Microsoft Report

Well, race fans, you can all calm down. I had my technical screen with Microsoft, and I don't think it went well enough to get me a job. I haven't heard anything from the DDCPX team, but I had to say 'I don't know' a lot during the call. That can't be a good thing. Well, it is and it isn't. It's good that I am willing to admit my lack of knowledge, rather than trying to BS my way in, but not good, because I should have more knowledge.

As to the actual questions asked, they were a different class of questions than I expected, based on technical screens with other companies. None of the questions dealt with the things I do on a daily basis; they were geared more towards the internals of the .Net framework. I guess that is to be expected, though, since the other companies I interviewed with (before getting my job at FNDS) were using the framework, and MS is building the framework.

Here are a couple of the questions (if you'd like to post a comment with your answers, I'll tell you if they differ from the answers I got during the call):

• Types
  
  
  
  • Explain the difference between value and reference types.
  
  
  • What is boxing? What is unboxing?
  
  


• Memory Management
  
  
  
  • What is the garbage collector?
  
  
  • How does generational garbage collection work?
  
  
  
  


• Algorithm
  
  • There is a conveyor belt, with a camera positioned above it. Every time a piece of fruit passes under the camera, a picture is taken. The picture is pre-processed, and is converted into an array of booleans, with true everywhere there is fruit in the picture, and false everywhere there is background in the picture. Design an algorithm which, given the array of bools, can determine if the fruit is a banana or an orange. These are the only two fruits that will be on the belt.