The Microsoft interview is a job interview technique used by Microsoft to assess possible future Microsoft employees. It is significant because Microsoft's model was pioneering, and later picked up and developed by other companies including Amazon, Facebook, and Google. [1]
The Microsoft Interview was a pioneer in that it was about technical knowledge, problem solving and creativity as opposed to the goal and weaknesses interviews most companies used at the time. Initially based on Bill Gates' obsession with puzzles, many of the puzzles presented during interviews started off being Fermi problems, or sometimes logic problems, and have eventually transitioned over the years into questions relevant to programming: [2]
Puzzles test competitive edge as well as intelligence. Like business or football, a logic puzzle divides the world into winners and losers. You either get the answer, or you don't... Winning has to matter. [3]
The questions asked during the Microsoft Interview are crafted to determine a candidate's problem solving, coding and design abilities. Eccentric questions (such as Which of the fifty states would you remove?) test a candidate's ability to come to a decision and articulate it. [4] Candidates answering questions should consider the use of technology in the present and future, and user scenarios. Some questions involve projects that the candidate has worked on in the past.
The Microsoft Interview is intended to seek out creative thinkers and those who can adapt their solutions to rapidly changing and dynamic scenarios.
Below is a small sample of questions that a candidate might be asked to answer during the second-round interview:
![]() |
The question of why manhole covers are typically round (in some countries) was made famous by Microsoft when they began asking it as a job-interview question. [5] [6] Originally meant as a psychological assessment of how one approaches a question with more than one correct answer, the problem has produced a number of alternative explanations, from the tautological ("Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.") [5] to the philosophical.
Reasons for the shape include:
The practice of asking these sorts of so-called lateral thinking questions was formally discouraged at Microsoft by the mid-2000s. There were various reasons for the end of this practice but it was most obviously because the company was not hiring people to design manhole covers and there are much more direct ways to assess applicable skills than through questions of this type.
Microsoft provides a list of suggested reading to prepare for the interview. A sample is given below:
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use. In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.
A computer program is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer. Most computer devices require programs to function properly.
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development (TDD), of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve nonfunctional attributes of the software. Advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity; these can improve source-code maintainability and create a more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility.
Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the software product or service under test. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs, and verifying that the software product is fit for use.
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he started coding the WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on the website of the software consultancy he started with his wife, Karen, Cunningham & Cunningham, on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He has authored a book about wikis, entitled The Wiki Way. He also invented Framework for Integrated Tests.
In class-based programming, the factory method pattern is a creational pattern that uses factory methods to deal with the problem of creating objects without having to specify the exact class of the object that will be created. This is done by creating objects by calling a factory method—either specified in an interface and implemented by child classes, or implemented in a base class and optionally overridden by derived classes—rather than by calling a constructor.
In software engineering, a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into source or machine code. Rather, it is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Design patterns are formalized best practices that the programmer can use to solve common problems when designing an application or system.
The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix established a set of cultural norms for developing software; these norms became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the "Unix philosophy."
Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development is a process of writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, sometimes in a planned and structured process. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the software is improved so that the tests pass. This is opposed to software development that allows software to be added that is not proven to meet requirements.
A manhole cover or maintenance hole cover is a removable plate forming the lid over the opening of a manhole, an opening large enough for a person to pass through that is used as an access point for maintenance and other work on an underground utility vault or pipe. It is designed to prevent anyone or anything from falling in, and to keep out unauthorized persons and material.
A software requirements specification (SRS) is a description of a software system to be developed. It is modeled after business requirements specification(CONOPS), also known as a stakeholder requirements specification (StRS). The software requirements specification lays out functional and non-functional requirements, and it may include a set of use cases that describe user interactions that the software must provide to the user for perfect interaction.
In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is critical for continuous delivery and continuous testing.
In computer programming, Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm developed by Charles Simonyi that encodes in software source code the precise intention which programmers have in mind when conceiving their work. By using the appropriate level of abstraction at which the programmer is thinking, creating and maintaining computer programs become easier. By separating the concerns for intentions and how they are being operated upon, the software becomes more modular and allows for more reusable software code.
Don't repeat yourself is a principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of software patterns, replacing it with abstractions or using data normalization to avoid redundancy.
Object-oriented modeling (OOM) is an approach to modeling an application that is used at the beginning of the software life cycle when using an object-oriented approach to software development.
There is considerable variety among software testing writers and consultants about what constitutes responsible software testing. Prominent members of the Context-Driven School of Testing consider much of the writing about software testing to be doctrine, mythology, and folklore. Some contend that this belief directly contradicts standards such as the IEEE 829 test documentation standard, and organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration who promote them. The Context-Driven School's retort is that Lessons Learned in Software Testing includes one lesson supporting the use IEEE 829 and another opposing it; that not all software testing occurs in a regulated environment and that practices appropriate for such environments would be ruinously expensive, unnecessary, and inappropriate for other contexts; and that in any case the FDA generally promotes the principle of the least burdensome approach.
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? is a 2012 business book by Pulitzer Prize-nominated science writer, William Poundstone, describing details of the methods used and questions asked of job applicants to Google.
In computer programming and software testing, smoke testing is preliminary testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to, for example, reject a prospective software release. Smoke tests are a subset of test cases that cover the most important functionality of a component or system, used to aid assessment of whether main functions of the software appear to work correctly. When used to determine if a computer program should be subjected to further, more fine-grained testing, a smoke test may be called an intake test. Alternately, it is a set of tests run on each new build of a product to verify that the build is testable before the build is released into the hands of the test team. In the DevOps paradigm, use of a BVT step is one hallmark of the continuous integration maturity stage.
![]() | This article related to Microsoft is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |