What’s It Like To Be A Program Manager Intern At Microsoft? (LIVE with a former Microsoft intern)

40 seconds left it's coming hey everyone I think I'm alive now I'm YK of course and welcome to CS dojo and we have Tanika veer as our guests today say hi to everyone Tana okay so Tana is actually a good friend of mine and she was formerly an explorer intern at Microsoft and she was also a program manager intern at Microsoft and she's currently at the University of British University of British Columbia in Vancouver pursuing a degree in computer science yep yep and this format is gonna be first of all we're gonna begin with about 23 minutes of interview or a conversation it would be like a need to be a slash conversation where I'm gonna ask Donna about what she did at Microsoft as an exploring turn and a program manager intern and what kind of experience she had prior to working at Microsoft and what her interview experience was like to get into Microsoft and after that we're gonna do like seven minutes of you know audience Q&A session so we can take your questions so let's get started first of all actually we're you know good friends we we knew each other before this we got to know each other through you know this project called sound vision so maybe you can tell everyone a little bit about the project that this project called sound business vision was an iOS app that transformed 3d spatial information into sound so pretty much it takes your field of vision into sound and it was to help those who are visually impaired navigate unfamiliar environments and pretty much use a device and the phone and we participated Ericsson for that the Ericsson Innovation Awards to help the future of city life right so just to give everyone a little bit of context it was sort of like a student competition that was held by you know this company called Ericsson you might have heard about and it was in Sweden and there were like 800 teams at the beginning and we were like one of the top four who actually got to go to Sweden so that was really cool yes definitely my first time ever being year so yeah and like at the end we didn't release the product but like we worked with some you know blind and visually impaired people and I think it was there anything you know new you learned about like that particular audience um just from someone we were making the app we did actually run it ourselves so we would actually glad for ourselves I walk around the campus and I think if anything I just got a new level of appreciation and also a new level of understanding of the importance of accessibility so I think that was the biggest learning that I got was accepting the importance of accessibility in software today yeah yeah sorry I think my audience audio was off for a little bit so I'm gonna start asking you about you know more about yourself and software development and Microsoft so how did you get interested in software development in the first place um I started off in old school I was put into a programming course because no the other courses were available all the time and I previously did a little bit of HTML with Neopets they used to have those like pages where you customize your profile I guess I'm so had a little bit experience with that but then when I went into a programming course I started to like it so I continued that on for 3 years throughout high school and after that I went straight into university into computer science so that's kind of my background before me before DBC though I didn't have any like very strong experience it's more just like Java the basics of like mmm like declaration of variables of stuff like nothing bad intense or extreme right so I'm I've heard about Neopets but I don't know like too much about how it works yeah I could game where are you girl pets and stuff kind of it's this goal it's this old game from like the 2000s where you have a bunch of pets and I guess you'd grow them you also make them stronger you also like trying to make money by playing games and I guess the main goal of it was to make money to buy a house to keep your pets in and buy them clothes like accessories and things like that so yeah and then with that people would make like profile pages to like highlight their pets and such and that had like a lot of like you can put in your own custom CSS and HTML to make it look cooler so that was like my first experience playing around with code because I want to make my page look really cool it doesn't really look that cool but you know a little kid with a lot of colors and everything as opposed to basic pH I was available right so you started learning HTML and CSS and maybe a few other things from Neopets and you were like I want to learn more about coding yeah well actually after that it kind of dropped off for a bit but then when I put back when I like into programming class back in high school it all started coming back and I started enjoying it again and we used to make up Java games in that class so I started enjoying like the ui/ux part of that as well cuz it brought back the Neopets days as well as I just enjoyed the logic and the mathematics behind it while I was in high school so that's kind of what started my interest okay and then when you went to you know the UBC in Vancouver you immediately choose computer science as your major I did yes I went straight into computer science CBC had that option so okay and so at some point you know you were able to get your first internship at Microsoft I think as an explorer intern so could you tell everyone a little bit about what kind of experience you had prior to working there sure um so prior to that I actually didn't have that much experience the Explorer program is for freshmen or sophomore those without much experience in science so I think the biggest thing that I had was they were looking for an interest in computer science so more my involvement rather than like concrete things that I've completed I think because by that point I didn't I didn't have anything concrete from sound vision or anything what I did that in tribute so it was more just like where I was showing my interest so me participating a sound vision me doing extracurriculars outside of class that showed like my interest in computer science and coding as well as you did need some knowledge of data structures so I did study off of there cracking the coding interview book and that was the main two things it was just showing my interest and knowing like linked lists and arrays and string manipulation those are the main things from cracking the code even near the beginning of the book okay just just in case you know some people came just now sound vision was that project we worked on us basically an iOS app and what was your interview like for the Explorer intern right I'll first explain what the exported so it's more it's a freshman