It all started with handing out my resume at my university's career fair. Microsoft's (MSFT) representative was an SU alumnus, and I had a recommendation, which I guess helped a lot initially. We spoke about my projects, my interests, and how I like spending time, etc. etc.

I was shortlisted, and an on-campus 1:1 interview was scheduled. This was a 30 to 45-minute interview. Everyone was asked a programming question and a testing question. Both were pretty simple. The coding question was to count the occurrences of every character in a given string. The testing question, which I vaguely remember, was to write test cases for a function that takes a string as input and performs an action. I was also asked to describe any scalability issues I had faced in my previous projects.

Then I was called for a final round of interviews in Seattle for an SDET position. On the day of the interview, the recruiter said I would be interviewing with the Windows team. That's a huge team, and I could be interviewed by any team within it, but this already sounded exciting to me!

1st interview was with a team lead from the Kernel Team. He said he wanted to start my day with a less rigorous coding question and asked me to write a function to return the nth Fibonacci number in the series, given integer n. I discussed my design choices before starting the code, then wrote a first function where I used arrays, which was inefficient for a large input. I then discussed the use of a linked list instead of arrays, which wasn't any better with its memory footprint. Then it flashed to me that I don't have to store the whole series and I just have to return what is required. He also asked for a recursive solution and to compare both solutions. The testing question was more of a learning for the next rounds than the answers I gave, but learning is important.

2nd round was with another team lead from the Hyper-V team. The coding question was to rotate an image by 90 degrees. The image is represented by a 2D int array. After a bit of struggling, I came to a solution. I was asked to devise a strategy for my own code. Again, it was half learning from the interviewer and applying what I had learned from the earlier interviewer.

3rd one was a lunch interview, so no coding question, but lots of testing questions. Also, he was expecting me to ask back as many questions.

4th and final was with a manager. He asked a simple puzzle, a coding question to reverse a linked list using a recursive technique. He also asked me about how the other interviews went. We did a lot of talking here, not always technical, but about the day-to-day work at MSFT, about the team, and what they are working on, etc.

After a couple of hours, I heard from the recruiter that I had gotten through!

How can a particular application be tested apart from testing its functionality?