July 2, 2006

Microsoft Interview - 2nd Technical Round

After completing first technical round, in some 2 days, got a call from HR that I will have another technical interview in two days that will focus very deeply into COM, OLE technologies. And duration of the interview would be 1 hour.

The second round was I think from US. The accent of the person taking my interview was cent percent US accent so, assuming it was from USA.

He asked me first about my career and educational qualification. I introduced myself with my educational background and then smoothly turned him to my professional career. Told him about all places I have worked for and gave information about all major projects and my role in them.

The person seem to have very vast knowledge of technology because when I told him that I was working on Dialogic Boards, he started talking to me for its SDK functions and when I told him about my Windows CE (PocketPC) project, he started talking about internals of TAPI and IP communications.

So, after hearing me for all my projects and experience, he started putting his questions one by one. The first subject for his questions was about Dialogic boards and SDK.

  • Which SDK you used for developing telecom application ?

  • Why you used SDK and why not TAPI, when it was possible to work through TAPI ?

  • How was experience while developing with SDK ?

  • Anytime taken support from these companies for any minor or major tasks ?

  • In case of dialogic programming, how do you get an incoming call notification ? Any message is received ?

  • Did you have state machine in your voicemail application ?


Then he started asking general questions.

  • Tell me something about your current project in your present company and your role in the development (Asking about the phone dialer project on PDA) ?

  • What were the challenges while developing any component of dialer ? Tell me about any one experience.

  • Tell me about the occassion when you dint understand anything in the given code and had to return back to the senior with empty face ?

  • Tell me about the occassion when you had to modify your peer's code as it was not proper and tell me how you notified him that it was not correct ?

  • What difference does it make when you program in embedded platform (for PDA ?) (I told him about memory leaks and Unicode in general)

  • How can you find the memory leak in the program ?

  • Tell me about one of the occassions which is memorable about the support !

  • What will you do if customer is telling you about his problem that you dont know ? (I told him that I will put customer on hold nicely and take help from peer or senior)

  • Tell me about your some project's some class or function where you think the way you coded was perfect. Tell me why you coded that way only and not some other way ?

  • What was the architecture of your voicemail application (one of my project in previous company, he actually wanted to see how were more than one calls handled by teh applications) ?

  • Anytime taken support from Microsoft ? (I told no and he told that you have missed an opportunity then, and we had a good laugh in the session !!)

After these questions and conversations, He started asking me about the questions on COM and OLE which I missed making note of. But questions included from basic to advanced level COM questions.

The overall experience of the interview was good. He took around 50 minutes for the interview. I was hoping to get this round cleared too and was expecting another interview from them.