I reached out to the interviewer assigned to my region in September, during my penultimate semester at college. We scheduled a phone interview for a month later.

The phone interview was similar to what others described, testing my knowledge about Microsoft, asking me to describe my favorite product, and also checking my motivation behind applying to MSFT. Avoid cliché answers like: "I want to work for MSFT because of stability." Make sure you study what they do, especially things unrelated to the technical field, like their community service and donations.

Once that was done, I received an invitation to onsite interviews.

This was the moment things went awry because despite applying for a Hardware Engineering position and insisting I wanted to do hardware/system-level software, I was assigned to interview with the MS Office division for a cloud services position where my experiences and programming languages were a little inapplicable. However, I was not aware of this until the very last interview.

Anyway, they flew me to Redmond for the technical interviews. The technical questions were related to data structures and recursion. Four interviewers asked me to code a solution to a problem on a whiteboard. If your solution is not the best (which is 90% of the time), they will ask how you would improve it.

The last interviewer finally told me that the whole time I was interviewing for the wrong position. So I spoke with the coordinator, and they said they would try to fix it. They directed me to the recruiter who assigned me to that particular division. That interviewer promised to call me to speak about it. I scheduled the phone call, but nobody ever called me. Then I had enough.

Recursive Fibonacci: Make a lookup table to speed it up.

Remove duplicated letters in a string.

Given a linked list where every node points to two different nodes, make a duplicate of it.