Only You Know Best
Any large company will have a variety of positions opened at any one time. This means that when you fly out and interview, you may be assigned to the team that needs head count the most. Or the team that the recruiter thinks you’re a best fit for. Or the team that the recruiter’s dart happened to hit.
I don’t know if any of these things are actually true, but what can happen is that you show up and interview with a team you have little interest in. The first time I interviewed here at Microsoft, I ended up talking to two teams that made me shudder as soon as the recruiter mentioned them. I’m sure some people were born to do backend SQL server work, but others are born to be awesome PowerPoint graphics developers.
Needless to say my interviews didn’t go very well, and I wasn’t offered an internship.
Later that year when I applied for fulltime, I made sure to emphasize to my recruiter ahead of time that I was interested in graphics. I ended up interviewing for Visio and a new secret project called “IGX” (later to be named SmartArt).
Oh the bliss. One interviewer showed me a screenshot of the new Office 12 rendering engine and how it was going to have all these great 3D features. “Man, that must be a pain to develop a user interface for” I commented, noting that moving a camera in 3D space with a mouse is neither intuitive or easy to get good results. His face lit up “Yah, it is!”
If I hadn’t found a team near my interest, I wouldn’t have nailed the interview and I wouldn’t have a job in an area that I love so much.
When you get an interview for a large company, ask who you will be interviewing with. You may get boiler plate “Oh, we don’t know until the day of, blah blah”. Push back and list your interests and ask if any of them can be met. If you know of a specific product you want to work on, be sure to mention it. If you just have this insatiable itch to work on Internet Explorer and you impress this upon a Microsoft recruiter before you fly out, the chances are infinitely better that you’ll get an interview there than leaving it to the day of.