Practice in Microsoft USA (resume and telephone interview)
I would very much like to call this article “I want to work at Microsoft”, but this title would not be entirely honest, since, in particular, I currently work not at Microsoft. Nevertheless, the difference in the approach to the search for practice (internship) and the workplace is quantitative rather than qualitative, that is, one must go through all the same steps, only to show (if possible) deeper and wider knowledge. Therefore, I think that what I have written will be equally interesting for those who would like to do a practice there and for those who are interested in working as a developer at Microsoft.
At first, I tried to combine in one article both personal impressions about the process and practical advice for Habrahabr's readers, which did not lead to anything good. Therefore, I tried in the article to describe only the experience that I acquired, and remove my impressions under the spoilers.
Part 1: General facts, document preparation and telephone interview.
Optional Prelude
Before talking about how I applied and prepared for the practice interview at Microsoft, it’s necessary to clarify a few details.
I am a pediatrician by training. More precisely, I was the only one in 2006. It so happened that after graduating from a medical university in Russia and after theoretical postgraduate studies in Germany, I was again faced with a choice of profession, since I did not recognize my doctor’s degree in Germany, but I somehow didn’t like to work in science.
It should be noted that Germany is a country of total bureaucracy. Therefore, to work here in any field without professional education - even with many years of experience - is always a risk. First of all, it concerns the salary level: regardless of qualifications, without education it is difficult to rise above a certain “ceiling”, as well as it is almost impossible to take a leadership position. Well, more or less large firms (including Microsoft) often do not even consider candidates without a diploma.
Therefore, after weighing all the pros and cons, I decided that it was time to get a professional higher education in this field and enrolled in the first semester of the Technical University of Hamburg .
')
It should be noted here that in Germany the system of higher education, about which I have already written here, is arranged in such a way that it is possible to study for 10 or even more years. Therefore, in spite of my age, which is already quite solid for a first-year student, in principle, I did not stand out much from the other students. On my course there were people older than me and the same age as me, who are also studying or retraining here.
Unlike the Russian medical university, where all the subjects are tightly defined and the schedule for each semester is drawn up in the dean's office, in Germany there are no timetables at all at technical universities as such. There is a list of subjects that must be passed to obtain a “small diploma” (Vordiplom) and for a diploma, but the order of passing exams and passing subjects does not play any role (with rare exception). In more detail the training I have already described in Habré .
As a third year student (5th semester), I first accidentally met with the Microsoft Student Partners program.
The Microsoft student program differs significantly from country to country, so it’s not meaningful to describe in detail all its bonuses, you can read more about the Russian program on its official website . In general, student partners organize various reports, workshops, “hackathons” in the area that they like best and get the opportunity for self-education in the form of books, exam vouchers and a number of individual bonuses (for example, participation in conferences) .
But, in my opinion, this is not the most important thing in the program. Its main advantage is the possibility of direct contact with Microsoft employees: technical evangelists and managers, as well as close contact with students from other universities who are just as interested in Microsoft technologies. The second, in my opinion, is even more valuable, because it allows you to learn a lot from your “peers” (not in terms of age, but in terms of status and interest in technology). In addition, in Germany there is no bias in relation to university students (as a student there can be quite a long-term status): some student partners also had the status of MVP (Most Valuable Professional) from Microsoft for their activities. And when you see what has been achieved by people who study with you together, it motivates you to further develop and work on yourself.
Along with motivation by personal example, a huge motivation for me was the fact that a number of former “student partners” were leaving after work to work in Microsoft in America. For the developer, this was the only opportunity to engage in software development at Microsoft, since in Germany, Microsoft is only engaged in supporting its products and consulting. Work in the United States, of course, has its own characteristics, but the fact that it is there that concentrated the leading developers of many companies (including Microsoft) is difficult to deny.
On the advice of one of the former student partners currently working in the Common Language Runtime group, I received advice to first practice at Microsoft in America, and based on the results of the practice, decide whether this job is suitable for me and this country or not. Thus, my strategic goal “I want to work at Microsoft” was transformed into a tactical “I want to do practice at Microsoft”.
