The Joel on Software Discussion Group

Hello guys,

I have a phone interview with one of the hiring managers at Microsoft, so not the HR people.  Does anyone have any experience with that,  what kind of questions he might ask??

Thanks,

Well...  Microsoft does a LOT of different things.  Generally, if a hiring manager is calling you, he's looking for two things.

a) He wants to get a feel for your personality and your communication skills.

b) He's doing a sanity check to make sure you at least know something about what he's working on before they fly you up for a formal interview.

You didn't say whether you applied for a general programming job (for example) or something specific such as operating systems work.  In the latter case, he may ask you a specific questions about resource deadlocks and race conditions.  In the former case, he may just ask you to define polymorphic code and describe what templates are used for.

Don't stress over it.  Phone calls are usually just to make sure you are someone they want to talk to, i.e., it's not like you have ten years of Java experience and you applied for a VB.Net related job.

yeah agree with the above post, when I had my phone interview with them it was just a few personal questions about my studies not much really.

Lasted 10 minutes and there was no pressure!

I had one.  The first part was the normal interview stuff about my resume.  Then they asked me to "write" a program to reverse a string with out using any extra memory.  I am guessing that I went the extra stuff because I was in Boston and wanted to put me put me through the paces before they flew me all the way to Seattle.

Yes, the same as others have said although the technical questions were slightly weird.

He asked me how to create a class that would protect its data against hacking by a developer customer.  For example, the answer was:

// distribute this part as .h file
class B;
class A {
 private:
  B * pB;
}
// hide class B in .cpp file that isn't distributed
class B{
 int hidden;
};

Also, there was describe how to write code that is exception safe without using try-catch.  For example, one of the answers was to wrap any possible resource leaks by encapsulating them in a class whose destructor will automatically be called when an exception comes through.

Hello,

Thanks for your replies. The phone interview went well, it wasn't very technical though, just some general questions.
Hopefully, they will call me in for a day's interview.

The Microsoft recruiters blog http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog has lots of good information about Microsoft phone screens and HR interviews.  Here's a few links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/05/12/130594.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/05/26/142667.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/03/30/104170.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/03/29/102175.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/03/31/104910.aspx

The last two are particularly relevant re: phone interviews.

Good luck with the rest of your interviews!