I applied online initially and was contacted within a few days by a recruiter who specialized in university recruiting from my alma mater. The recruiter was very helpful in explaining the different Software Engineering (SW) positions (SDE, SDET, & PM) and spent the phone interview with me deciding which position best fit my interests. There were no technical questions during the phone interview. The recruiter contacted me shortly after to let me know a position was available for SDET at the Mountain View location. We then set up an in-person interview, and I flew out to meet them.

I spoke with an amazing team that worked on Outlook. I had a total of five interviews throughout the day:

1. First interview: The interviewer was great and fun to talk to. We discussed testing, reliability via redundancy, and other issues and challenges of distributed systems.

   • Technical Question: How would you test the responsiveness of one node from another node in a network of two connected servers?

2. Second interview: This interviewer was also great. He worked on test automation and discussed various testing schemes and benchmarks they observe and work on.

   • Technical Question: How would you test that two strings are anagrams of each other?

3. Third interview: The interviewer was really nice, but he was fiddling around with his phone while I was working on the technical problem on the whiteboard. This made me feel like I was a high school teacher trying to get him to understand and pay attention. We talked about his work testing products on various consumer personal electronic devices.

   • Technical Question: Describe and implement a search algorithm. (I picked Quicksort).

4. Fourth interview: The interviewer was cool. We talked about the company and future opportunities. He grilled me on my academics (my GPA, why it was what it was, what else I was doing in college, etc.).

   • Technical Question: He picked one of the projects on my resume and asked me to explain it to him as if he were a 6th grader.

5. Fifth interview: This interviewer was also really great and fun to talk to. We spoke about Microsoft, the team, and what they were doing. He was an international transplant, so I asked him about opportunities across the globe with the company. I forgot how to do the simplest brute-force solution for the problem and spent a lot of time trying to figure out a generalized pattern that would provide an efficient algorithm. He presented me with the simplest, recursive, "try every board configuration" solution, mentioning that Dijkstra found the solution to it, but I couldn't remember it. He chuckled a bit.

   • Technical Question: The 8 queens problem.

Outside of the actual interviews and the on-campus experience, which was the best part of my trip, everything else sucked. Nobody's fault though; just a couple of those "acts of God" that come with traveling. For example, on my drive to the interview, I got caught for 45 minutes on the off-ramp to the campus. It wasn't even highway traffic, just the one off-ramp had morning rush hour, I guess because Google and some of the other companies also had their campuses down the street.

Standard technical questions. If you do your homework (literally and figuratively), you should be fine.