I am a pediatrician by training. More precisely, I was the only one in 2006. It so happened that after graduating from a medical university in Russia and after theoretical postgraduate studies in Germany, I was again faced with a choice of profession, since I did not recognize my doctor’s degree in Germany, but I somehow didn’t like to work in science.
It should be noted that Germany is a country of total bureaucracy. Therefore, to work here in any field without professional education - even with many years of experience - is always a risk. First of all, it concerns the salary level: regardless of qualifications, without education it is difficult to rise above a certain “ceiling”, as well as it is almost impossible to take a leadership position. Well, more or less large firms (including Microsoft) often do not even consider candidates without a diploma.
Therefore, after weighing all the pros and cons, I decided that it was time to get a professional higher education in this field and enrolled in the first semester of the Technical University of Hamburg .
')
Study
It should be noted here that in Germany the system of higher education, about which I have already written here, is arranged in such a way that it is possible to study for 10 or even more years. Therefore, in spite of my age, which is already quite solid for a first-year student, in principle, I did not stand out much from the other students. On my course there were people older than me and the same age as me, who are also studying or retraining here.
Unlike the Russian medical university, where all the subjects are tightly defined and the schedule for each semester is drawn up in the dean's office, in Germany there are no timetables at all at technical universities as such. There is a list of subjects that must be passed to obtain a “small diploma” (Vordiplom) and for a diploma, but the order of passing exams and passing subjects does not play any role (with rare exception). In more detail the training I have already described in Habré .
Microsoft student program.
As a third year student (5th semester), I first accidentally met with the Microsoft Student Partners program.
The Microsoft student program differs significantly from country to country, so it’s not meaningful to describe in detail all its bonuses, you can read more about the Russian program on its official website . In general, student partners organize various reports, workshops, “hackathons” in the area that they like best and get the opportunity for self-education in the form of books, exam vouchers and a number of individual bonuses (for example, participation in conferences) .
But, in my opinion, this is not the most important thing in the program. Its main advantage is the possibility of direct contact with Microsoft employees: technical evangelists and managers, as well as close contact with students from other universities who are just as interested in Microsoft technologies. The second, in my opinion, is even more valuable, because it allows you to learn a lot from your “peers” (not in terms of age, but in terms of status and interest in technology). In addition, in Germany there is no bias in relation to university students (as a student there can be quite a long-term status): some student partners also had the status of MVP (Most Valuable Professional) from Microsoft for their activities. And when you see what has been achieved by people who study with you together, it motivates you to further develop and work on yourself.
Along with motivation by personal example, a huge motivation for me was the fact that a number of former “student partners” were leaving after work to work in Microsoft in America. For the developer, this was the only opportunity to engage in software development at Microsoft, since in Germany, Microsoft is only engaged in supporting its products and consulting. Work in the United States, of course, has its own characteristics, but the fact that it is there that concentrated the leading developers of many companies (including Microsoft) is difficult to deny.
On the advice of one of the former student partners currently working in the Common Language Runtime group, I received advice to first practice at Microsoft in America, and based on the results of the practice, decide whether this job is suitable for me and this country or not. Thus, my strategic goal “I want to work at Microsoft” was transformed into a tactical “I want to do practice at Microsoft”.
Preparation and submission of documents for practice.
First of all, I found out (I hadn’t thought about it before) that the practice at Microsoft in the USA is very prestigious and therefore there is a very big competition there. Most student interns are recruited by Microsoft directly from the United States. As for foreign students, according to the “insider” information I received from a reliable source, from about 5,000 resumes that are sent to Microsoft every year not from America, about 20-30 people are invited to practice. That is, the selection will turn out to be about 1 to 100, which of course is inferior to competitions in leading universities in Russia, but still quite impressive.
