I submitted a resume while at the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference. A recruiter emailed me shortly after, followed by a brief, fairly straightforward phone interview.

This was followed by an invitation to fly out to Redmond for a day of in-person interviews.

(Note to other applicants: that particular email was misclassified as spam by my email provider! The words “Microsoft,” “job,” and all of the all-caps text related to flight details was enough to set off the spam filter.)

The day of interviews was long, but surprisingly fun. I was interviewed by members from a few different teams, so the day didn’t drag – there was always something new to talk about.

Given two nodes in a directed graph represented by singly linked nodes, provide an algorithm for finding the nearest common ancestor. In fact, provide as many different algorithms as you can, giving different trade-offs between time and space requirements (in Big-O notation).

Write the fastest possible code for some functions from the C string library (for example, strcpy).