Microsoft

A lot. As a research intern you choose and define the project to a large extent, and drive every aspect of it.

As a contractor, you should not expect to receive much support from upper management. However, there are exceptions because it will also depend on the role, team, and manager.

The career progression for contractors are undetermined. Contractors are not guaranteed continuous work on the same team or organization. You really need to drive your own career path and not depend on full-time employee conversion. Make sure that each job you take on, you learn a new skill that'...

Honestly, as an individual contributor, you're probably forgettable to Microsoft as a company. Focus on adding clarity and value through data: enable your team to make good decisions, and you'll have a great impact to your team.

This depends on team. I have a great work-life balance and the company as a whole emphasizes that the work is only an aspect of life: I wouldn't be concerned about this.

Your work life balance would depend on your team, project, deadlines and work ethic. The company is generally very flexible and allows you to work remotely if needed. The people generally understand if you have something that you are involved in that would require you to leave early or miss a few...

No two days are alike. You may spend hours working with one customer on the phone with a whole building full of servers “down”. This is called a business critical outage. Or take multiple calls throughout the day and work each case as they come. You never know what challenge you’ll have each time...

I really enjoy the projects and activities that the internship has to offer. You learn a lot about writing production-level code and have a lot of fun in the meantime. Look up Microsoft Intern Signature event for a taste of summer at Microsoft

Skills required to succeed as an intern at Microsoft is passion for learning new things, not just a new programming language or new technology but everything from how psychology to AI. And then being able to connect the dots of how psychology can impact decisions made using AI

As long as you are are really passionate about the work you want to do and how you want to contribute towards your growth and that of the company, you should be able to crack any interview. They do have a long and tedious interview process and ask a lot of questions on data structures and algorit...

Any research based experience/publications would be great. Sometimes Microsoft Research (MSR) researchers are looking for specific experiences for e.g. in my case I had published a paper on applying deep learning on biological datasets and my mentor was looking for someone with that experience fo...

The senior title is a rite of passage at Microsoft. Many stay at this level for years. It's less about the title and more about how you got here. It usually means, you've become a go-to person that has wide ownership. Junior teammates also come to you for mentor ship. The only downside to this i...

You're pretty much what they rely on. Management usually consults the more senior team members so you'll have a stronger relationship with them. Support will be there when you need it but it'll be different as you shouldn't require the type of support that junior members need.

A lot and it's more than just the code. You'll be ask to partner with a Program Manager to own a feature area and form a small team with junior team members. You'll be involved in business decisions and asked to help with planning, working with other teams, dividing up the work, etc.

This varies by team but I haven't heard of anyone that haven't gotten the work-life balance they desire at Microsoft. Leveling up to Principle thou... will take a bit of work thou a few seem to have done it effortlessly.

Besides what you can already learn and research about Microsoft online, you need to be proficient with the basic Windows platform and their core languages such as C++ or C. Learning their core WIndows SDK to understand how a native Windows application is built with C or C++ is essential as an SDE.

Knowing how to listen and communicate design concepts verbally and clearly. Understanding the technical insights of building an GUI or Windows service application for the Windows platform is essential. I worked on the Microsoft Office products so that was my core skills area: native C++ Windows...

An Internal Audit Intern at Microsoft has a great deal of flexibility to what they do. In my experience as an Internal Audit Intern, I worked with many auditing divisions ranging from fraud investigation to risk management. While I was there I got the chance to learn about auditing in general and...

I really liked everything about my internship. It was a great first experience for me because not only did I get to do a lot of business work, but I also had a lot of fun! The atmosphere at the company is very refreshing. All of my coworkers were super friendly and would go to lunch with me all t...

Some skills you may want to highlight would being a self-starter and time management. Since you do have a lot of flexibility, you may need to have a little flare to ask for new things to do, new projects, and to pitch your own ideas for what you want to do. Also time management because you will h...