We are a very practical team at Microsoft and this extends to the way that we work with you to find out if this team is a great fit for you. We want you to come away with a great understanding of the work that we actually do day to day and what it is like to work with us.
So instead of answering at a whiteboard with someone watching over your shoulder under high pressure, which is not a thing we often do, we prefer to discuss the exercise below.
As a TPM, we would like for you to review The Problem below and think about how you would prioritize and organize this project with an engineering team. Create a simple backlog including full detail of 3-4 of the more challenging workitems. In addition, create a one-page project proposal detailing the problem and proposed solution.
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This is meant to be an assignment that you spend approximately two hours of dedicated, focused work. Do not feel like you need to overengineer the solution with dozens of hours to impress us. Be biased toward quality over quantity.
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You are not being asked to solve The Problem.
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Upload your backlog and project proposal into your repo.
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Good luck! Please send a link to your solution on Github back to us at least 12 hours before your interview so we can review it before we speak.
Our San Francisco team loves to eat. They are also a team that loves variety, so they also like to discover new places to eat.
In fact, we have a particular affection for food trucks. One of the great things about Food Trucks in San Francisco is that the city releases a list of them as open data.
Your assignment is to make it possible for us to find a food truck no matter where our work takes us in the city.
This is a freeform assignment. You can write a web API that returns a set of food trucks (our team is fluent in JSON). You can write a web frontend that visualizes the nearby food trucks. We also spend a lot of time in the shell, so a CLI that gives us a couple of local options would be great. And don't be constrained by these ideas if you have a better one!
The only requirement for the assignment is that it give us at least 5 food trucks to choose from a particular latitude and longitude.
Feel free to tackle this problem in a way that demonstrates your expertise of an area -- or takes you out of your comfort zone. For example, if you build Web APIs by day and want to build a frontend to the problem or a completely different language instead, by all means go for it - learning is a core competency in our group. Let us know this context in your solution's documentation.
San Francisco's food truck open dataset is located here and there is an endpoint with a CSV dump of the latest data here. We've included a copy of this data in this repo as well.