From official sources - in particular, after a detailed study of the application site - it was found out that practice in the USA is possible for students in two versions:
| Microsoft Research Intern | Microsoft Business Intern |
|---|---|
| This type of practice is intended for postgraduate students and “gifted” students who wish to undergo a “scientific” internship. The main thing is to search for a possible practice leader who would already work at Microsoft Research and discuss the topic. You can apply for practice almost all year round, there are no deadlines for submitting applications. If the application is successful, the practice is covered in the group where the scientist works. The work of an intern should not be directly related to his main topic of the thesis. | Three-month practice from May to September (12 weeks from this interval) in one of three possible roles:
|
To apply for the practice was required
- Fill out a detailed resume on career.microsoft.com before December 15 to qualify for one of the places for next summer.
- After the selection of candidates on the basis of the resume, the candidates had to go through a telephone interview and, if successful, also
- in-person interviews with representatives of the group that required trainees.
In case of successful completion of the last, face-to-face interview, the candidate was invited to practice. Face-to-face interviews for candidates from Europe are held at Microsoft's European offices: in Dublin, in Warsaw, and in Munich. As I understand it, at these offices once a year - around the end of February - beginning of March - a landing of Microsoft employees from the United States lands, who conduct interviews and invite those who successfully pass to their practice.
Interview - what you need to know
Finding information about how an interview at Microsoft is being conducted yielded just a lot of results: it turned out that there is even a separate Wikipedia article devoted to this issue. If I summarize everything that I have collected from the Internet, then we get something like this:
- Microsoft as a company is known for its extraordinary attitude towards interviews.
- The job interview itself differs little from the job interview. It is conducted by several employees, who then must reach a consensus on the candidate. In the case of admission to work, an interview is carried out by 4-5 employees of the department, while the level of the interviewee grows with each following interview: that is, if an ordinary programmer starts the interview, then his department head or architect finishes. There are many cases where the interview ended "ahead of time" and after two interviews the candidate went home.
- In the early years, when the interview was personally supervised by the company's founder, Bill Gates, various interview questions (brain teasers) were often asked at the interview, which did not always have a direct bearing on the tasks that the employee would deal with and required some erudition and ingenuity from the interviewer.
- In addition to the puzzle questions, the most frequent types of questions were evaluation questions, known as Fermat's tasks, the essence of which was to evaluate a certain parameter, the exact meaning of which could not be known to the interviewee, but which could be assessed with certain accuracy based on well-known facts and a number of assumptions (“How many sewers in New York?”, “How many piano tuners are in Chicago?”, “How many golf balls will fit into the school bus?”).
- In recent years, Microsoft has officially abandoned the practice of such questions, the possibility of such questions is still not 100% excluded, especially as additional questions.
However, in order to get an interview (even a telephone one), one has to go through the very first stage - with a resume.
Resume preparation.
In my case, the process of preparing and reading the resume took about two months and passed about 25 iterations to the final version. Several Microsoft employees, several of my friends working in the USA, my university professor, with whom I had written research work for more than 10 years in America, as well as a number of my German friends, had a hand in editing my resume. After each revision, the resume was redrawn to the point that I had to practically reassemble it again from the pieces left after editing the previous version. The final version can be viewed here .
I’ll say right away that this work was mostly unnecessary, because when applying for the practice on the Microsoft website, you still need to use their “constructor”, into which you can, of course, import an existing resume, but which itself defines the format and the necessary information .
Following a large number of iterations, I got the following principles for writing a resume for practice in the USA:
- In a summary in the United States, it is strongly not recommended to insert your photo, because on the basis of the photo you can make a “biased” decision about the candidate (for example, you can judge his skin color, obesity, race, etc.), which can be the basis for a lawsuit.
- For the same reason, the candidate’s age and date of birth are not written into the resume. It is also not necessary to indicate the floor, although it can often be understood by name.
- We must try to refrain from assessing and describing the facts whenever possible. In the case of studying at a university, it is useful to indicate with which technologies you have worked within the framework of practice or laboratory. If you have experience in a firm, then it is also very good to indicate technologies and acquired skills.
- When describing technology, you should try to be as detailed as possible. For example, “database programming” sounds much worse than “developing a Silverlight client application for working with a database on MS SQL Server 2008 R2”.
- If you were a Microsoft Student Partner, you need to indicate this in your resume. According to unconfirmed officially (but not refuted by anyone) information, such summaries always reach the stage of a telephone interview. All my friends-partners, who sent their resumes after me, reached this stage.
