Lockheed Martin Interview

Just three days after I got home from my Microsoft interview, I had an on-site interview scheduled with Lockheed Martin. Though I was still bummed about Microsoft, I knew I had to shake it off and have a good performance because I was running out of time to find a summer internship. In the past, I had applied to Lockheed Martin through their online job site and at career fairs. I hadn’t heard anything back from them until they contacted me about a week before my Microsoft interview. They had sent me an e-mail that contained information on a recruiting event for entry level engineers. To be considered, I had to send in a resume, an unofficial transcript, and answers to some application type questions. A couple of days after I responded I received an invitation to the event.

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Defense Company Interviews

Before I get into my Lockheed Martin interview, I want to spend some time talking about defense companies. A Defense company is a business that develops military technologies for a particular government or country. These technologies include electronic systems, space systems, information systems, aeronautics, and much more. In the US, many defense companies provide job opportunities for entry level engineers. Places like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Honeywell all actively recruit on campuses looking for talented new college graduates.

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Teach Yourself Programming

One of the best decisions I ever made was to teach myself how to program. It reignited the initial passion that I had for technology when I was younger and helped solidify my decision to pursue a career in software. It also put me way ahead of the curve during my initial coding classes. For those who are interested in teaching themselves how to program, I’d like to offer you some advice on how to get started.

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Dealing with Programming Interview Failure

You spend years building up your resume so that one day you might have a job opportunity with your dream company. You finally get that opportunity and spend weeks preparing for the interview. The day of the interview arrives and you perform well enough to feel like you have a shot. You agonizingly wait for the decision. Finally, you receive an e-mail from the recruiter. You open it up and find out the news: you didn’t get the job.

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Microsoft Interview (part 5)

(Continued from part 4, part 3, part 2, and part 1) My fears were eased when finally my second interviewer came out and escorted me back to his office. He apologized for the inconvenience and began to tell me more about Exchange and how he’d been a manager in the group for numerous years. We talked about the software engineering process at Microsoft and how developers aimed to design algorithms that ran in linear time. He briefly asked me about one of the projects on my resume and then proceeded with a coding question which went as follows: “Write a function to reconstruct a chain of linked nodes that has been severed. Each node is missing the link to the node that it’s supposed to point to, but contains the value of the node that points to it.”

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Best Tech Companies to Work For

Every year in late January / early February, Fortune releases its US 100 Best Companies to Work For list. While the list is usually a good indicator of which places are currently making the most effort to keep their employees happy, one of its downfalls is that it’s only a year snap shot of a companies performance. With that in mind, I decided it would be interesting to see which tech companies have performed the best over the twelve year history of the list. In order to make this determination, I went through every list since 1998 and recorded the position of each tech company that appeared. I then compiled my data into two lists which ranked the companies based on their amount of appearances and their average position on the list when they appeared.

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Microsoft Interview (part 4)

(Continued from part 3, part 2, and part 1) I spoke with the recruiter for about 15 minutes. He provided me with more information on the groups that I’d be interviewing with and told me about the agenda for the day. There would be 3-4 interviews – the first 2 with Exchange and the last 1-2 with Real-Time Collaboration. He also told me that I’d find out about my results 3-4 days after the interview. After we finished, he called a shuttle for me and I was driven over to my first interview (Microsoft’s campus is so large that they have a fleet of cars which transport employees from building to building).

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The Microsoft Interview Loop

When you interview on-site with Microsoft, you're scheduled to interview with two product groups or two teams within the same product group. On the day of the interview, you start out by having two interviews with the first group and then you have one interview with the second group. What happens next is based on your performance up until that point. One of the more unique things about the Microsoft on-site interview is the fact that your interviewers share your results with each other while the day is still in progress. During the interview, your interviewer will take notes on you and forward them to your subsequent interviewers for review. If the feedback during your initial three interviews is positive, you’ll continue to have as many interviews as it takes to reach a decision.

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Microsoft Interview (part 3)

(Continued from part 2 and part 1) Initially, it was difficult for me to figure out how to go about preparing for the interview. My school semester was extremely hectic and left me with little or no time to do anything but study. There was no way I’d have sufficient time to get ready for the interview if I left my schedule the way it was, so I ended up dropping my computer systems engineering major (which also allowed me to graduate one semester earlier). Even so, I was still pretty busy with school and had to force myself to spend any free time I had studying for the interview. As for the preparation itself, I decided the best course of action would be to focus on my resume, common data structures and algorithms, and coding questions.

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The Microsoft Scholarship Program

If you've read part 1 and part 2 of my Microsoft interview, then you know how big of a role the Microsoft Scholarship Program played in helping me acquire an on-site internship interview in Redmond. For those that go to school in the US and are interested in working at Microsoft, the Microsoft Scholarship Program is a great way to get your foot in the door. Below, I've listed some reasons why it's beneficial to apply for a Microsoft scholarship:

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