your experience and qualifications but because everyone else is doing it too, its really hard to stand out from thousands of applications.
Domina says that developers and engineers can get an edge by being referred and discovered by Microsofts out-bound recruitment: Youll show up higher on recruiters searches, and youll have recruiters reaching out to you instead of you having to apply online.
Heres how job-seekers can do this:
Most Common Microsoft Interview Categories
Choosing the types of questions that we spend our time practicing on is important, especially if we are targeting a specific company.With this in mind, we decided to gather some data regarding the types of questions that are typically asked in Microsoft interviews.
We combed through the website Glassdoor to find specific examples of what people had experienced in their Microsoft interview.Glassdoor has a page dedicated to Microsoft, and individuals who have interviewed at Microsoft give a review on their experience. This often includes specifics as to what problems, or at least, what types of problems they were asked during their interview.
After parsing through over one hundred interview experiences from Glassdoor for Microsoft, I obtained the following distribution of the types of problems that were generally encountered in a Microsoft interview.
Spend most of your time on the most important and most likely material to appear in your Microsoft interview.
We can see that there is a large emphasis on data structure-based questions over the algorithm and design categories.
For a bit more granularity, I also took these larger categories and broke them down into subcategories.
From both of these graphs, its clear that Microsoft really favors the following topics:
One of the observations I made in parsing through this data is that there were recurrent specific problems and topics that arose in all three of these subcategories.
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Research The Interview Process For Companies
Each company has its own process for interviewing candidates and evaluates candidates along different core values, so do your homework! If you understand the mission and core values of the companies you’re applying to, you’ll not only understand more about the company’s culture and goals, you’ll also be better prepared to demonstrate those values and principles during the interview. We’ve put together an extensive catalog of interview guides that give you an inside look at the interview process and criteria for most tech companies. Here are a few examples:
- Google emphasizes technical competence in their interviews and often asks system design questions.
- interviewers tend to ask about your people skillslike ability to manage conflict or dealing with difficult team members.
Check out our full list of company interview guides here:
Microsoft First Round Interview Questions To Prepare 2021
Before we get into the Microsoft first-round interview questions, lets take a look at what Microsoft is all about. Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company located in Redmond, Washington. It is in charge of developing, manufacturing, licensing, supporting, and selling software, consumer electronics, computers, and associated services. Microsoft Windows, Office suite, Internet Explorer, and Edge web browsers are Microsofts most well-known software products. Xbox video gaming consoles and Microsoft Surface touchscreen personal computers are the companys two main hardware products. Microsoft was the largest software company in the world by sales in 2016, and it was rated No. 21 on the Fortune 500 ranking of the top US firms by total revenue. Along with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, it is regarded as one of the Big Five in the US information technology sector.
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Three Things The Amazon/aws Interview Process Seeks To Determine
Are you an Amazonian? At most companies, the decision to hire is focused on the candidates functional fit for the role they are applying to. Amazon/AWS is different – the interview loop is focused on your cultural fit, as measured by our Leadership Principles . We know that builders and entrepreneurs are frequently inspired by new ventures and we have a culture which celebrates you pursuing the areas you are passionate about without any internal gatekeeping. At Amazon/AWS, we encourage each employee to own their career and there is no minimum time in role required before transferring to another team. Having a consistent hiring bar ensures you will be successful at Amazon/AWS no matter what team you are on.
At what level of seniority do you raise the bar? We have relentlessly high standards in everything we do including our hiring process. If you are deemed to be an Amazonian, we next determine at what level of seniority you are better than 50% of people in role. As an example, we expect a junior employee to drive impact with a singular project/partner/customer, while a mid-stage employee drives impact at a team level, and senior level role at the organizational level. At Amazon/AWS our Leadership Principles arent a poster on a wall they are part of everyday life at the company. The interviewers you speak with are calibrated to assess our expectation of those LPs at the level of seniority you are applying to.
Read About The Position
As mentioned, Microsoft puts special emphasis on the level of your motivation to work specifically at Microsoft.
You are expected to show curiosity and interest in the position and in the company .
Try to ask yourselfwhat interests youin the company, and the position youre applying for.
Here are a few tips for that:
- Go to Microsofts website and try to soak in their culture.
- Read about Microsofts products, think of interesting questions, and research products that interest you.
- Talk to people you know that have worked at Microsoft and ask them about their experience.
With that said, you are most definitely not expected to know everything about the job youre applying for. This is mostly to develop your interest in the position youre applying for and in Microsoft.
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Build Your Networks Get Referrals
Domina says that referrals are still one of the best ways to land an interview in general. Whether at Microsoft, or any other company, referrals not only get you to the front of the queue, but recruiters and hiring managers trust referrals more than they do blind applications. She says, Because theres someone else thats currently on our team vouching for your experience, your work ethic all of those things that take us a little while to interview for statistically, youre more likely to have a successful on-site interview.
In order to increase your chances of being referred, you need to build a solid network of contacts. Domina suggests tapping into, growing, and leveraging your network by reconnecting with past school connections and colleagues. Think about who you went to school with, who youve had past work experiences with and start there.
Or, if your old connections dont prove fruitful, Domina suggests reaching out to people who are in a position at a company that you can see yourself fulfilling, and picking their brains: Say, Hey, this is my dream job. Im really impressed by X on your profile would you be open to me buying you a cup of coffee and picking your brain?. By doing this, you can artificially make some of those connections.
Microsoft Program Manager Interview Process And Prep 80 Sample Interview Questions Included
Youâd be hard-pressed to find anyone whose life has not been influenced by a Microsoft product directly or indirectly. That is the sheer magnitude of scale at which this tech giant operates. And right at the center of this action is a Microsoft Program Manager.
Program Managers or PMs are also known as Technical Program Managers or TPMs. At Microsoft, PMs are expected to deep-dive into technical aspects when planning, designing, and outlining the roadmap of a product, in addition to performing all the duties required of a product manager. In this article, weâll cover everything you need to know about the Microsoft Program Manager hiring process:
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Engineering Manager Interview Stages
In general, the engineering manager interview has the following interview stages at most companies:
1. Recruiter screen
In this 30-45min interview, you’ll be asked questions about your resume, light technical questions to gauge your domain knowledge, and behavioral questions to assess your personality and working style. In general, try to be authentic and genuine, while also showing that you’ve done research on the company and are genuinely excited to work there. We often recommend looking up your interviewer on LinkedIn to understand them a bit better.
2. Manager screen
In this interview, you’ll speak with the hiring manager about your technical skills and domain knowledge . Expect to talk through why you’re the best candidate for the job and how you’d add value to the company.
3. On-site
On-site interviews also vary, but they follow a predictable structure. Typically youll interview for 3-5 hours total with a lunch break midway through. Youll go through many rounds, each 30 – 60 minutes long. EMs may be given a technical screen or coding challenge and complete 1-2 rounds of people management interviews and system design questions. There may be a separate round for a project retrospective. We encourage you to gather as much information as possible about the exact structure from your recruiter, as well as checking our list of EM interview questions that have been recently asked by tech companies.
