Applied through a university recruiting event.

Talked to a recruiter, then scheduled a technical phone interview. Did a basic programming problem on the phone (reverse a singly linked list) and a few days later was invited to fly out for an on-site interview.

Fast-forward a few weeks, I flew out to Seattle, WA. They put me up in the Westin (a very nice hotel) and paid for everything. Opt for a rental car (it's free!) so you can explore the city on your own time once you're done.

Microsoft now conducts most of its interviews in four-hour intervals. I was assigned the morning interval (~8 am - ~1 pm), so the whole on-site interview didn't last more than 4 or 5 hours.

They pick you up in a limo with the other candidates (there were a total of 16 of us). They brought us into a holding room in a building on campus. From there, interviewers came and got a candidate one by one. A total of four interviews were given (everyone received the same amount; no one was sent home early). Each interview was 45 minutes long, with a 15-minute break in between. The interviews weren't too hard – reverse the words of a string (example input: "sunny in seattle"; output: "seattle in sunny"). If you read through Cracking the Coding Interview, it's really not too bad. I've interviewed at Google and Amazon, and those interviews were much harder.

At some point during the interview, they feed you food, usually pasta. My advice would be to avoid all the carbs, as my group had two interviews, then lunch, then two more interviews. After lunch, the people who ate a lot of carbs (pasta) were about ready to fall asleep, despite having two more interviews.

One thing to point out about these interviews is that they will drain you, similar to walking out of the SAT. A few kids actually fell asleep on the way home from the interview because they were so mentally exhausted, so make sure you pace yourself and prepare.

Write a function that takes in three side lengths of a triangle and determines if it is a valid triangle. (See, it's not too bad. Remember the basics, and you'll be fine.)