This is an interview for an SDET position as a new college graduate (graduating May 2012).

They started out with a phone interview, which consisted of a few (honestly, pretty easy) questions. Nothing particularly technical, just stuff like:

• How would you test a calculator?
• If you were stuck inside a conference room with a window, but no network/wifi/smartphone, how would you figure out the temperature outside?
• Tell me about a difficult project you worked on.

The phone interviewer was very friendly and it was a great experience. It went pretty well, and I was offered a flight out to Seattle.

I'm going to take a quick detour here, for people who've never been flown out on a company's dime before: Read all of your email very carefully and fill out everything as soon as you get it. If you need to reschedule (due to an exam or something), then tell them. They won't take it personally; they will be happy to work with you to find the date that best fits you. But be sure to tell them this as soon as you can.

The on-site interview was very, very pleasant and I had a lot of fun with it. I was given four interviews of approximately 45 minutes each. My group started after lunch. Between interviews, we would have a 15-minute break to grab a snack, get some coffee, use the restroom, or chat with some of the hiring managers.

I had the following questions, one per interview:

• Given an array of integers (of any value, from MIN_INT to MAX_INT), how would you find the consecutive integers with the largest sum?

• Given a string, how would you determine if that string contains a palindrome?

• How would you search a string for a substring, in C? This interviewer also asked me some questions about hardware and security, such as "describe how a buffer overflow attack works".

• How would you count the NUMBER of palindromes in a string?

Other people I was with had other interesting questions; the only one I remember right now is:

• Given a time of day, how would you determine the angle made by the hands of the clock?

I didn't get a job offer (I really blew the non-coding portion of my third interview; I needed more practice with hardware-related stuff, and I made a few really dumb mistakes when I was explaining things), but it was a great experience. All the free food and the free luxury hotel room certainly helped!

One final note: Microsoft wants people who are smart, but also personable. Be friendly, be interesting, chat with your interviewers about their hobbies or interests, or at least chat about what they do. People skills are very important, and if you focus exclusively on the technical aspect of your interview and come off as a humorless robot, you are honestly not going to do well.

Hope this helped. Good luck!

• Given an array of integers (of any value, from MIN_INT to MAX_INT), how would you find the consecutive integers with the largest sum, and return their sum?

• Given a string, how would you determine if it contains a palindrome?

• How would you search a string for a substring in C? This person also asked me some questions about hardware and security, such as "describe how a buffer overflow attack works."

• How would you count the number of palindromes in a string?