There were basically three steps in the hiring process:

• Online aptitude test
• Subjective test
• Technical interview.

The first two steps were a piece of cake. All questions in these steps were simple, and with a little knowledge of data structures, anyone could answer them.

The technical interviews were a bit tricky. Compared to other companies, Microsoft's technical interviews are the easiest (believe me!). They ask simple questions related to linked lists and trees, but they are tricky. They don't concentrate much on theoretical questions like "explain Dijkstra's algorithm." One good thing about Microsoft is that you are allowed to give one bad interview. So, if you screw up once, don't worry; you might get another chance.

Given a linked list with two types of pointers: a normal next pointer which points to the next element in the list, and a random pointer which points to a random element in the list. The question was to clone this linked list.