I had an on-campus screening and didn't feel that I performed very well, especially with the behavioral questions. Nevertheless, I received an email inviting me to interview in Redmond, WA.

The day of the interview, I was nervous, but excited and enthused. My optimism and cheer carried me throughout the day. Everyone I met was so nice and genuine, and they declined all phone calls and texts to give me their full attention.

One of my interviewers gave me a hard time for not understanding his instructions for testing an algorithm I wrote, but I kept a smile on my face, accepted his criticism, and ended up offering my own good insight on the solution. I solved every problem during the day, although I didn't always arrive at the best solution the first time. I was very thorough in my testing of each algorithm.

I was very excited to find out that I would be getting a fourth interview, which was with a manager. The function I had to code during this fourth interview was fairly straightforward. It was also easy to test.

Regarding the culture, as I said, everyone was very genuine and attentive. These were all people I would be excited to work with, and I had some pretty good banter with most of them. I received affirmative interview results soon after. I had a great time in Seattle, and Microsoft, of course, paid all the expenses.

I would rather not disclose any interview questions.

I will say that half the questions I received were very personalized, while the other half were similar to the ones you can find online.

Know your algorithms, data structures, and design patterns. My knowledge of networks, information security, databases, compilers, and finite state automata also came in handy.