Altogether, there were three interview rounds that spanned a month.

Round 1 was a 30-minute phone interview consisting of multiple HR questions and two logic questions. The HR questions involved discussing past projects, difficult problems encountered, and how they were overcome. The logic problems were as follows:

• Someone coded an interface with three input text boxes and a start button. When the start button is pressed, a triangle will be drawn on the screen. Each side of the triangle will correspond to a length in one of the input boxes. How would you test this program?
• You are in a room by yourself. Someone walks in, asks you to find the temperature, and leaves. How would you find the temperature in the room without leaving?

Round 2: After waiting two weeks for the results, I made it past the first round. Since Microsoft does not recruit in my area (Southern Ontario, Canada), my second interview was another phone interview. This one consisted of a 1-hour HR phone interview, followed by a 1-hour break, then a 1-hour technical interview.

The first hour was with a PM who asked questions about myself, my experiences, and my resume. This was a standard HR interview. The second interview was the most challenging of all the coding questions.

Question: We have a quadtree algorithm, and we assume the boxes are labeled 0 (top left), 1 (top right), 2 (bottom left), and 3 (bottom right) 'n' times. Write a function that, when given an array input of size 'n' (e.g., [0,0,0,0] or [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]), would determine if the corresponding box has at least one side touching at least one of the outermost walls.

Round 3: I made it through Phase 2, much to my excitement and surprise. The third round was an in-person interview on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. The interview started at 8 a.m. and, after talking with the recruiter, consisted of two 1 hour and 15-minute interviews with a 15-minute break in between. Both involved coding and HR questions with only one interviewer.

Interview 1: Write a function (in your preferred language: C, C++, or Java) that will take a given string and return its reverse (e.g., input: "abc def ghi" output: "ihg fed cba"). Optimize the above code (if possible). Now, knowing that the original function you wrote in part 1 cannot be modified because it is used by other programs, write another function that, when called, will utilize the function from part 1 to only reverse the words in the sentence (e.g., input: "abc def ghi" output: "ghi def abc"). Test your code.

Interview 2: Write a function that, when given a string, will return the starting position of the largest recurring character (e.g., given: "AAABBCCCCD" would return 5, the starting point of 'C'). Test your code.

Someone codes an interface that consists of three input text boxes and a start button. When the start button is pressed, a triangle will be drawn on the screen. Each side of the triangle will correspond to a length in one of the input boxes. How would you test this program?

You are in a room by yourself, and someone walks into the room, asks you to find the temperature, and leaves. How would you find the temperature in the room without leaving the room?

We have a quadtree algorithm, and we are assuming that the boxes are labeled 0 (top left), 1 (top right), 2 (bottom left), 3 (bottom right) 'n' times. Write a function that, when given an array input of size 'n' (e.g., [0,0,0,0] or [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0], which would be the top-left corner), would determine if the corresponding box has at least one side touching at least one of the outermost walls.

Write a function (in your preferred language: C, C++, or Java) that will take the given string and return the reverse. (e.g., input: "abc def ghi" output: "ihg fed cba")

Optimize the above code (if possible).

Now, knowing that the original function you wrote in pt1 cannot be modified because it is being used by other programs, write another function that, when called, will utilize the function from pt1 to only reverse the words in the sentence. (e.g., input: "abc def ghi" output: "ghi def abc")

Test your code.

Write a function that, when given a string, will return the position of the starting point of the largest recurring character. (e.g., given: "AAABBCCCCD" would return 5 (the starting point of C))

Test your code.