program that allows you to explore both the three positions of being quality p.m. so program manager and dev in Microsoft so you do you're going to part of two other interns with you you both you three of you work on the same project and you just cycle through the different roles so in that interview process they kind of tested in all three roles so they would ask me some coding questions and then they also ask me some more design related questions like design are calculated for the blind for example and where you put into consideration what the buttons should be like what the material you're gonna use for those buttons if there should be sound feedback and it kind of just show like you have a higher thinking like to be more of PME to have like more design or int your thinking as well as they also did def questions so the usual ones that you would find in practically cutting each of you yeah okay that sounds good and what is it has an explorer intern so that was like for the entire summer right for three or four months yeah it's for three months twelve weeks and as an explorer attorney I worked under the edge team under the quality team so we were building an internal bug tracking tool yeah so what second edge is the you know Microsoft's new browser right yeah so we were working on to the edge team specifically under the quality team at Microsoft so they the team that I was working on they focus more internal tools making a lot of internal tools so the tool that we were responsible for was making a bug tracking tool or pretty much those using edge internally could submit bugs easily into and to see bugs so yeah that's what we're doing we spent the first few weeks interviewing people around the around the floor and around our team asking them what kind of things they want to see what Qaida and being like interview all the stakeholders essentially and then afterwards we developed for a long time and then finally we collected data so it's called telemetry and Microsoft about our findings to showcase the team okay so it was like a team of just interns working on this project yes it was me plus two interns so all the Explorer programs it's you plus two other entrants all right nice because you get a nice like little teeny bonding experience too okay so this like you totally owned this project and it was up to you like what you wanted to build into this thing and what you wanted to do with it yep pretty much yep they just kind of gave like the overall like motivation behind it so we want to see bugs for the website and then it was just our responsibility for how we want to do it and what we would okay let's move forward now a little bit so that was was that like after your first year in university or your second year first year and then after that you you know you returned to Microsoft as a PM intern or program manager intern as they you know as they call it yeah so what's that like the year right after that um kind of it was so I was in the summer of first year I did explore and in the fall of third year / second years after my second year I went to another program of the summer so that's why I pushed my internship to the fall yeah so it was in the fall and to pick p.m. what happens with the Explorer program is after you do it you I you sometimes interview for well it kind of depends on what team you're originally placed in but you interview for another rule so I interviewed to be a p.m. and then I was places yeah right and just in case you know people don't know what is what is p.m. what is program manager and why did you choose that role for yourself yeah so program manager there's a lot of definitions of it but I think the biggest thing is from what my experience with is to see end to end the whole like a portion of the system and just keep everything kind of on track as well as kind of help the business value of your projects so you kind of look a little bit more into the business side as well for me the reason why I picked depict it because many of the peons that I met I really liked a few of the things they were doing so first thing is they had full oversight of the whole project which is really cool like if you ask me a question they'll know everything about something so if you don't know how to use a certain tool if you have to PM about it most of the times they actually know everything about it first is if you ask the developer they're very concentrated so I like the like how do I say a higher view of the project and the other thing I liked is that you also do code so it's not all just business we do code and you tend to code at least for me it was like other smaller projects or like I've seen PM's prototype code prototypes or code testing environments or just code like different things so you kind of get more flexibility from what I found in what you want to do on the terms of coding I want to code so when I told my manager like the first thing I said was I want to code that's what I like doing so he gave me a project purely relate to coming and there are other pans who don't want to come as much so they can do other things as well I think there's a lot of flexible all right so just to give everyone a little bit of context when people say p.m. it could mean like a few different things it could be like project manager product manager or program manager and I Microsoft you know the most common term is program manager and it's sort of like this like these whole things are this disposition where you decide what the product you know sort of looks like in general like not too much in detail because that's the the responsibility of you know of a designer like a UX or UI designer and then once p.m. has like a mock-up of what the product looks like then they sort of give it to the developers and they did you know do all of it that's sort of the usual practice at different software companies so what did you do as a p.m. Microsoft yeah so what I did was I was working again on your edge under their layout team which is responsible for CSS so what I was doing was collecting data about the usage of certain CSS properties across the web so pretty much I was crawling two million and collecting data and aggregating that into a website to be viewable by anyone um you say you were you are scraping 2 million websites yeah yeah what did you use to do that um so we have like an internal crawler system where pretty much I made the code the script to scrape the information and I just ran it on that crawler system that they have internally and they went over Chrome Firefox and edge and it just scraped all the information off of some random source of 200 million euros I'm not exactly sure how we got that 2 million from but it's supposed to be a very representative sample and then yeah and then I was just responsible for collecting that data and then cleaning it up to make it actually