Hardly any firmware interview questions content

New
dlihcriafe

New

dlihcriafe
Oct 31, 2021 11 Comments

I have an upcoming Microsoft firmware interview , and YouTube and internet in general is flooded with software questions but very very little firmware questions. I assume firmware goes through the same process because I have a multi hour multi person interview coming up. Do firmware guys just not go all over the internet posting their experiences or what? Furthermore if Microsoft starts asking me high level software non-domain specific question I'll tell them to have a nice day ... I don't have a software background I have an EE degree and took maybe 1 class on basic C . But I have experience writing firmware because you can't be ignorant of EE and write good firmware , next thing you know your switching MOSFETs with no dead time and magic smoke comes out. So where are the firmware people at and what type of question do you get from these mostly software companies...

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TOP 11 Comments
  • Verily
    GLbv31

    Go to company page Verily

    GLbv31
    I’m a firmware guy and I’ve been doing embedded for 20+ years. I may not ask graph traversal questions but I will ask about arrays, queues, stacks, even hash tables (yes even for low level - think about how hardware lookup tables are implemented and used).

    I’ll ask stuff like endianness, structures, pointers. Interrupt handling.

    Even RTOS stuff like cooperative vs. preemptive multi-tasking.
    Oct 31, 2021 6
    • New
      dlihcriafe

      New

      dlihcriafe
      OP
      However the firmware position at Microsoft I think is to write firmware for new IC designs that they want to make to offload things like targeted ads or some other stuff , to hardware designed specifically for that job. So it's a firmware position more about moving data than a actually controlling things in the physical world
      Oct 31, 2021
    • New
      dlihcriafe

      New

      dlihcriafe
      OP
      Bootloaders and messaging queues , definitely the onboard periphs like mentioned above ..then you can go even more specific like CAN bus and it's different flavors. I really hope they come at me with firmware questions I have the names of my interviewers and one of them is a long time firmware guy so I know he will hit me with the good stuff. Do firmware interviews go through behavioral questions too?
      Oct 31, 2021
  • Apple
    down!

    Go to company page Apple

    down!
    RTOS, data structures (linked lists, stacks, queues, Tree), assembly, good understanding of c.
    Oct 31, 2021 0
  • ViaSat
    RVDi170

    Go to company page ViaSat

    RVDi170
    Could you explain what you mean by firmware?
    Oct 31, 2021 1
    • New
      dlihcriafe

      New

      dlihcriafe
      OP
      Writing to registers of a microcontroller through not much abstraction.
      Oct 31, 2021
  • Penske / Other
    embpen

    Go to company page Penske Other

    embpen
    @dlihcriafe, how was your interview, and what type of topics did they ask? I have an upcoming firmware interview with CHIE.
    Feb 2 0