I met someone at a job fair, and about an hour later, I had an in-person interview on my campus. They asked me about my resume and background, and then gave me a few simple coding tasks involving strings. This interviewer was very charismatic and seemed genuinely happy to be working at Microsoft. They were quite different from the interviewers I met in Seattle, but they did their job well and made me excited about the prospect of working there.

I was later contacted for an on-site interview in Seattle. I was flown in for an overnight stay and went through four interviews the next day.

The first interview was easy. We discussed a few operations on linked lists. Although the interviewer did not seem particularly excited or happy to be conducting the interview, it appeared they were simply going through the motions.

The second interview was worse. The interviewer seemed to have a large ego and felt the need to correct everything I said, including my reasons for liking programming and my favorite project. I attempted to remain polite throughout. They asked me about finding the largest consecutive sum in an array. Although I managed to put something together, I don't feel it was what they were looking for. They then showed me their solution, which I questioned but never received a satisfactory answer for. I was afraid to push further due to time constraints and their firm demeanor, and I was far too nervous and tired. I suspect they didn't fully understand the question they asked, and merely selected it from a list.

My next interviewer, with whom I had lunch, asked a few more questions, such as iterative and recursive Fibonacci implementations, and how I would approach new code. This interviewer also had a piece of paper and seemed to be selecting questions from a list. They were young and personable, though they seemed very tired and somewhat jaded.

My final interview seemed to be with a higher-up manager. This individual was older and appeared to have more influence over Windows 8 features, as they were able to point to some of the decisions they had made regarding the tablet interface. They were very laid back and didn't ask anything too specific. Rather, they simply asked what I liked, discussed it with me, and then asked for some code examples. They seemed very experienced in conducting interviews and somewhat jaded by the process, but the interview itself was not too difficult.

Most unexpected was the last interview of the day.

It seemed as though my interviewer had no plan at all for what to ask and just let questions develop, which took me off guard.