- No matter how well you speak English, resumes should always be submitted for proofreading to at least two or three Americans or, in extreme cases, to people who speak English better than yours. Even if there are no language errors (and not necessarily grammatical - some things just do not sound in English), this will help to find typos or flaws in the design (missing points, commas) from which no one is insured.
It is important to always remember that resumes are the first thing that eliminates candidates, and it is at the resume stage that 90% are eliminated. Therefore, it is extremely important that everything here is in perfect order.
Preparing for a telephone interview
For candidates who have been pre-selected on the basis of a resume, the next step is a telephone interview.
On the basis of this, drawn from the Internet and from various kinds of manuals for preparing for telephone interviews, during this interview the following questions are resolved by the employee conducting the interview:
- First of all, the interview serves to assess the level of proficiency in English. Of course, no one expects from a person who has lived all his life outside the United States and English-speaking countries that he will speak flawlessly. However, a free level of language proficiency is required, the ability to clearly and clearly express your thoughts, understand the interviewer's questions and be able to argue your answers. For the role of Programm Manager, they say, we need to speak better than for SDE, but in practice I could not verify this.
- If the candidate has an English level, the interviewer assesses the overall adequacy of the interviewee. Here, special attention is paid to the so-called "stop signals" (red flags), which may indicate (some) inadequacy or eccentricity of the candidate. Such signals may be:
- inadequate assessment of their role (arrogance or arrogance in describing past projects, "they could not do anything until I came, and did not do everything", "everything rested only on me, because only I knew how to do it", etc.) ,
- the inability to clearly and clearly state the essence of completed projects (excessive care in detail (“we used PInvoke with kernel32.dll to access information from the driver”), or excessive generalizations (“I was developing databases in Java”)).
A candidate is expected to have a more or less critical assessment of their activities and completed projects and a relatively honest answer to the question “what would you have done differently?”. At the same time, the answer itself is not so important (for example, you can calmly answer “I would do exactly the same”), and his argument (“because otherwise I think we would have the following problems ...”).
How did it happen with me?
After making a resume and sending it through the already mentioned site carreer.microsoft.com in early December, I did not hear from Microsoft until the end of January. Considering the fact that face-to-face interviews were to take place in February in Munich (this was insider information), I gradually began to worry more and more about the fate of my resume. I was only reassured by the fact that the refusal did not come to me yet.
On January 30, I finally received a letter from the university recruiter from the USA, which congratulated me on the fact that my resume passed the first stage of selection and offered to choose the time for a half-hour telephone interview. Given the time difference between the United States and Germany, the interview was supposed to be between 11 o'clock in the morning and 4 in the morning. I chose 11 nights, because I still could hardly sleep if the interview was late at night.
In a response letter, the recruiter confirmed the time of the interview to me, and also gave the name of the interviewer. A short search on Facebook was immediately crowned with success, even though the recruiter did not explicitly indicate the company where he works, but his name and place of work in the Greater Seattle Area quite clearly identified him. I don’t know why I did it - probably because I am essentially a visual myself and I feel very insecure when I need to speak on the phone with someone I don’t know. The fact that I saw what my interlocutor looks like in a photograph has already largely reassured me.
Also in the letter a whole paragraph was highlighted in red, which stated that during the interview I might be asked to solve a small programming problem and that I should be ready to dictate its decision to the recruiter by phone. About whether you can use a computer or not said nothing.
Following the advice from the book Cracking the Coding Interview (I will analyze the books for preparation in detail in the next section), I took my resume and prepared a large table, each line in which was a paragraph from my resume (study, work, practice), and in the columns I briefly (two or three words) described the possible answers to the recruiter’s questions.
I selected the six most likely questions:
After compiling the table, I slightly rehearsed that I would answer the questions and wrote out for myself separately various kinds of introductory expressions in English, such as "despite the fact that ... we had to use", "Even though we managed to ... we, nonetheless,. .. "," We decided to ... "," We decided to ... "," We decided ... " It is also important to note here that I specifically tried to use we everywhere, as if provoking the recruiter a little to the question of personal contribution and at the same time as if emphasizing the fact that I always worked in a team, and not alone.