readable and useful because you'd get I think we got like I got 9 terabytes of data back after doing that so that it's cleaning it up and making it actually actionable and that was pretty much my whole project was making actionable data for the other devil development teams or other PM's or whoever else ok and you say you the goal of that project was to analyze how CSS was used um it was aged analyzed but B was more to give more actionable feedback to our teams so specifically I was looking at rules it's a new feature from CSS so I'm specifically looking to how people nowadays in their websites use that rules and if our developers or our team can be better suited for the web so that just just in case you know there's someone who's not familiar it's like CSS and HTML CSS and HTML you know are basically used to build web pages and they're like always new developments in CSS I think so they're like always new features and stuff so you were basically like maybe counting the number of times that rule was used and how it was used yeah yes accounting the number of times it's used what kind of values people use like for it because I'm like what kind of specifications they would use I kind of just getting an overall percentage like what is used where and what kind of sites use these okay and just moving back a little bit I guess what was your experience like you know to become a PM or program manager intern at Microsoft the interview experience or sure interview experience right the interview experience from what I know a very some person person but for me it was there was no technical questions for me it was more questions related to like higher level thinking of design or or even like how to find business value and things so I got questions like if you were to pitch edge to a director how would you pitch it what business value can you like show for edge so things like that but I know that other PM's who also interviewed they got technical questions so they got like code this thing or code that so I think it really depends on the interviewer because some p.m. tend to be very very technical and some pants I guess aren't as technical they're more business focused so I guess it depends on interviewer a little bit okay that sounds good what did you think of you know your experience as a PM intern and then before that as as a exploring term explorer I loved it and I would recommend any freshman to do it I think was a really great experience it was really fun I learned a lot made really good friends it was just an overall really good summer so definitely recommend to anyone umm p.m. for me it was a very different experience because I was in the fall so I also got a little glimpse of what full-time life would be like it's very different in summer than it is in the fall I liked it um I wouldn't say it's like of the same excitement as explore just because explore was in the summer with like 2,000 interns a lot more fun yeah yeah I think what like what people don't see immediately is that you know I interned at Microsoft to and in the summer there are a lot of interns like 2000 interns and there's like even an event where every intern sort of comes together and there's a concert and stuff so it's almost like a den party guys and there's like events like every single day and there's like foods and like there's just like constantly like things to do like they're barely bored I wasn't bored at all like last summer at all I never had a moment of being bored because they're just so Mara I'm gonna fall is a lot different I I still really liked it like but it was like much more realistic I guess if you could put that as a word everyone's really nice and everyone's really easy to work with but of course it wasn't like the two thousand interest to hang out with and there was an event every single day it was a lot more like normal life kind of thing and as a p.m. I really enjoyed it I really enjoyed our team I really enjoyed talking to people but yeah I think I think I enjoyed the talking to people I enjoyed coding I think I was lucky and that my manager was pretty responsive to me so he I just told them I want to code and he gave me a project that was heavily technical um as opposed to something not nice yeah so um you're living in Seattle now yep so working on your projects and taking courses at the same time what's your you know like what's your life like in Seattle my life is very interesting so a few like random facts I guess is um so I'm living with a roommate right now in two hundred square feet place so probably like the size of a dorm room and we're working on project together so that's why I were living together and I guess like if the random facts is I actually live off of Soylent which is not very conventional but I don't know if you guys can see that that's all the empty ones for like the past I don't know three weeks or something like that yeah so in case you know Soylent is this like you know there it's supposed to be food you can drink yeah yeah pretty much supposedly I mean I like it so far I've liked it I've been on it for like many months now but it's 20% of your daily nutrition in a bottle and it's like drinkable and it comes from Amazon so yeah today and this live stream is not sponsored by Soylent it's not yeah pretty much living off this toy line and I'm perfectly healthy so that's good working for you then written gay uh yeah and then living in its very small place I'm still doing school so I actually spend a lot of time going back and forth from make over to Seattle of attending classes and quizzes but working on my project here it's a bit of a mess uh yeah that that's my semester in the next few months really okay and you know we we talked about it before a little bit and what I found interesting is that how you don't have a lot of stuff no yeah because of a really small place and there's two of us I think like yeah I only have like one suitcase of things which is like very different from the usual where like if you're living somewhere for a long time you can't fit all of your belongings into one suitcase so yeah and like we live on oh we sleep on like camping cots um because it was the easiest and the cheapest like a pink card spot kind of pink hot so they're like these beds that you usually take for camping so they're foldable oh and you put them in the car and you unfold them we sleep on that because it was cheapest and the easiest to get to so yeah yeah the very minimalistic I would say yeah yeah and you didn't even have a desk gray at some point oh yeah for a while we were using like an ironing board from Goodwill it was like three bucks and our chairs are actually like three dollars each the diving board was like four bucks maybe and using that for a while it's really ergonomic so I kind of think it's a business idea if you also go with it to make like an ironing