First, I had a 20-minute on-campus screening interview at the University.

My experience doesn't seem typical from talking to other candidates, or maybe it was only typical when Microsoft was hiring large groups (there were at least 50 candidates) for their $ divisions. What happened next was, after two weeks, there was a callback to interview in Redmond. It was a planned day that started, split in half from 9 AM to 6 PM. Half of the group started interviewing first; the other half had talks about how great working at Microsoft is.

The actual interview process was four people, 45 minutes each, with a 15-minute break in between. There were fairly easy test questions on how to test (insert physical object/software part here) and also some code to debug/show your approach to know when the code has been tested "sufficiently."

At the end of the day, there was about an hour's wait while interviewers deliberated and called dibs (multiple teams were interviewing) on the people they interviewed. Then all of us who got offers were called into a room to be presented with our managers, who congratulated us and had a chat about the team, offer details, etc. My only advice is to relax, be methodical and organized in your testing of objects questions, and break down all the problems, no matter how simple they seem – trust me.

How would you test (a physical object in the room or something else)? Totally unexpected when asked to tell them how you would proceed to test a spoon. This is to test your testing aptitude.