In preparation for the programming task, I compiled a table with different data types (array, list, balanced B-tree, heap, and a couple of exotic ones), where for each supported operation I noted its complexity (in O-notation). I don’t know why, but it seemed to me the minimum minimum minimum I could need. I did not take the computer out of those considerations that the keystroke would still be heard and that it would only distract me from the decision: surely the task would not be very complex, since the entire interview is planned for only half an hour.
I do not know why it happened, but the interviewer rang an hour earlier. Either I incorrectly transferred the time to the local, or he was wrong - but the fact remains that at 10 o'clock they unexpectedly called and introduced themselves as an “interviewer”. It’s good that it was in the evening and I, in principle, was ready and just rehearsed, but in the first seconds I was just dumbfounded. My advice is therefore - do not delay the rehearsal for the last hour before the interview :)
Although the interviewer was an American, he honestly tried to speak slowly and clearly. It can be said, it was directly audible as he tries to clearly pronounce his words, which must have been prepared text. It certainly helped a lot. It was also hampered by the fact that some kind of IP-telephony was most likely used, because the periodic distortions of his voice very much resembled a Skype conversation via an analog modem.
After he introduced himself and asked me if I was the candidate, the interview began. He immediately took my last draft in the resume and began to ask him questions from those for which I had already prepared answers: about problems, about what I would have done differently, about the attitude in the team. Then he asked a more general question: what skills do I consider most important and valuable, and why. Together, it took about 15 minutes.
Exactly 15 minutes later he asked me if I had any questions and if not, then we can “conclude our conversation”. I replied that I had no questions and that I was ready for “conclude”, at the same time preparing paper to write down the conditions of the task for programming which, in my opinion, should have been in the next 15 minutes after that “conclude”. To which he downloaded "Ok, then good bye, Alexander" and hung up.
In the first few seconds, I was just in a stupor. Then I hung up, I think that maybe I misunderstood and this just broke the connection and he will call me back. But it took about ten minutes and no one called me back. I did not have an interviewer phone, of course. The only thought that was spinning in my head was: probably I said something completely stupid or wrong and he decided not to give any task at all. But what could it be, I did not know - it seemed to me, I was rather fluent, without a large number of mistakes, and I honestly told.
Thank God, the wait was not long: the interview was on February 13, and from February 22 to February 26, interviews were scheduled in Munich (which I knew). Considering that I myself live in Hamburg, I should have been warned for 2-3 days, that is, there was actually less than a week to wait.
However, a week passed, a week of interviews began - and no one ever wrote anything to me. On the last day of the interviews, February 26, was my birthday, so by the end of the week I was almost resigned to the refusal (anyway, there was no chance to have an interview in Munich) and was busy with pleasant efforts to prepare for the celebration of Birthday.
The answer came just on my birthday, on Friday evening. The standard response, the recruiter simply clicked on Reply in my Outlook, so when I saw the title of the letter on the phone, I did not even open the letter in order not to be upset.
On January 30, I finally received a letter from the university recruiter from the USA, which congratulated me on the fact that my resume passed the first stage of selection and offered to choose the time for a half-hour telephone interview. Given the time difference between the United States and Germany, the interview was supposed to be between 11 o'clock in the morning and 4 in the morning. I chose 11 nights, because I still could hardly sleep if the interview was late at night.
In a response letter, the recruiter confirmed the time of the interview to me, and also gave the name of the interviewer. A short search on Facebook was immediately crowned with success, even though the recruiter did not explicitly indicate the company where he works, but his name and place of work in the Greater Seattle Area quite clearly identified him. I don’t know why I did it - probably because I am essentially a visual myself and I feel very insecure when I need to speak on the phone with someone I don’t know. The fact that I saw what my interlocutor looks like in a photograph has already largely reassured me.
Also in the letter a whole paragraph was highlighted in red, which stated that during the interview I might be asked to solve a small programming problem and that I should be ready to dictate its decision to the recruiter by phone. About whether you can use a computer or not said nothing.
