Microsoft interview questions for laterals

Hey there, job seekers, the interview is for you, too! Ask these questions throughout your interview to make sure the job and company are the right fit for you and your life.

By clicking "submit," you agree to receive emails from Career Contessa and accept our web terms of use and privacy policy. Listen to the Latest Podcast Episode. Back to Articles. Job Search. By Mallory Briggs. First, take some time to congratulate yourself. Celebrate your confidence—celebrate your competence. More importantly, you know or have a better idea of what you want.

Instead, the interview will be focused around three themes:. Getting hired at a company like Microsoft is not easy. The competition for the prestige and benefits of a job at Microsoft are highly sought after, and as a result, you will be in competition with many other qualified engineers. Mastering this interview is the barrier that stands before you and working for one of the largest and most prestigious tech companies.

In this post, we are going to be outlining how to prepare for the Microsoft technical interview. We will be highlighting some of the key differentiating factors for Microsoft and how these compare to other, more standard technical interviews.

Preparing for any interview requires some work, and this is more so for a company the size of Microsoft, where competition is very high.

After reading this post, you can rest assured that you will have greatly enhanced your chances of passing the interview! For the most part, a Microsoft interview consists of coding, and this is what the focus of this post specifically will be about.

For strategies regarding how to ace your system design interview, consult the following post from Byte by Byte. The recruitment process begins either when someone from the recruiting team reaches out to you directly or when you apply for a position at Microsoft and are contacted by someone from the recruiting team.

Generally, unsolicited recruitments occur to candidates who are graduating as part of a specific program or have, for instance, some type of compelling web presence to cause the recruiter on the Microsoft side to reach out. You will often be applying directly to Microsoft to establish this correspondence. The most straightforward way to do this would be to apply directly on the careers website that Microsoft offers. Microsoft also has a specific website dedicated to student recruitment if you will be graduating from a university.

Furthermore, Microsoft sometimes recruits at job fairs, hackathons, etc. You can also use a service like hackathon.

If the application looks like a fit, someone from the Microsoft recruitment team will reach out to you with further instructions on how to navigate the interview process. The phone screen involves writing code via a shared document between you and the interviewer.

The problems that you receive here are ones that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time, e. If you succeed at the phone screen, the next step will be to bring you on-site to interview in person at Microsoft. This is typically structured as one full day of interviews consisting of about four to five separate interviews.

Each of these interviews takes roughly an hour. You may also be interviewing with different teams to determine what the best fit between you and the teams is, more specifically, where your strengths could be used most effectively to leverage any given Microsoft team.

The interviews themselves will be conducted in the standard whiteboarding interview style, where you will be given a specific problem and expected to work through it during your interview. Depending on the role that you applied for, the interviews themselves may focus on technologies or concepts that are particularly relevant to that role.

Each on-site interview is conducted independently. Once all of the interviews have concluded, each of the individuals that conducted the interviews with you will be responsible for submitting their respective feedback and making a decision to hire or not hire.

This can be very frustrating, especially after receiving this decision later on in the process. The first step for preparing for any interview is research. Review the job description to refresh your memory about any must-haves. Look for insights about other priorities, like traits that are referenced repeatedly throughout the vacancy announcement. Your goal should be to glean as much info about what Microsoft finds important as possible.

That way, you can speak to those points when you answer the Microsoft interview questions. In fact we wanted to let you know that we created an amazing free cheat sheet that will give you word-for-word answers for some of the toughest interview questions you are going to face in your upcoming interview. After all, hiring managers will often ask you more generalized interview questions along with their Microsoft specific questions! Enough about strategy.

Now, like we mentioned above, Microsoft hires for all kinds of positions. Each of the jobs at Microsoft is going to have a unique set of interview questions. However, it also serves as a unique opportunity.

Since the question is relatively open and broad, you can steer it in nearly any direction. That means you can use it as a chance to highlight relevant skills or traits that you want to showcase that you may not be able to work in otherwise. Additionally, you can tweak your approach based on which of the Microsoft jobs you are trying to land, allowing you to discuss a product or service that aligns with the nature of the role. If I had to pick a favorite, I would choose Microsoft Office Under the ribbon, file menu items and toolbar buttons were grouped according to their functionality.

It made these functions much accessible on the main interface, with the most commonly used buttons being shown instantly. Microsoft classifies such threats into 4 indicators, which are low, moderate, important, and critical.

Such indicators are available as reference under the Microsoft bulletin. It is a programming model that centers on the creation of objects and classes. Unlike structural programming, OOP lets you write shorter codes by being able to reuse codes and create instances of objects.

As often as possible. Enabling the auto update feature of the Microsoft operating system would allow regular monitoring from the Microsoft site for available updates that can be downloaded and installed. ADO, or Active X data objects, allows developers to create applications that can interoperate well with other data application services.

This API is mainly used for power management, and is very useful especially to those using Windows on their laptops or netbooks. The letters XP actually stands for eXPerience. Hotfix are files that are distributed by Microsoft Customer Service. These are intended to address issues such as bugs and errors within existing software.

It is the standard file system that is being used by operating systems starting from Windows NT, Windows , Windows XP, and even the newer versions like Vista and 7. It was originally designed to have a better performance on file storage and retrieval under the Windows NT family. These are shared library files that contain usable codes and routines that other applications can utilize to create other new applications.

This certification deals with skills related to applying solutions to business productivity by utilizing Microsoft Server operating system. Registry is a very important component of the Windows Operating System.

It stores important information, such as setup and configuration, installation settings, and user settings. ScanDisk is a diagnostic tool that checks a hard drive for errors, file corruptions and data integrity. It can do repairs on errors that it detects. To do this, start from the head and traverse to the end. Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored in a browser. It keeps track of user preference, like what sites are visited, what keywords are used, among others.

This means that Windows XP can be installed on these file systems. The use of NTFS is preferred especially when using a bigger hard drive space. A Service Pack combines hotfixes and updates into one installer module. These are mainly used to upgrade an existing software version without the need to uninstall and reinstall an entire software package. Option Explicit ensures that all variables to be used in a program are defined or declared, therefore specifying what data type it is intended for.

Arrays can store data in a fix allotted space. The use of linked list allows more flexibility because space is dynamically allocated as needed. Defrag is a system utility tool under Windows operating system that is designed to rearrange the ordering of data on disk.