Interview Questions from Microsoft

A blog from Shawn L. Morrissey

Interview Questions - My Favorites
Posted at July 18, 2005 08:38 PM in Microsoft .

A couple of the folks I had the pleasure of interviewing down at Stanford wanted me to update this post to include the questions I asked them. I’m not going to give them all away, and a couple of the more entertaining questions were:

* Which of Microsoft’s seven businesses would you sell? Why?
* You’re now the product manager for Fortran.NET. What are the top three features you want to add? (This one was a LOT of fun!).

—– original post —

I had the wonderful opportunity earlier this week to travel to Philadelphia, PA, and visit some first-year MBA candidates at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business. What a brain vault! I was asked to help interview candidates for our MBA Intern program here at Microsoft. I was surprised how much Wharton has internalized blogging – there’s even some “officially-sanctioned” blogging going on over there. I’ve already asked them to add an RSS feed – we’ll see what happens.

I found out from a couple other folks recruiting that these little weasels send around the interview questions, so we had to change a lot of the fun questions between days. Since these are probably making the rounds anyway, and for those of you working on the “Complete Reference of Microsoft’s Interview Questions”, here’s a few highlights:

* Explain a database to a young child.
* Explain the Internet to your grandparents
* What is your favorite web site? Why? Now improve it.
* Steve Jobs calls and asks you to improve the iPod. Go. (No bonus points for saying, “Add WMA support!)
* You’re in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake – goes up, goes down, stays the same?

e-mail me your answers for this last question :) my e-mail is hey_bri_pino@yahoo.com

DONT PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS AS IT WOULD SPOIL IT FOR THE OTHERS!!