Microsoft Microsoft Explore interview questions

Phone interview: Be sure to know your projects - what was hard about it, what were the bugs, how did you refactor it. There will be behavior questions, technical questions, and a creative question. Practice the behavior questions, because those are asked first and you want to gain confidence through them. The technical questions are easy because you already know how to program and now you're just explaining what you must do. The creative question is fun and allows you to explore different ideas on how to test things. Good luck!

First I went to a Microsoft interest meeting at my college and learned about the program and handed them my resume at the end of the presentation. About a week later they emailed me saying that they would like to interview me over the phone. The phone interview lasted around 30 minutes and it felt more like a friendly conversation than an intimidating interview. The rep asked me questions like "What's your favorite piece of software or hardware and why" "Explain to me how a computer works" "How would you test a water bottle" "How do you stay up to date with new technology" "Tell me about a coding project that you have worked on". After feeling it went well, I received another email about a week later telling me that they would like to fly me out to their main Redmond campus in Seattle, WA. They paid for the flight, a two night stay at the Westin, and for any other expenses like food and taxi travel. When I got there there was a dinner social where you got to meet other candidates and previous explorer interns who now work at Microsoft full time. The next day we were bussed out to the campus and ate lunch in their massive food court and then it was time for the interviews. There are three interviews, one that's more software development oriented, one that's more PM, and one that's more development and testing. The interviews are extremely laid-back. The interviewers are just trying to find out if you are a good fit at Microsoft and you are not competing with the other candidates. If you can just have a conversation with the interviewers, you will be fine. There were three whiteboard coding questions. One was to sort an array of integers. Another was to combine and sort two arrays into a single bigger array. Be sure to have a coding project to talk about, whether it's something you did at a previous internship or a personal coding project. You need to show them that you are extremely interested in technology. I received an email at the end of the same week saying that I got the position. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and even if I didn't get the internship position, I still learned a lot on my short trip to Microsoft.