I’m currently sitting in the airport in Philadelphia, having just taken the 10:30 red-eye from Seattle. I had the entire row to myself, which enabled me to sleep rather decently, all things considered! (even better than I’m sleeping at 95 Lippincott in all honesty!)
My onsites were earlier that day in Redmond, Washington (Microsoft Main Campus). It was quite a process interviewing with them!
Here’s a breakdown of the entire day:
6:00 - 7:00: Wake up/prep 7:00 - 7:30: Check out of the hotel and Uber to the onsite building (Microsoft building 111) 7:30 - 8:00: Check in at the reception, mingle with some of the other interns 8:00 - 11:45: Interview, break cycles. Interviews last around 45 minutes each, and then we have 15 minutes break in between each one, where we can talk with others, recruiters etc.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of how my interviews went: 1) S: This was my first interview. They asked a mix of technical and behavioural questions, including questions about my past experience. One thing I spoke about extensively was the model I developed for Air Miles. Beyond that, they asked me general job quality questions like: what is the best attribute in a leader? etc. I kind of messed up by saying “communication” repeatedly, when I could have segued into my involvement at school, Rotary, etc. This interviewer was not as friendly/nice as the others, although I think that might have been part of the process (kind of a tough guy, nice guy approach). They also asked a kind of confusing question: first with positioning the scrollbar of a UI element, according to a database index, and then another question about a structure that supports updating quickly: 1) which was this? 2) L: This was a friendly interviewer. We had another coding question, which was to write a simple library function. 3) S: This was a behavioural interview, although we talked about technical concepts like neural networks etc. By this point, I was getting a little confused about what role exactly I was interviewing for! So it was also an interview where we spoke about the team (Microsoft News), and the approaches they use. 4) P: This was another technical interview. The question was a simple Leetcode easy question, although I found a very complex solution online for this question now.
When I spoke to some of the other teams that were interviewing PhD candidates, it seemed their interviews went much more deeply technical, in terms of algorithms and modelling.
One thing that confused me was that every interview was a mix of both technical and behavioural components. It threw me off a bit,since I found that I could keep talking for a while, and then this would cut into my time for the technical component. One other thing that was surprising to me was the amount of pure coding questions, none of which seemed particularly relevant to the position at hand (or even particularly interesting questions in their own right). I believe this is the principal issue: shoehorning a technical question in to every interview for a data scientist intern doesn’t make sense! This is not the right way to interview people! In comparison, the questions I was asked at Lyft seemed much more relevant and interesting to the position at hand.
Although I have a computer science undergrad degree,
In general, this really felt like the “superday” of my profession, computer science! However, it is important to note that as the scale and size of the tech comapnies has grown, fewer and fewer companies are having these massive onsite days. For instance, Google doesn’t do onsite interviews for interns any more, Amazon has not done onsites for a long while (even for new grad!). After the interviews, I had an entire other set of experiences, which I will detail in this upcoming post!
We started off with 10
Questions: 1. kind of confusing question (about binning sort, hashmap etc.; it was kind of like bringing pages into memory, and then doing stuff with that) 2. implement atoi 3. behavioural 4. is palindrome for an integer