Stairway To Heaven

I went for three interviews these two days. Tuesday morning with Microsoft, midnight with Google for the first round, and Wednesday midnight with Google for the second round. Though the intention for applying those internships is not to get the offers but simply to gain some experience for technical interviews, I still prepare hard for the interviews, hoping to learn as much as possible. The first round Microsoft interview was conducted in NUS where one HR and one technician flew over to Singapore to give the interview. I had 30 mins with both the HR and the technician. The questions with the HR is the standard interview questions like project experiences+ some brain teasers. The questions are not really that challenging. In case you are interested, I attached the questions in appendix1. For the technical interview, the technician monitored you to write codes on the spot. The technician this year is a tester from Austin-Taxes working 10 years in MS. I did three questions during...

Machine learning seems to be a big trend for either today's research or the IT industry. There are quite a number of business ideas hanging around my head, most of which require machine learning for a good outcome. First idea is a products-comparison application which help consumers to better compare similar products from different online retailers. This is going to solve the pains for the consumers who would like to buy certain products from all the possible overseas retailers and ship to their homes. The consumers need to spend a lot of time comparing different solutions(including the price of the product and the price of the shipment) and the solutions are mostly not optimal. The idea is not new. But with the evolving development of mobile clients, this idea has a very big market. As is shown in one survey, 70% of the smartphone users use their smart phones to compare different products. The comparison service itself can generate a fairly good revenue from ads, even we on...

I did the second round NOC interview this afternoon. It went well, but a bit overtime. One question made me think further, that is "what kind of role would you like to play in the company". I paused a little bit and told them that I would like to work as a software engineer and further train my programming skills and hopefully learn some business along the way. However, the NOC interviewers think that my technical skills are good enough and what I really need is to train the business skills. I thought for a while and then responded,"I believe the importance of the distribution of different competences/abilities in the team. It's no good to have someone to know a bit tech and a bit business but not good at either of these two. I envision myself to be a CTO in the future but my programming skills are not good enough. So I hope to further train my programming skills. Of course, it would be good to know some business stuff so that I can better communicate with my partn...