All in all it was an amazing experience. Even if they hadn't hired me I still would have been pretty happy. I said the same thing to the recruiter before they gave me the offer. I got the chance to have dinner and talk about programming with extremely bright people. I met really nice and smart people from my own country and now we are going to be working at the same company; most likely not on the same team/group, but still...
I went to Vallarta for three days. My dad, a businessman, made a "business meeting" in Vallarta so that he could accompany me.
The hotel didn't give me room right away so I stayed at my dad's studying and smoking. I was pretty paranoid so I was making sure that I knew the stuff I put on my CV as deeply as possible. When I was taking a smoke-break next to the window, I saw other interviewees chilling out. Having some drinks and spending time at the pool. In retrospect, that is how I should have spent the day. Nothing I studied during those hours directly helped during the interview, but it possibly helped my confidence
We were invited to have dinner with the interviewers the night before. We were told it wasn't an assessment. Someone earlier explained to me in business-speak what an assessment is. It is a meet in which the candidate feels comfortable in a non-interview like context, while the interviewers are taking notes on his behavior. Anyway, according to them they weren't doing that. There were three tables set up and I chose the one John Guin was sitting at. Both because the prettiest girl was sitting there and because John was hilarious. Turns out my choice of table was pretty good since Mike Fortin came to our table and sat next to me.
For the next couple of hours I had a great time talking to Mike and John about what's it like to work at MS, about their backgrounds, we even spent time talking about the version control system they use at Microsoft. Mike introduced himself as the guy you can blame Windows Vista on. He is in charge of the team that is responsible for Windows being fast. Hardcore stuff. I took the risk and told them that MS Paint sucks. Fortunately they agreed. Paint sucks. Not only was the dinner delicious and the conversations interesting, but I made a good impression on Mike which helped me when he ended up interviewing me, praise Zeus.
I returned to my hotel so excited that instead of sleeping I spent a couple of hours at the bar with a bunch of drunken Canadians, my dad and his friend.
My interview was supposed to be at noon, but they moved it to 7:30 am a couple of days prior. I only slept about 4 hours but the adrenaline of the next day was enough to compensate. The Microsoft guys were nice enough to get us breakfast at their hotel since ours didn't serve until later. The interview began at 7:30 sharp.
We were taken to a room within the conference center. There were cookies and soda. Within a minute or two a small army of interviewers came into the room calling people by name. Slowly, pale students and recent graduates were standing up.
I had four interviews. All of them consisted of around ten minutes of talking about my interests and around 40 minutes solving a coding problem. There were no whiteboards in the conference center's rooms so the small point markers I bought were pointless (no pun intended). We wrote code on paper. I always kept in mind all the tips I read from the Internet.
Donna, my first interviewer told me that Manav, the guy who interviewed me in Mexico City had put in a good word for me during dinner. That was a tremendous boost of confidence. She made me write an algorithm involving linked list. It was pretty easy but I chose C so I could show her that I knew how pointers work. She gave me some tips and we wrapped it up.
My second interviewer was named Bambo, and he started off telling me that with my math background maybe I could find an formula to the solution of an algorithmic problem involving consecutive letters in a string. I spent a couple of minutes thinking and I found a solution only to realize that I hadn't understood the problem correctly. He posed to me another problem and I went on to try to find a formula for the solution. I realized too late that this time what he wanted was code. I told him "damn... I'm not doing well"; he just laughed and told me that the point of the interview was to find out how I think. I shrugged it off and told him that he had gotten me into math-mode; so he changed directions and asked me how I would test a dialog box. Then he asked me how I would test Notepad. He complemented me on not giving up on a problem and he finished the interview. My confidence dropped after the interview but I found out that Mike was interviewing me next so I got pretty excited.
Mike started of saying that I asked some good questions the night before. He asked me if I wanted to go right ahead to the coding but I was a bit tired so I told him to ask me some questions first. He asked me what was my favorite program that I have written. I told him about an Internet proxy I wrote to substitute all images in websites for a picture of myself on my mom's computer. He laughed and then asked me what was my most difficult program. I told him about the shadowing in pycave. The problem I had to code was to determine if a matrix has a copy of a smaller matrix within it. After I finished, he told me if I had any questions and I asked just the right question to get him to ramble for 10 minutes about some awesome stuff his team is working on.
When I returned to the main room, there were only two guys left. Most of us only had 3 interviews and as far as I know they hired three of us that morning.
My fourth interview was with a guy named Nar. He works on device driver architecture for Windows. He asked me about Haskell and then he asked me to find an algorithm to find the largest palindrome within a string. After staring at a piece of paper for a couple of minutes he told me that I could find a solution in O(n^3), O(n^2), but he didn't expect me to find the linear solution. I found a quadratic solution but it took too long to write and we didn't have time to test it or for me to ask him questions.
When I was waiting in the room for the last time, I was drinking coke and smoking my fifth cigarette. Suddenly I heard my name and nervously walked to the aisle. There was my recruiter and my four interviewers waiting for me. I didn't realize what was going on until Mike told me congratulations. The rest of my memory is a bit of a blank. Happiness and rainbows.
Tips for the interview.
This is subjective but I believe this is what helped me:
Be methodical. Understand the problem. Plan the solution and *then* code. I did this in all but the second interview and got complemented on it.
Show passion: I made a good impression by having projects of my own and by getting excited when talking about programming.
That's pretty much it. I asked them during dinner what is it that they're looking for in candidates. Mike told me: Intellectual horsepower and passion.
I will have to leave school a month early for my internship. I'll see how I deal with that. I'm excited and I can't wait to leave. It's going to be a great summer!
I will blog as much as I legally can about my experience the next summer =).
