The phone interview was easy enough. Typical questions included writing a function to print the Nth Fibonacci number and how to test a calculator.

Microsoft then invited me to Redmond for an on-site interview three weeks later. I was confident up until the third interviewer, who was more confrontational than the rest.

The fourth interviewer took me to the employee cafeteria on the top floor for lunch, and later back to his office for more questioning. I was exhausted by the time I finally met the fifth and final interviewer, and I made plenty of mistakes that ultimately led to a "no offer."

As this was an SDET position, the interview questions consisted mostly of coding questions and how to test them, with a brief discussion on design patterns (explaining singleton), and one puzzle: divide the clock into segments using two lines so that the numbers in each segment add up to the same sum.

Generate all permutations of a string and determine if each is in the dictionary. Find an efficient data structure for the dictionary.

Delete the Nth node from the end of a linked list.