Interviewing with Microsoft...

[rabbit]

Hm.  My co-op will be at least $14/hr, but I'm shooting for the $18 range.

[iago]

Guess it depends where you are....  We pay our interns ~$12/hr.

Our students get $19/hour, and aren't worked very hard. Plus, they get to hang out with me, that's an extra bonus!

[Sidoh]

That's nice. It's less than what I make at Nortel, though. =( I should also note that taxes suck.

It's a summer internship and she has no work experience, lol

You may be surprised then to learn that that is the average pay for these kinds of jobs. I haven't talked to an employee of a non internet startup programming company that makes less than this average. It's a tough job if you think about it. You're constantly doing critical thinking, problem solving, working with teams constantly... you're never done. You're staring at a monitor all day, and have the humming of computers making you go insane subconciously. They're not going to find anyone willing to do this after all the schooling for much less. These companies know that, too, and they've got no problem paying the price.

heh, true.  I think I was only getting paid like $3,000/month at LM.  However, they did give me $900/month for living costs.  The other interns were paid better because they were further in school (even though I was probably among the most competent of them, heh).  I've heard Google and Microsoft pay the best for internships (out of the commonly discussed companies, of course).  However, I still think I'd prefer working at the DoD.  I think they pay ~$25/hour, which is pretty good.

Hm.  My co-op will be at least $14/hr, but I'm shooting for the $18 range.

Yeah, go as high as you can!  Or work for Microsoft and get paid $33.75/hour...

I wonder if that's a "salary".  That'd be kind of lame.  Hourly work is awesome.  Overtime pay kicks ass!

Guess it depends where you are....  We pay our interns ~$12/hr.

Our students get $19/hour, and aren't worked very hard. Plus, they get to hang out with me, that's an extra bonus!

Sweet!  Do you convert them to RPG playing vegans?

[Blaze]

Drink getting slaves. 

[warz]

Well, I just got finished with the interview. I think everything went very well. They didn't ask any difficult questions, really. I was expecting questions like "can you explain polymorphism to us" and stuff - didn't get any of those. There was one tricky question that asked me to code up a method that'll plot coordinates on a graph, and I think the purpose was to end up with portions of a circle, but not the entire circle? I couldn't understand the interviewer too well because he had a heavy indian accent, and initially I thought he wanted me to graph out the arm of a clock as it rotates around the circle. So I started thinking out loud on how to do that, and he stopped me and said "no i mean like parts of the circle", so I kept asking questions trying to clarify by we kind of hit a language barrier wall, maybe. I don't think he was explaining the question very well... because I still don't know what he really wanted me to do.

Other than that one question I think I blew the interview away. Now I just wait for a response!

I asked about their teams, too, and he said there's so many and that they don't determine which one you'll be on until you get to that point in the interview process. He said I'll be shown the different teams, though, and I'll be able to choose.

[Sidoh]

Cool!  Hope you get an offer.

My friend decided on the Outlook team, I guess.  She got offers from Outlook/Word, which were the only two she interviewed for.  You're gonna have to give her a hard time for me if you end up working near her.

[warz]

Well, unlike your friend, Sidoh, they seem to be taking their sweet time sending me a response.

Your friend said she got a response the Monday following her interview, which was on Thursday. Sounds like her interview was a lot shorter than mine, and much much easier. Her coding question involved something as simple as looping through a char array and counting the number of occurences of 'a', or some other letter.

It probably doesn't help that my recruiter is on vacation until Thursday. I'm about to start pulling my hair out over here.

[Sidoh]

Well, unlike your friend, Sidoh, they seem to be taking their sweet time sending me a response.

Your friend said she got a response the Monday following her interview, which was on Thursday. Sounds like her interview was a lot shorter than mine, and much much easier. Her coding question involved something as simple as looping through a char array and counting the number of occurences of 'a', or some other letter.

It probably doesn't help that my recruiter is on vacation until Thursday. I'm about to start pulling my hair out over here.

Like I said, she's interviewing for an internship position.  I assume you're applying for fulltime?  The interview probably should be a lot more rigorous.

That was the phone interview, I think.  The real interview had more involved questions, from what I heard.  They weren't like super hard, but definitely harder than that question.

[warz]

Well, I always just figure stuff like this is karma for me going into spy-mode and destroying rosethorn's clans back in the day on bnet. Oh, and joining +D+ with the sole purpose of stealing one of Spht's friend's cross-bow on Diablo 2 - which I did. That kind of stuff.