Microsoft visited my university, the University of Illinois at Chicago, for our career fair, the day before they held a hiring event. I handed my resume to a recruiter and had, at most, a minute to discuss a few things. There were about 200 people and only around 4 recruiters, so they were trying to move quickly. About two weeks later, I received an email stating they'd like to set up an on-site interview.

Going into the interview, it became apparent that the recruiter had guessed which position to place candidates in (PM, SDE, or SDET). I was suggested for an SDET position. The first interview was still an overall assessment to determine the best fit. We discussed basic interview questions, such as my experience with group projects, my career aspirations, and why I was interested in working for Microsoft. There was a design question asking how I would change the room we were sitting in. There was also a programming question: reversing the characters of words within a string (e.g., 'Here is a string' to 'ereh si a gnirts'). I answered both questions in detail, but the interviewer was impressed with my response to the design question and passed on a recommendation for a PM position.

Two weeks later, I was contacted about moving on to the next round and was told they would contact me to set up a phone interview for a PM position. The phone interview covered most of the same questions as the first, but with more emphasis on the PM role. The first question was to design a watch, which took roughly 15 minutes to complete, covering every possible aspect (marketing, target audience, various price points, build, etc.). Following that was a relatively standard brainteaser. At the very end, they asked if I would be interested in the MSIT program. We didn't have much time, so I only received a brief description, but I agreed to it, and the interview ended.

Another two weeks later, I received an email stating I was moving onto the final round in Redmond for an SDE/SDET position in the MSIT program. There was a good amount of paperwork, but the recruiter I worked with assisted me with any issues I had. They covered the cost of the flight, rental car, and hotel, as well as reimbursing me for food during my visit.

Fast forward another five weeks. Shuttle vans were parked outside my hotel in Bellevue (a town near Redmond) at 7 am to pick up about 20 candidates going to three different locations on campus. Upon arrival, we were brought into a very nice lobby and offered food and beverages. From there, we were set up with four interviews, each lasting 45 minutes.

After my first interview, I quickly realized I had made a mistake on my resume. I had mentioned working with relational databases and placed a bit too much emphasis on it. Each interviewer dealt with databases, and three of them focused solely on those concepts. For the most part, I was able to hold my own, but my second interviewer really grilled me, and I definitely fumbled. The questions he asked were outside my scope. I answered as best I could, but I asked for more hints than I would have liked. The other two database-related interviews were on much broader subjects that I am comfortable with.

Another common theme across all interviews was testing. All of my questions were immediately followed by, "Alright, now how do we test this?" My initial response was always to test functionality (which is something I do in my job). The answer they were looking for, and eventually elicited from me, included other concepts like concurrency, CPU/memory usage, and exception handling. So, with those items in mind, how would we test to ensure we don't encounter these issues, or how do we test to see if they are indeed a problem?

Asking around between interviews, I realized I was one of the few candidates receiving these types of questions. Everyone else had standard programming questions, which I had prepared for. I had only briefly studied databases, so learn from my mistake: if it's on your resume, make sure you know it well!

Rather than keep us waiting on campus, they shuttled us back to our hotel around 1 pm, letting us know we would hear from them within the next four hours. The next stretch seemed to last forever. 6 pm arrived with no word. I sent an email around 7 pm to gauge their progress. Around 10 pm, I received a text from Michael (the University Staffing Ninja, as his email signature suggested) stating he had been busy and I should hear within the hour. About 4 minutes before midnight, I received an email stating that I had been given an offer and a follow-up call would go over the details. In that respect, they kept their promise of providing results the same day.

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience. It's clear that even though they spend a significant amount of money to have you visit Redmond, it's not a guaranteed position. They can see your potential, and this is your opportunity to truly impress your potential teammates.

Given an eBay-type service with multiple front-end applications, user information is being truncated when sent back to the user (e.g., Name was 'Andrew' but shows 'And'). Discuss your strategy for debugging this issue.