I was contacted by a recruiter in late July after submitting my resume to Microsoft online several months prior. I had a phone interview scheduled for early August.

This phone interview was a half hour long. While it was with an HR person, she did ask a few technical questions, such as how to quickly find the middle element of a linked list. She also asked about how I would go about testing a vending machine.

In about two weeks, I was invited to interview in Redmond in late September for an SDET position. Microsoft booked my flight, hotel for two nights, and rental car.

On the interview day, I was there with seven other SDET candidates. We had lunch, and then a series of four interviews that lasted 45 minutes each, with 15-minute breaks in between. Each interview was with a Test Manager, and each one consisted of a few minutes of talking about my resume and then some technical questions. After all the interviews were over, we were free to go for the day, and they told us we'd know by the next day if we would be getting an offer.

I had the evening free and went to Seattle to explore a bit. The next morning, I got an email informing me I wouldn't be getting an offer.

Overall, it was a difficult but exciting process (free trip to Seattle!). Microsoft will reimburse for most everything, so even if you're only slightly interested in the position, definitely take them up on the offer to interview.

Given a linked list, swap every pair of elements (so elements 1 and 2 swap, 3 and 4 swap, etc.).

You have a tree where every node has one sibling and one child. My interviewer said this structure would be used to implement a File menu. Each node had a boolean T/F value. I had to write code to search the tree and find the first value that was true. All siblings of the same level had to be searched first, before any children were searched.