Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 blog extreme-home-m

Remember my dinner date?

As promised, I took a Jobsblog reader to dinner the night before his interview to provide him some tailored profession guidance and insight on Microsoft. We had a fantastic time and I told him to call me as soon as his interview day was done to tell me how it went. So at 2:00pm my cell phone rings and he says, “I feel like I am on Extreme Home Makeover and I was just shown my dream house, only instead of my dream home, I just got my new dream job!”
I love this guy. Anyone who compares a new job to a makeover show is my dream candidate. I am thrilled to announce that Pat Munns is moving to Seattle and joining the CRM team as an SDET. Aside from the great wine and seafood we had the night prior to his interview, he had a few other tricks that he used to help him land the job.

Here is Pat's advice:

When I would apply for jobs at Microsoft, I would apply exclusively to SDE jobs. I didn’t think to apply to SDET jobs because I assumed it wouldn’t be as interesting to figure out how to test something. I went for months, applying to jobs,Office 2007 Professional Key, getting a bunch of phone screenings, a few interviews, but no offers I felt really excited about.

Then,Windows 7 Keygen, I got a call from a Microsoft recruiter who talked to me about what it means to be an SDET. I began to realize that SDET was not what I thought it was: it seemed like SDET was actually a slight superset of SDE. When I thought about it, the difference really just came down to ego. I reasoned that if I let go of the ego requirement, I could still have everything else I wanted in a job. It was a no-brainer. I had 8+ years of SDE-like experience. If I wanted to grow and learn new things, I needed a change. I wanted to look at software from a new perspective. So, I went all-out and prepared for the interview.

Of course, Microsoft has this notorious reputation of being impossible to get into. My experience had definitely supported that so far. The interviews even have their own Wikipedia page. Some JobsBlog readers post comments about how they won’t even apply to Microsoft because of the interview. I was intimidated. I imagined being asked to implement an insert operation for a 2-3 tree on the whiteboard.

To prepare, I studied my old data structures textbook,Office Pro 2010, and worked out a lot of the coding exercises with paper and pencil. I read the testing chapter of Code Complete twice, and did a lot of reading online about Dynamics CRM. I would awkwardly interview myself out loud. I didn’t know exactly how polished I needed to be. So, I kept going until I would start second guessing my decisions, worrying I was preparing in one area too much at the expense of others. It got to the point that whenever I would learn something I would feel myself forgetting the stuff I studied yesterday. I took that to be the sign that I was pretty much as ready as I’d ever be.

It was an awesome coincidence that Jenna posted about taking an interviewee out to dinner just after I had received confirmation that I was going to Redmond. It took me about 5 minutes to quash the unease I felt about telling my story on JobsBlog. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Jenna obviously had a ton of great advice to share. More importantly, being able to talk and get all of my interview worries off my chest with someone who understood what I going through, was a huge boost. It allowed me to go into the interview the next day relaxed and composed. Plus, Jenna was really cool and I had a lot of fun. Even if I didn’t get the job, I wouldn’t have gone home disappointed.

It turned out I was interviewing in what Microsoft recruiters call a “finals day”, which is an event where they interview a bulk of people in back-to-back meetings. My day started in the lobby, waiting for someone to come in and call my name. At any given time, there are 1 to 5 other candidates in the lobby waiting to be called as well. All together, there was probably something like 10 interviews going on at once.

After a few interviews, I was beginning to get concerned because I didn’t ace any of the whiteboard coding problems with the air-tight, elegant solution. There were some things I hadn’t prepared for,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, like implementing different data structures in SQL, so I had to fly by the seat of my pants. I frequently felt like I was ‘thinking underwater’; it seemed like I couldn’t work through the problems fast enough to produce a complete solution prior to the interviewer cut me off to move on.

However,Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, I made sure not to get sloppy and to reason through my decisions rationally. It helped to think aloud because then at least I didn’t appear to be totally perplexed. A few times I slipped into thinking about the solution too deeply and I fell into some assumption traps that the interviewer set for me (just remember there are lots of variations of linked lists.)

Sometimes, I would get the feeling that my style of thinking about the problems was not working for the interviewer, but I guess for SDET positions they probe a lot to see if you are a breadth-first or depth-first kind of problem solver. I was a little disappointed I didn’t get any puzzle questions, because I enjoy trying to solve those.

After my 3rd interview, the recruiter came in and told me that the team liked me, but they were still unsure if I could free my mind of assumptions like a true SDET. An interview later, I was beginning to feel the mental fatigue, and the recruiter took me aside and said that the team gave me the thumbs up.

I was elated, but it wasn’t long before I started worrying about whether I would sink or swim at Microsoft. I guess I have a sort of pessimistic outlook on things, always on the lookout for what could go wrong – hey, maybe I am cut out to be an SDET after all!

- Jenna