A few days ago I observed a job interview at Microsoft and realized that blogs, compared with until just recently, have made a big difference in how you should prepare for a job interview. Let me explain what I mean and how this phenomenon can help you the next time you are in an interview. The idea is stunningly simple and I’m surprised (more…)
Add comment August 28th, 2010
An old, old interview question at technical companies like Microsoft for development and test automation positions goes something like the following. “You have a list of the numbers 1 through 1,000,000 in a random order, but one of the numbers is missing. How can you find the missing number?” A crude answer is to (more…)
Add comment August 14th, 2010
Let me describe a very common Microsoft hiring interview question, and why I think it’s a fairly good question for software engineering position interviews. I’ve been asked this question many times when I worked at Microsoft and was interviewing with new groups following a product-ship, and I’ve also (more…)
Add comment August 3rd, 2010
A very common interview questions at technology companies like Microsoft and Google is, “Write a function which reverse a string.” It’s a very simple question but because there are so many different solutions, the hiring manager can tell a lot about a job candidate by exactly how the candidate answers the question. Reversing a string depends to a large extent on (more…)
Add comment July 24th, 2010
I was chatting with one of my buddies who has been working at Microsoft for nearly 10 years as a software developer. We both started at Microsoft in the same week and worked on Internet Explorer version 3. Here’s an interview question he has used for years: “Write a function which prints a list of the longest (more…)
Add comment July 8th, 2010
A engineer I used to work asked me my thoughts about an interview question he received recently. The question was essentially, “How would you model a pinball machine as a program?” This is a classic object oriented programming (OOP) design question. As with any design question, there are an unlimited number of approaches. Let’s imagine that you further qualify the question and determine that you want to (more…)
Add comment June 19th, 2010
In a recent blog entry I described how coming across as being needy is the number one kiss of death in a technical job interview at a company like Microsoft. But there are several other all-too-common big mistakes you can make in an interview. Another interview kiss of death is to either be too (more…)
Add comment June 5th, 2010
I didn’t realize how important body language is in an interview until an interesting incident recently. A Volt recruiter contacted me and asked me to meet with a candidate, “Joe”, who had been turned down for eight jobs in a row even though he had very solid technical skills. So, I set up a short meeting with Joe. When Joe arrived at my office I immediately knew something was wrong. (more…)
Add comment May 24th, 2010
I observe a lot of job interviews at Microsoft and other technical companies. All too often I see technically qualified candidates do poorly in an interview. Sometimes very, very poorly. There are a handful of “Interview Kisses of Death” — things that if you do them in an interview, almost guarantee that you will not get a job offer. And these kisses of death are surprisingly common. The number one kiss of death in an interview is (more…)
Add comment May 15th, 2010
Many of the jobs (developer, tester, manager, tech writer, support, and so on) at technical companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon require at least a basic knowledge of SQL joins. So, it’d be natural to assume that interview questions about joins are common. And they are up to a point. The trouble is that (more…)
Add comment April 24th, 2010