board s cuz I just heights really well but now we have a desk fronting good well which is like 10 bucks but yeah yeah yeah that's better yeah okay so the life audience Q&A sessions coming up it starts so many questions you leave live chat we're gonna take a look at them you can ask kana or me any questions you have and for future live stream the best way to you know get credit on that is just by following csgo jokes Facebook page you can just search for CH dojo on Facebook for that so let's do life audience Q&A kind of beauty any interesting questions reading yeah it's cool not any questions if you see any yep is someone's asking are you from India I'm not I'm actually Bengali but I grew up in Canada Victoria my whole life because someone's asking me I am a University of Waterloo student that's in Canada what do you guys think of that school do you ever hear of it in the industry definitely like when I was interning at Microsoft you know I'm from the UBC which is in Vancouver and there were like maybe five people from UBC and they were like 40 people from you know University of Waterloo so I think it's definitely the best school for computer science in Canada definitely it's insane even like they also have a lot of meetup so all the tech interns that I'm from Waterloo for Facebook Microsoft Google all of them meet up a lot it's definitely like really like one of the best it has the best network yep Tenzing big one I think is asking what is the best website or way to get internship um so my my process of getting my recruiter was I attended the career fair at school and I kinda just started from there and it's really important one one advice I have for everyone is if they don't reply to you in two weeks please email them again sometimes I forget and like so many people I know missed out on opportunities because they just didn't think it was too routed email again but you should like definitely suspension weeks email again until you get a formal answer but yeah mainly just from school yes I definitely agree with that career fair thing so you know it's different for big companies and smaller companies for smaller companies I think the best way is to just sort of you know be they're all networked and you know maybe email people on LinkedIn before large companies going to career fairs it can be really really effective hmm um I did get paid I saw a question I did get paid to work at Microsoft as both an explorer and a PM injured I think someone was asking like a salary question would you be willing to share that sorry like well some of us asking a question about salary I wasn't there I don't know if I'm allowed to say specifically but I can kind of say that Explorer was a little bit less than a regular insurer oh but I don't think I'm allowed to fully disclose the exact amount but it was regardless right so I can you know just share my personal experience I think Microsoft so as a program manager intern I was getting paid I mean I I thought it was kind of crazy but I was gonna pay like seven thousand US dollars and when I heard it I was like well yeah that's that doesn't make any sense but that's sort of like you know what they the level you know they go they go for it like these big companies are pretty similar there's another question for me what programming language do you recommend me to start learning if I'm starting to learn any programming language so my advice is sort of always the same you know either Python or JavaScript and you know if you do with if you if you go with JavaScript go with like HTML CSS and then JavaScript and do you have any thoughts on that uh yeah that was a similar path that I went through with HTML CSS and JavaScript I also really recommend maybe I'm a little biased because of my computer science degree but to have like to start learning about the fundamentals and you can use that language business you're specific but actually like try to learn it rather than just like how to build a website but also like the things behind cracking the coding interview like the data structures and stuff okay I'm looking for more questions someone says what about Ruby so I would say Ruby is like a really simple and nice language to learn it is getting less popular these days but it's still like a good first language to learn I think someone's saying any interview tips um the biggest interview tip I have is talk your thoughts out loud that's really really helpful for the achieve your and also I think most my interviews have gone really well whenever I'm just talking through my thoughts hmm so as they ask a question I repeat it as I'm writing down things on the board I like say them out loud I also before encode make sure I understand the whole problem so I will ask questions make sure I understand all of the problem and then start coding it even when I'm coding I'm still talking about what I'm coding and why I'm doing certain lines and what my thought processes yeah I definitely agree with that I think I mean someone's asking me for it you know some interview tips and I think a lot of what a lot of people miss is how interviews are not just about solving you know the technical problem it's also about communicating your thoughts and trying to understand what the interior like wants exactly so that you know you can answer the question exactly that they're asking okay so should we take one more question - yeah sure okay looking through some questions here saying any website you recommend for a self-learning coding I have some thoughts on that do you have any thoughts okay sure so I would say code Academy is good I also heard that let me just type it in you know in the chat too so code kata me I saw you was code Academy but apparently it's code Academy was just confusing and then another one is I can't remember remember I can't remember what it's called but it's similar to code Academy like you know it does any of any of those interactive websites it's good and after that I would recommend Rinda calm and good to me like video of websites anything you want to add um I mostly I guess most money like online learning has been prepared for interviews so I really like using packer rank and I leak code sorry I was blinking so yeah those two um but I don't know any specific like video sites I also recommend also looking at like if you have time to look through like online video lectures from the universities if you guys want like a university I think courses on Coursera and stuff are good too yeah yeah one the one I was trying to think of yeah was free code camp free code camp is sort of I think similar to Co Academy but you know three hmm yeah okay um I guess that's it for this call yeah thanks for having me yeah no problem thanks for coming to my show first and thanks everyone for um you know being part of this and I'll see you guys in the next video bye bye everyone