Following the advice from the book Cracking the Coding Interview (I will analyze the books for preparation in detail in the next section), I took my resume and prepared a large table, each line in which was a paragraph from my resume (study, work, practice), and in the columns I briefly (two or three words) described the possible answers to the recruiter’s questions.
I selected the six most likely questions:
- What was my personal contribution to the project or work.
- What was the most interesting, important, entertaining, instructive, etc.
- What are the results achieved by the results of the project, study or practice.
- What problems had to face during the project.
- How was the cooperation with other project participants?
- What would I, in my opinion, do differently, given my current experience.
After compiling the table, I slightly rehearsed that I would answer the questions and wrote out for myself separately various kinds of introductory expressions in English, such as "despite the fact that ... we had to use", "Even though we managed to ... we, nonetheless,. .. "," We decided to ... "," We decided to ... "," We decided ... " It is also important to note here that I specifically tried to use we everywhere, as if provoking the recruiter a little to the question of personal contribution and at the same time as if emphasizing the fact that I always worked in a team, and not alone.
In preparation for the programming task, I compiled a table with different data types (array, list, balanced B-tree, heap, and a couple of exotic ones), where for each supported operation I noted its complexity (in O-notation). I don’t know why, but it seemed to me the minimum minimum minimum I could need. I did not take the computer out of those considerations that the keystroke would still be heard and that it would only distract me from the decision: surely the task would not be very complex, since the entire interview is planned for only half an hour.
I do not know why it happened, but the interviewer rang an hour earlier. Either I incorrectly transferred the time to the local, or he was wrong - but the fact remains that at 10 o'clock they unexpectedly called and introduced themselves as an “interviewer”. It’s good that it was in the evening and I, in principle, was ready and just rehearsed, but in the first seconds I was just dumbfounded. My advice is therefore - do not delay the rehearsal for the last hour before the interview :)
Although the interviewer was an American, he honestly tried to speak slowly and clearly. It can be said, it was directly audible as he tries to clearly pronounce his words, which must have been prepared text. It certainly helped a lot. It was also hampered by the fact that some kind of IP-telephony was most likely used, because the periodic distortions of his voice very much resembled a Skype conversation via an analog modem.
After he introduced himself and asked me if I was the candidate, the interview began. He immediately took my last draft in the resume and began to ask him questions from those for which I had already prepared answers: about problems, about what I would have done differently, about the attitude in the team. Then he asked a more general question: what skills do I consider most important and valuable, and why. Together, it took about 15 minutes.
Exactly 15 minutes later he asked me if I had any questions and if not, then we can “conclude our conversation”. I replied that I had no questions and that I was ready for “conclude”, at the same time preparing paper to write down the conditions of the task for programming which, in my opinion, should have been in the next 15 minutes after that “conclude”. To which he downloaded "Ok, then good bye, Alexander" and hung up.
In the first few seconds, I was just in a stupor. Then I hung up, I think that maybe I misunderstood and this just broke the connection and he will call me back. But it took about ten minutes and no one called me back. I did not have an interviewer phone, of course. The only thought that was spinning in my head was: probably I said something completely stupid or wrong and he decided not to give any task at all. But what could it be, I did not know - it seemed to me, I was rather fluent, without a large number of mistakes, and I honestly told.
Thank God, the wait was not long: the interview was on February 13, and from February 22 to February 26, interviews were scheduled in Munich (which I knew). Considering that I myself live in Hamburg, I should have been warned for 2-3 days, that is, there was actually less than a week to wait.
However, a week passed, a week of interviews began - and no one ever wrote anything to me. On the last day of the interviews, February 26, was my birthday, so by the end of the week I was almost resigned to the refusal (anyway, there was no chance to have an interview in Munich) and was busy with pleasant efforts to prepare for the celebration of Birthday.
The answer came just on my birthday, on Friday evening. The standard response, the recruiter simply clicked on Reply in my Outlook, so when I saw the title of the letter on the phone, I did not even open the letter in order not to be upset.
To be continued...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/174787/
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