I initially applied at Microsoft in late November. I received an email offering me a phone interview by the beginning of December, and I then had my phone interview on December 17.

I heard back from them again on January 20 that I had been chosen to fly up to Seattle for an in-person interview, which was then scheduled for February 25.

Altogether, the process took roughly 3 months from application to in-person interview.

Write a program that takes in a string and a delimiter. It uses that delimiter to split the string and then reverses the characters in every word (or jumble of characters between the delimiters), stuffing them back into a string when finished. For example, 'The dog walks' becomes 'ehT god sklaw'.

Write a program that reads in a string and prints each character once it has been found to have duplicates (2 or more). The program should only print the character once, not every time a duplicate is found. This program should be faster than O(n^2).

Write a program that takes in a string and removes any duplicate spaces (including leading and trailing spaces – there should be none when finished). This program should not have any embedded loops, and you can only traverse the string ONCE. It should definitely be faster than O(n^2).

Write a program that multiplies two numbers (integers, floats, etc.) without using the multiplication operator.